Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England: From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Thomas of Erceldoune 1843844478, 9781843844471

Table of contents :
Contents
Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction. An Island of the Ocean
1 ‘Cadualadrus Conanum uocabit’: Political Prophecy in England, the Welsh March, and Ireland, c. 1130s–1260s
2 ‘E si finerount les heirs d’engleterre hors de heritage’: Galfridian Prophecy and the Anglo-Scottish Border, c. 1301–30s
3 ‘Whan shal this be?’: The English Erceldoune Tradition, c. 1310s–90s
4 ‘A dede man shall make bytwene hem acorde’: Cock in the North and Ceiliog y North, c. 1405–85
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Victoria Flood

prophecy, politics and place in medieval england

prophecy, politics and place in medieval england from geoffrey of monmouth to thomas of erceldoune

Victoria Flood

d. s. brewer

© Victoria Flood 2016 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Victoria Flood to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2016 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge ISBN 978 1 84384 447 1 D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate This publication is printed on acid-free paper

For my parents, Kookie and Steve

Contents

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgementsix Abbreviationsxi Introduction: An Island of the Ocean 1 ‘Cadualadrus Conanum uocabit’: Political Prophecy in England, the Welsh March, and Ireland, c. 1130s–1260s 2 ‘E si finerount les heirs d’engleterre hors de heritage’: Galfridian Prophecy and the Anglo-Scottish Border, c. 1301–30s 3 ‘Whan shal this be?’ The English Erceldoune Tradition, c. 1310s–90s 4 ‘A dede man shall make bytwene hem acorde’: Cock in the North and Ceiliog y North, c. 1405–85

1 18 66 110 155

Conclusion199 Bibliography205 Index231

Illustrations

Plates 1. The goat ‘Edwardus’. Illustration from an early fifteenth-century copy of the Prophetiae Merlini. (c) The British Library Board, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol 73r 2. The boar after ‘Edwardus’, and the ass ‘Ricardus’. Illustration from an early fifteenth-century copy of the Prophetiae Merlini. (c) The British Library Board, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol. 73v 3. Conflict between the boar, ‘rex’, and the dragon, ‘comes’. Illustration from an early fifteenth-century copy of the Prophetiae Merlini. (c) The British Library Board, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol. 74r 4. Conflict between the king and the lion, ‘comes’; and another king’s revenge. Illustration from an early fifteenth-century copy of the Prophetiae Merlini. (c) The British Library Board, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol. 74v

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Figure 1. Alois Brandl’s stemma of the surviving manuscripts of the Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune137 Table 1. Early manuscripts of Cock in the North (produced c. 1450s–70s)

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Acknowledgements

M

y thanks, first and foremost, must go to Helen Fulton, to whose friendship and support I owe so much, and to whose scholarship the entire enterprise of comparative English and Welsh literary study is greatly indebted. Thanks are also due to Erich Poppe, whose insular investigations have inspired my own, and from whose guidance in questions of translation I have benefitted greatly. I must express my gratitude too, for the intellectual generosity and insight of other colleagues and friends who have commented on this book at various stages of its development: Aisling Byrne, Dale Kedwards, Jane-Héloïse Nancarrow, Jo Bellis, Venetia Bridges (with thanks also for advice on Latin and French translations), Liz Herbert McAvoy, Henry Bainton, Megan Leitch, Emily Lyle, Mark Ormrod, and Helen Cooper, who first inspired my interest in Thomas of Erceldoune. Thanks too must go to the anonymous reader appointed by the press. I am grateful also to friends and colleagues at the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York; Philipps-Universität Marburg; and the Department of English, Durham University. Particular thanks are due to my colleagues at Marburg, who welcomed the first Crossing Borders conference, and to all involved in the Crossing Borders project – this has already played a huge part in my thinking, and I look forward to our future discoveries. This book was made possible by the enthusiasm and support of Caroline Palmer, and the team at Boydell and Brewer – Robert Kinsey, Rohais Haughton and Nick Bingham. I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to the various funding bodies and institutions who have supported my research during the development of this book: the Leverhulme Trust and Durham University, who have funded my Early Career Fellowship; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the International Arthurian Association; the Society for the Study of Medieval Languages and Literature; the Arts and Humanities Research Centre, and the Centre for Medieval Studies, at the University of York; and the Arts and Humanities Research Centre at Swansea University. I am grateful too to the libraries from whose collections I have worked: the British Library, the National Library of Wales, the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, Gray’s Inn Library, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Thanks are also due to my family and friends, whose good humour, tolerance,

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and support for the oddities of academic life have helped to keep the author sane: to Vanita, Marianne, Jo, Natalie, Anna, Maire, Erika, Alex, Tom, and Wilfred; and to my family – the Floods and the Quills (especially the little ones), and my grandparents, who are so very much missed. Final thanks must go to my parents, whose belief and encouragement have been unfailing, in particular, to my mother, who has by now spent as much time with Geoffrey, Gerald, Thomas, and the Percies as I have. This book is for you. An earlier version of material in Chapter 4 was published as ‘Henry Tudor and English Prophecy in Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 34 (2014) 67–86.

Abbreviations

ANTS Casebook

Anglo-Norman Text Society Michael Livingstone and John K. Bollard, ed., Owain Glyndŵr: A Casebook (Liverpool, 2013) BBCS Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies BL British Library Bodl. Bodleian Library Chaucer The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford, 1997) CMCS Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies/Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies CUL Cambridge University Library DIMEV Digital Index of Middle English Verse EETS Early English Text Society EETS OS Early English Text Society, Original Series GPC Geiriadur Prifysol Cymru: A Dictionary of the Welsh Language Historia Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, transl. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007) LAEME A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English LALME A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English MED Middle English Dictionary NLW National Library of Wales NS New series ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Opera Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, 8 vols, ed. J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and George F. Warner (London, 1861–91; RS 21) RS Rolls Series Scotichronicon Walter Bower, Scotichronicon, ed. and transl. D. E. R. Watt, 9 vols (Aberdeen, 1987–98) Shakespeare The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. Harry Levin, Herschel Baker, Anne Barton, Hallett Smith, Marie Edel, Frank Kermode, and G. Blakemore Evans (London, 1997) TCD Trinity College, Dublin TEAMS The Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages

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abbreviations

THSC TRHS

Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

All biblical references and quotations are taken from the Douay-Rheims Bible (London: Baronius Press, 2007)

Introduction An Island of the Ocean

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his book explores the relationship between prophecy, politics, and place in medieval imaginings of Britain. It charts a dominant textual tradition of political prophecy concerned with pan-insular sovereignty that developed in England over the course of three hundred years, alongside Welsh and Scottish prophetic counter-traditions rooted in alternative pan-insular fantasies. Prophecy has erroneously long been understood to be one facet of the superstition and credulity that for many modern commentators signifies the great divide between medieval and modern mentalities. This is in large part due to the long-enduring influence of Keith Thomas’s 1971 Religion and the Decline of Magic, a study of the movement from medieval supernaturalism to Enlightenment rationalism, which dedicates fifty (out of its 850) pages to prophecy, in a sequence of chapters also concerned with fairies, ghosts, and witch-beliefs.1 Yet the central belief that imbues political prophetic texts of the insular Middle Ages is not in the marvellous nature of the prophet Merlin and his later counterparts, but rather in territorial entitlement, its historical ratification, and the role of peoples and places in the realisation of a particular vision of the future. It is the same category of belief that has motivated colonialists, nationalists, and separatists alike for centuries, and it is one we have not yet outgrown: the perceived rights of peoples to territories. The present is certainly an opportune moment for reflection on the geo-political visions of insular history: nearly twenty years after Welsh and Scottish devolution, the relationship between national borders and political identities in modern Britain remains a contested issue, and the current configuration of insular political sovereignty is again open to challenge. This is a literary history with no small claim to contemporary relevance. A term first coined by Rupert Taylor in his 1911 study The Political Prophecy in England, political prophecy refers to a predominately secular literary tradition drawing on authorities from the historical and legendary past, alongside a common stock of heroes and ciphers, to comment on near-historical and  1

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Belief in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Harmondsworth, 1973), pp. 461–514.

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c­ ontemporary political affairs.2 Although for nearly a century following the publication of Taylor’s book there was relatively little advancement in the field, in the last decade and a half awareness of the importance of prophecy in the reconstruction of insular political and intellectual culture in the medieval and early modern periods has gained considerable ground.3 It is now recognised as an important influence, not only reacting to, but on occasion shaping, momentous historical events, and has an important place in literary history from the medieval English chronicle tradition to Shakespeare and Spenser. However, precisely what constitutes political prophecy has long remained a difficult question. It is certainly not a genre. There are no generic conventions common to all extant works of English political prophecy, no universal metric or rhyme schemes, and certainly no formal rules regarding the use of poetry or prose. This is largely because political prophecy in England was produced across dominant languages: in Latin, later French, and finally English. As Lesley Coote, author of a major monument of scholarship in this field, has observed, prophecy can most intelligibly be understood as a discourse: a mode of historical and socio-political commentary with its own conventions and stock motifs, invoked in different textual forms and contexts.4 This definition has seen use by more recent scholars, who, following Coote, have understood political prophecy as a highly protean discourse, by turns used to endorse and to challenge political authority.5 For Coote, this was an activity undertaken largely in the name of the people: she explores political prophecy as a mode of commentary on the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Rupert Taylor, The Political Prophecy in England (New York, 1911). Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry, and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford, CA, 1990); Sharon Jansen, Political Prophecy and Protest Under Henry VIII (Woodbridge, 1991); Sharon Jansen, ‘Prophecy, Propaganda, and Henry VIII: Arthurian Tradition in the Sixteenth Century’, in King Arthur through the Ages, ed. Valerie M. Lagorio and Mildred Leake Day (New York, 1990), pp. 275–91; R. Wallis Evans, ‘Prophetic Poetry’, in Guide to Welsh Literature, 1282–c.1550, ed. A. O. H. Jarman, Gwilym Rees Hughes, and Dafydd Johnston (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 256–74; L. A. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England (York, 2000); Tim Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, 2006); Helen Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics in the Later Middle Ages (Aberystwyth, 2009); Aled Llion Jones, Darogan: Prophecy, Lament and Absent Heroes in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff, 2013). For an earlier general discussion of European prophecy, see R. W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing: III. History as Prophecy’, TRHS 22 (1972): 159–80. See also, Robert E. Lerner, The Powers of Prophecy: The Cedar of Lebanon Vision from the Mongol Onslaught to the Dawn of the Enlightenment (Berkeley, CA, 1983).  4 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 13–14.  5 G. L. Risden, Karen Moranski, and Stephen Yandel, eds, Prophet Margins: The Medieval Vatic Impulse and Social Stability (New York, 2004), pp. 1–12.  2  3

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However, in the texts examined in the present book – prophecies that stand at the very beginning of the history of political prophetic discourse in England – the ‘people’ are largely occluded from this field of vision. For the most part, these texts are concerned with territory, and the claims of the ‘gens’ are little more than a cipher for class-based interests. The subjects and addressees of political prophecy belonged to the very highest social stratum: royal and aristocratic political actors and high-ranking ecclesiastics.6 Yet engagement with this material was more than simply functional. Medieval prophecy offers an important intersection with belief. High political engagement with prophecy has been regarded by one recent scholar as a form of ‘cynical belief’. Paul Strohm has suggested that political actors knew better than to believe in political prophecies, but the pretence was nonetheless important, and the course taken by one simulating belief is effectively at one with that of a genuine believer.7 There is, however, a core of what I think we can only regard as genuine belief within both the authoring and use of medieval prophecy. Prophecy functions, as Helen Fulton has observed, as a way of ‘conferring legitimacy on those who were prepared to acknowledge its truth value’.8 These texts were vehicles for dominant ideologies, asserting particular power claims, which go beyond pure propaganda, in the sense of material intended to shape and inform public opinion. To understand them we can best look to the insidious nature of ideology itself: these texts are the products of, and accordingly reproduce, a total value system in which their authors believed.9 They convey deep-rooted perceptions about how Britain is, and ought to be, governed, for the most part affirming the status quo: the interests of those already in power, or with some manner of historical claim to it. As such, prophecy often represents an engagement with a highly nostalgic version of the imagined past, and historical-legendary territorial configurations, to which it promises a return. As a field of study, it might be compared profitably to the conservative medieval uses of national historiography.10 Prophetic authors Helen Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, Arthurian Literature 22 (2005): 64–83 (p. 64); Steven Justice, ‘Prophecy and the Explanation of Social Disorder’, in Prophecy, Apocalypse, and the Day of Doom: Proceedings of the 2000 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nigel Morgan (Donington, 2004), pp. 139–59; Paul Strohm, England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation, 1399–1422 (New Haven, CT, 1998), pp. 1–3.  7 Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, p. 17. This concept is borrowed from Slavoj Zˇizˇeko.  8 Helen Fulton, ‘Owain Glyndŵr and the Prophetic Tradition’, in Casebook, pp. 475–88.  9 See R. Hodge and G. Kress, Language as Ideology (London, 1993). My own understanding of ideological positioning here is rooted in Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation, for which see ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (1970)’, in On Ideology (London, 2008), pp. 1–60. 10 For studies of the relationship between medieval literature, in particular history writing,  6

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engaged in acts of ideological positioning: these texts required from their early (elite) readers self-recognition as geo-politically centred subjects, with a vested interest in a particular arrangement of insular power. The political prophetic tradition in England takes its lead from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini, an important pro-Norman reworking of a much older Welsh prophetic model forecasting the rule of Britain by a single people.11 Its Welsh source traditions rest on a historical-prophetic notion of a time of original British pan-insular rule, lost following migrations from the island to Brittany, and the successive invasions of the Saxons, and later the Normans, to be rectified through the return of a great army encompassing the remaining insular Britons (that is, the Welsh) and members of the British diaspora, who will exile the foreigners and restore British rule. The key concept here is an understanding of the pristine insular wholeness of ‘Ynys Prydein’ (island of Britain), a structuring vision of past and future British pan-insular rule.12 This great imagining was used by medieval Welsh prophetic authors to frame contemporary political claims on behalf of the princes, and later the Welsh gentry, to articulate opposition to Saxon, later Norman, and then simply English, occupation.13 The oldest and best noted example of a prophecy of this type is the tenth-century Armes Prydein, which envisages a military union between the Welsh, Bretons, Cornish, and Strathclyde Britons, alongside other potential anti-English allies such as the Scots and Norsemen, resulting in British territorial restitution from Manaw in the north to Brittany in the south.14 This vision cut across a number of historical divisions and antipathies to construct an image of a unified island and a panand trans-insular force capable of countering the expansionist ambitions of the and national ideologies, in addition to n. 8, see Paul Strohm, Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer to Shakespeare (Notre Dame, IN, 2005); Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Historiography in Thirteenth-century France (Berkeley, CA, 1993); R. James Goldstein, The Matter of Scotland: Historical Narrative in Medieval Scotland (Lincoln, NE, 1993). 11 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, ed. Michael D. Reeve, transl. Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), Book VII. Hereafter Historia. 12 Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories in Medieval Wales’, in History and Heroic Tale: A Symposium, ed. T. Nyberg, P. M. Sorensen, and A. Trommer (Odense, 1989), pp. 91-131; Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut Y Brenhinedd’, in The Arthur of the Welsh: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval Welsh Literature (Cardiff, 1991), pp. 97–116 (pp. 102–03). 13 For a succinct appraisal of prophecy as a vehicle for Welsh political ideology, see R. R. Davies, Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415 (Oxford, 2000), pp. 79–80. For the conservatism of Welsh historical mythology, see also R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: IV. Language and Historical Mythology’, TRHS 7 (1997): 1–24 (p. 12). 14 See below, p. 28.

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English kingdom of Wessex. This motif endured late in Welsh prophetic culture, and yet it also stands at the very foundation of the English tradition. The returning Britons were re-written by Geoffrey of Monmouth as the Normans, and the actions of the British diaspora and their allies as a figure of Norman pan-insular conquest. The matter of Britain’s rightful ownership is a long-lived historical theme. As early as the sixth-century De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae of the British monk Gildas, and from there assimilated across English chronicle traditions including Geoffrey’s own Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138), we read of the island of Britain as temperate, sustaining, on the edge of the western ocean, and – an awkward coda – inhabited by a multiplicity of peoples. The notion of the bountiful island bounded by the sea was in many respects a fraught imagining: it is a vision both of singularity and of limit. This perception comes across very strongly in a short prophecy given by the goddess Diana to the island’s eponymous founder, Brutus, in book I of Geoffrey’s Historia: Brute, sub occasu solis trans Gallica regna insula in occeano est undique clausa mari; insula in occeano est habitata gigantibus olim, nunc deserta quidem, gentibus apta tuis. Hanc pete; namque tibi sedes erit illa perhennis. (Brutus, to the west, beyond the kingdoms of Gaul, lies an island of the ocean, surrounded by the sea; an island of the ocean, where giants once lived, but now it is deserted and waiting for your people. Sail to it; it will be your home forever.)15

A re-working of Welsh conceptualisations of unified British sovereignty, this prophecy is fulfilled later in Book I when the Trojans under Brutus claim Britain as their new homeland. However, Diana is wrong about one thing: the giants are not all dead, and in order for the Trojans to take possession of the island they must first defeat its previous inhabitants. In medieval imaginations the island of Britain did not lend itself comfortably to divided ownership. In many respects we can understand this, to borrow a term from economics, as a zero-sum situation: what one group has, another has not. For the greater part of its history insular prophecy rested on this perception, which was the very basis of its ideological appeal: it frames a statement of exclusive ownership. Yet, as with all dominant 15

Historia I, lines 305–09.

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ideologies, incongruities and instabilities remain: not least, the multiplicity of the island’s peoples and territories, a situation which in reality was far more complicated than the Galfridian model allows. As such, it is no surprise that English prophecy is haunted by counter-claims, articulated by prophetic authors working in Wales and Scotland. The attempt to silence these dissenting voices defined the very development of the English prophetic tradition. The present study traces representations of the imagined and ideal dimensions of pan-insular sovereignty from the Prophetiae Merlini to prophetic texts of the late fifteenth century. This period saw the formation of what R. R. Davies has termed ‘the first English empire’: the spread of Norman, later English, dominion to Wales and later Scotland.16 Accordingly, the high political literature of this period is replete with visions of the island brought under single rule, in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s terms the ‘totus insula’, a Latin term which loosely corresponds to the Welsh ‘Ynys Prydein’.17 These perceptions not only informed, but were influenced by, the composition of a heavily imperialist vein of political prophecy in England. Nonetheless, throughout this period there were other imagined configurations of insular rule, alternative to the Anglo-centric worldview. Alongside the continued utility of political prophecy in Wales, this period also saw the composition and dissemination of Scottish political prophecies derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae, antipathetic to English insular hegemony. This material fed back into the English tradition, and inspired new territorial fantasies and anxieties. There was a formative interaction between English, Scottish and Welsh prophetic traditions, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s engagement with Welsh, which marks the very beginning of political prophecy in England, to the fourteenth-century English prophecies ascribed to the Scottish border-prophet Thomas of Erceldoune, which owe much to Scottish traditions of the prophet, and the English prophetic compositions inspired by the Anglo-Welsh coalitions of the fifteenth century. The development of prophecy during this long period was defined by multiple R. R. Davies, First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343 (Oxford, 2000). 17 Fantasies of pan-insular rule have been discussed by Patricia Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia, PA, 2001), with a particular focus on later medieval prophecy, pp. 51–74; Michelle R. Warren, History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain (Minneapolis, MN, 2000), pp. 25–129; Michael Faletra, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination: The Matters of Britain in the Twelfth Century (Basingstoke, 2014). For discussions of this into the Elizabethan period, see Alan MacColl, ‘The Meaning of “Britain” in Medieval and Early Modern England’, Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 248–69. For discussion of perceptions of the movement of insular power in the early period, see R. William Leckie, Jnr, The Passage of Dominion: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Periodization of Insular History in the Twelfth Century (Toronto, 1981). 16

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acts of cultural appropriation across political, national, and sometimes linguistic lines. Its very origins rest on a level of normalised transmission between Welsh language and Anglo-Latin contexts, and the study of prophecy is by extension an engagement with the conditions of insular multilingualism.18 As such, its history can only be understood through the adoption of a critical stance which is itself pan-insular. The setting of this study is Britain, a term I use in preference to the recently favoured ‘archipelagic islands’, adopted by scholars in response to a sizeable medieval and early modern ambiguity in nomenclature, particularly in regard to the relationship between Britain and Ireland.19 However, it remains that in these particular texts the island of Britain itself is always firmly in sight, imbued with a comprehensible insular integrity. Where prophetic material touches on Irish affairs I regard this, as did my medieval authors, as a separate locus of geo-political power, although – as we shall see – one which might itself be a space of transferred insular imaginings. I also employ the term ‘insular’ in a neutral rather than pejorative sense, in reference to the island itself or to traditions common to England, Wales, and Scotland. This is an attempt to move towards a genuinely comparative approach. As J. G. A. Pocock observed in his 1975 ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, such an undertaking inevitably runs the risk of ‘paradigm crowding’: the obscuring of the subject through an engagement with competing methodologies conventionally applied to the study of different national histories and literatures.20 This is a danger that the present book attempts to negotiate through the study of There are a number of highly specialized studies in this area, but for work on AngloWelsh literary exchange in particular, see Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones, eds, Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales (New York, 2008); Michael Richter, ‘Miracle Collecting on the Welsh Border’, in Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain, ed. D. A. Trotter (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 53–62; Helen Fulton, ‘Negotiating Welshness: Multilingualism in Wales before and after 1066’, in Conceptualising Multilingualism in England, c. 800–c. 1250, ed. Elizabeth Tyler (Turnhout, 2011), pp. 145–70; Tim William Machan, ‘Language and Society in Twelfth-century England’, in Placing Middle English in Context, ed. Irma Taavitsainen, Terttu Nevalainen, Paivi Pahta, and Matti Rissanen (New York, 2000), pp. 43–66. For general studies of linguistic pluralism in medieval Britain, see Trotter, ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain; Tyler, ed., Conceptualising Multilingualism in England; Judith A. Jefferson and Ad Putter, ed., Multilingualism in Medieval Britain (c. 1066–1250): Sources and Analysis (Turnhout, 2013); Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed., Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500 (York, 2009); Michael Richter, Sprache und Gesellschaft im Mittelalter: Untersuchungen zur mundlichen kommunikation in England von der Mitte des XI. bis zum Beginn des XIV. Jahrhundert. (Stuttgart, 1979). 19 Philip Schwyzer and Simon Mealor, eds, Archipelagic Identities: Literature and Identity in the Atlantic Archipelago, 1500–1800 (Aldershot, 2004). 20 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, Journal of Modern History 47 (1975): 601–21. 18

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an English literary movement that is re-contextualised and re-situated within a broader insular framework. To borrow Pocock’s phrase, English literature, like English history, is here no longer ‘the centre of its own universe’.21 Importantly, in its engagement with the relationship between English, Welsh, and Scottish prophetic traditions, this study dispenses with the notion of a culturally unified, and prophetically obsessed, ‘Celtic fringe’. The continued appeal of this construction, founded on a decidedly romanticised idea of vatic Celtic literature, has been perhaps the single most detrimental factor for our fuller understanding of the relationship between insular literary-political traditions. As Aled Llion Jones has noted, when it comes to the history of political prophecy the word ‘Celtic’ is a largely meaningless and unhelpful piece of terminology.22 Modern scholars have been quick to root English prophecies, wherever they appear in any sense obscure, in so-called ‘Celtic’ source material, generally understood to mean material common to the literary-political culture of Wales and Gaelic Scotland.23 As we shall see, there is no evidence of this prophetic commonality from the period in question, and Welsh and Scottish influences on the development of political prophecy in England form the basis of a far richer tale than has hitherto been told.24 This story lies in the reconstruction of the movement of specific motifs and entire texts, and plausible lines of transmission. Therefore, the history of political prophecy is one in which textual reception histories on the Anglo-Welsh and Anglo-Scottish borders had an important part to play. Accordingly, these sites of literary activity find particular mention in this book. On England’s borders competing articulations of territorial belonging entered broader political consciousness and were co-opted as standards for diametrically opposed uses. Here perceptions of difference and threat were at their For a brief discussion of this historiographical trend, see David Dumville, ‘“Celtic” Visions of England’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, ed. Andrew Galloway (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 107–28 (p. 125). 22 Jones, Darogan, pp. 39, 197. For interrogation of the uses of the term, see Patrick SimsWilliams, ‘Celtomania and Celtoscepticism’, CMCS 36 (1998): 1–35. For other recent critiques of Celtic commonality, in particular in relation to the question of mutual influences between Welsh and Irish literature, see Patrick Sims-Williams, Irish Influence on Medieval Welsh Literature (Oxford, 2010); Mark Williams, Fiery Shapes: Celestial Portents in Ireland and Wales, 700–1700 (Oxford, 2010); Aisling Byrne, Otherworlds: Fantasy and History in Medieval Literature (Oxford, 2016). 23 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs; Lesley A. Coote and Tim Thornton, ‘Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon: A Tradition of Popular Political Prophecy’, in New Medieval Literatures IV, ed. Wendy Scase, Rita Copeland, and David Lawton (Oxford, 2001), pp. 117–37. 24 There are two important exceptions in this respect: M. E. Griffiths, Early Vaticination in Welsh with English Parallels (Cardiff, 1937), and Fulton, Welsh Prophecy. 21

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sharpest, but here too oppositional prophetic material was most visible and open to re-use, and was transmitted across England. The history of political prophecy is therefore also a history of strategies of national address and their revision and re-application. In relation to the study of the Middle Ages, the nation is a contentious term, but in the discussion of political prophecy it is a necessary one. Although modern authorities on nationalism and the nation-state hold the nation to be inextricable from contemporary concepts of democracy and universal political representation, the utility of medieval concepts of natio and gens (and their vernacular counterparts) was important to medieval thinkers.25 As Saskia Sassen, scholar of the emergence of the modern nation-state and the transition to globalisation, has observed: the core ‘capabilities’ of the modern nation – an interest in the interdependent concepts of territory, authority, and rights – are manifest in institutions and mentalities that we find in the Middle Ages.26 Medieval political prophecies reflect concepts of territorial belonging which are certainly not founded on any interest in social equality or universal political representation, yet they are invested in the place of particular populations and their right to occupy a territory over and above rival peoples. In political prophecy in England we see something very close to the ‘imagined communities’ of Benedict Anderson, a term medievalists have adopted with enthusiasm (and far beyond the limits Anderson set for his theory).27 As Anderson understands of the modern novel and newspapers, political prophecy imagined a nation into being, and framed addresses to a national subject. This conjunction has also been observed by Patricia Ingham, who has argued that political prophecy produced communitarian bonds, understanding E.g. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 2004); Anthony D. Smith, ‘The Problem of National Identity: Ancient, Medieval and Modern?’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 17 (1994): 375–99; Anthony D. Smith, ‘The Idea of the Nation as a Political Community’, in Power and the Nation in European History, ed. Len Scales and Oliver Zimmer (Cambridge, 2005). For important arguments against this position, see Thorlac Turville-Petre, England the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290–1340 (Oxford, 1996); R. R. Davies, ‘The Peoples of Britain and Ireland, 1100–1400: I. Identities’, TRHS 4 (1994): 1–20 (pp. 2–5); Warren, History on the Edge; Kathy Lavezzo, ed., Imagining a Medieval English Nation (Minneapolis, MN, 2003); Schwyzer and Mealor, Archipelagic Identities; Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066–c.1220 (Oxford, 2003); Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in England, 1066–1220 (Cambridge, 2007); Hirokazu Tsurushima, ed., Nations in Medieval Britain (Donington, 2010); David Matthews, Writing to the King: Nation, Kingship, and Literature in England, 1250–1350 (Cambridge, 2010). 26 Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ, 2006), p. 4. 27 In addition to Anderson, see Lavezzo; Warren; Tsurushima, cited above, n. 25. 25

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the more pessimistic examples of the type as forms of collective mourning for territorial loss, predicated on a concept of insular unity.28 Yet I do not think we can go so far as Ingham. The intended national subject of political prophecy was not each and every member of this imagined community, but rather the perceived guarantors of the nation’s territorial authority and insular integrity: kings, bishops, and noblemen. This body of literature destabilises a now retreating but long-lived axiom of medieval studies: the relationship between language choice and textual constructions of national identities. The long-held supposition that we could not have national identity in England until authors began writing in English is problematic. Certainly, we cannot regard Latin as a language of universal Christendom which by its very existence obscured national interests – a position long held by scholars of the emergence of the modern nation.29 On the contrary, the evidence surveyed in this study suggests the importance of Latin literature for both national and other secular communal identifications. What is more, it also suggests the close engagement of writers in ecclesiastical milieux with a fundamentally secular discourse. The role played by these persons in secular literary production, particularly texts concerned with kings and kingdoms, must not be underestimated: after all, political prophecy in England began with an Oxford canon, Geoffrey of Monmouth. The utility of Latin material in expressing forms of national consciousness continued into the later Middle Ages, and it stands in a close relationship to later vernacular writings.30 For example, there is much we cannot hope to understand about the late medieval English language prophecies ascribed to Thomas of Erceldoune unless we hold them in relation to the Prophetiae Merlini. For, like the greater part of the English tradition, the Erceldoune prophecies are rooted in a fundamentally Galfridian vision of pan-insular rule. The relationship between vernacularity and literary forms of national address across this long period is far more complex than is often fully appreciated: the earliest vernacular prophecies articulating ambitions for insular conquest in England were composed not in English but in insular French. In the analysis of political prophecy in England, we must consider not only language choice but the nature of a text’s geo-political vision.31 Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies, p. 70. See above, n. 25. 30 Andrew Galloway comments on a similar relationship in regard to late medieval historical writing, as well as the continued status of Latin as a language for the writing of national history. Andrew Galloway, ‘Latin England’, in Imagining a Medieval English Nation, pp. 41–95. 31 A similar proposition is made by Davies, ‘Peoples of Britain and Ireland IV’, pp. 11–12. For work in this area, with a particular focus on the uses of insular French in con28 29

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However, although national imaginings structured the uses of political prophecy they did not define its ends exclusively. During this period, prophecies of insular conquest were drawn on also in line with more firmly localist agendas, including the defence of the territorial rights of non-royal dynasties.32 The division between the interests of the locality and the nation is not always an easy one to draw in the study of political prophecy, especially when much of this material was produced on the borders, sites where in the face of (perceived) foreign hostility, the interests of the region were often presented as one and the same as those of the nation. In these texts the tale of the locality is often the tale of the nation in miniature, and the history of the nation is the history of the region also – after all, this level of interconnectedness is in the very nature of politics in what is essentially a small island. Yet across this material, we never lose sight of the insular dimension, a conceptualisation which rests firmly – until the very end of my period of study – in an interest in the governance of Britain as a single nation under the English crown. It is only in the fifteenth century, during the rebellion of the Percy earls of Northumberland (as I discuss in Chapter 4) that this imagined nation became a confederation, an important departure from the Anglo-centricism of earlier periods, and even then power was still conceptualised in pan-insular terms. The place of political prophecy in the production of elite mythologies, both royal and dynastic, forces the questioning of a number of long accepted commonplaces in the field. The first is that the prophetic traditions with which I am here concerned (specifically the early prophecies ascribed to Merlin and Thomas of Erceldoune) developed as a way of articulating popular opposition to political elites.33 This perspective is in many respects indebted to Norman Cohn’s influential study on European millenarianism, medieval and early modern prophets and prophetic movements anticipating the End Times, which often took the form of

structions of English national identity, see Joanna Bellis, The Hundred Years War in Literature, 1337–1600 (Cambridge, 2016). See also, Ashe, Fiction and History in England; Ardis Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language, and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009). For a more general consideration of the place of insular French literature in the study of multilingualism in England, see Wogan-Browne, Language and Culture in Medieval Britain. 32 The uses of prophecy in the construction of regional identities, above and beyond national, have been discussed in relation to the early modern period by Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People; Tim Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 1480– 1560 (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 60–61. Unlike Thornton, I do not suggest we can dispense with the latter. 33 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, esp. p. 100; Coote and Thornton, ‘Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon’.

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popular challenges to authority.34 However, it has been noted that Cohn gives a slightly more radical impression of millenarianism than the evidence bears out – and, importantly, by no means was political prophecy in England predominantly millenarian.35 Indeed, to borrow a phrase from Julia Marvin, English political prophecy is far more interested in the ‘next things’ than the ‘last things’.36 In the following pages, I suggest that in origin, political prophecy was not an extension of a popular movement (that is, written by and for the people, the stuff of collective ownership and authorship), but a discourse constructed by the clerical arm of political elites, and used accordingly. The study of prophecy reveals important insights into the patronage of English political literature, as well as literary-historical constructions of royal and dynastic power. It is not by definition subversive or counter-authoritarian. The earliest legislation against the uses of political prophecy appears towards the end of my period of study: the early fifteenth century, contemporary with the antiLancastrian uses of prophecy by affiliates of the Percies in England and allies of Owain Glyn Dŵr in Wales, two groups invested in a vision of sovereignty that was opposed to the Lancastrian status quo. We might note that these acts did not condemn the uses of prophecy but ‘false’ prophecies and ‘lies’.37 The legislation was about controlling a vision of the future – of how one might conceptualise the dimensions of geo-political power in England and Wales. However, as I discuss in Chapter 4, even and especially in the oppositional uses of prophecy during this period, we see a vision of the future that was the domain not of the many but of the few: the mobilisation of prophecy by aristocratic factions in line with their own political and territorial interests. This assessment stands in an important relationship to the better-noted function of prophecies into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as oppositional material with genuinely popular utility.38 On the basis of acquaintance with this period, and Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London, 2004). 35 Cohn’s association of millenarianism with oppositional movements has been questioned by Robert Lerner, ‘The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities’, The American Historical Review 86 (1981): 533–52. 36 Julia Marvin, ‘Arthur Authorised: The Prophecies of the Prose Brut Chronicle’, Arthurian Literature 22 (2005): 84–99. 37 Taylor, Political Prophecy, p. 105. 38 Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples; Jansen, Political Prophecy and Protest; Madeline Hope Dodds and Ruth Dodds, The Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536–37, and the Exeter Conspiracy, 1538, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1915); Madeline H. Dodds, ‘Political Prophecies in the Reign of Henry VIII’, Modern Language Review 11 (1916): 276–84; Alistair Fox, ‘Prophecy and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’, in Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics and Reform 1500–50, ed. Alistair Fox and John Guy (Oxford, 1986), pp. 77–94; Thornton, 34

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following Keith Thomas, a number of scholars have understood prophecy as providing a ‘validating charter’ for revolution.39 However, as tempting as it is to read this later tradition of popular protest into these influential medieval political texts, it remains that in the Middle Ages if this material endorsed revolution, it was from above. It has been suggested that manuscript witnesses of political prophecy from the twelfth to fifteenth centuries reveal a long process of democratisation in readership, and that by the fifteenth century we come closer to Thomas’s vision than I am here suggesting.40 A bigger comparative study into long historical changes in the ownership of political manuscript materials more generally is certainly needed, but examination of political prophetic collections from this period suggests that manuscript ownership was by no means more obviously popular than chronicles, histories or other forms of political literature, and by the end of the period there is no evidence of its dissemination below the level of the gentry. This connects to a related, and similarly problematic, critical commonplace about political prophecy: its assumed status as a predominantly oral medium. Although prophetic texts were certainly ephemeral, and may on occasion have seen (or engaged with material in) oral circulation, political prophecy in England and the lines of affinity it constructed were built on strongly inter-textual foundations. The notion that prophecies were more likely to be the stuff of oral composition than other forms of political literature in medieval England denies the formative role of manuscript culture in both the construction and circulation of political prophecies. This position risks conflating topicality with orality, and the former is certainly not the domain of oral composition and performance alone. Furthermore, we cannot deny that political prophecies were in the first instance texts. As Sharon Jansen’s investigations have shown, even in the early Tudor period, from which we possess some of the most clearly documented evidence of the oral circulation of political prophecies across social strata, prophetic rumours often remained associated with the transmission of manuscripts.41 The study of medieval political prophecy is first and foremost an engagement with textual history. In addition to tracing lines of textual influence, through an assessment of surviving manuscript collections of prophecy, and where visible the dedications or stated agendas of texts, this book attempts to reconstruct the ­geographical ­circulation and salience of particular types of prophecy in particular Prophecy, Politics and the People, pp. 14–52. However, Thornton also notes the continued utility of prophecy, and its appeal for political elites during this period, from the gentry to the crown. His survey also suggests a continuing clerical element involved in the dissemination of political prophecy. 39 Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 503. 40 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 11. 41 Jansen, Political Prophecy and Protest, pp. 27, 39.

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regions during particular periods, and consider how they functioned in relation to long-lived political literary traditions which were recurrently invested with new meanings. From here we can begin to understand precisely where and when major points of innovation occurred in the early centuries of the development of political prophecy in England. Over the three centuries surveyed in this book, old prophecies were drawn into new contexts and combined with additional materials. Each act of re-combination entailed a re-writing in line with changing political circumstances and agendas. Yet political prophecy was not simply reactive; it also must be understood in relation to the longue durée. It evolved through the addition of new texts and new meanings to what we can intelligibly term the prophetic canon. The present study is intended as the first step towards the delineation of such a body of works. My hope is that it will show that prophecy is not non- or extra-literary material but a body of texts defined by the inter-textual influences elsewhere characteristic of medieval writing. Authors of political prophecy share the same sense of operating within a continuous literary tradition as we find, for example, in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer – who, let us remember, in The House of Fame claimed as one of his influences the ‘Englyssh Gaufride’ (1470), that is: Geoffrey of Monmouth.42 As medieval authors looked back to the matter of Troy, Rome, Britain and the like, the political-prophetically minded among them looked to the prophecies of Merlin, and later to Thomas of Erceldoune – like their better studied counterparts – with one eye firmly on the present. We might understand the tendency towards anonymity that characterises political prophecy not only as an authorising strategy but also, by extension, an expression of a debt to earlier source material. An author wrote as Merlin or Thomas because he drew on material that had long been attributed to the same: he positioned himself as a link in a chain stretching back to the distant insular past. In this respect, anonymity, or pseudonymity, functioned as an acknowledgement of influence. The present study is by no means intended as an exhaustive catalogue of all known political prophecies in circulation in England during this period. Works detailing the better part of these are already in existence.43 Rather, it considers the key ‘House of Fame’, in Chaucer, p. 365. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs; Taylor, Political Prophecy. For studies on religious, predominantly reformist, apocalyptic material in England during this same period, see Morton Bloomfield, Piers Plowman as a Fourteenth-century Apocalypse (New Brunswick, NJ, 1962); Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism and Piers Plowman (Cambridge, 2007). Although there are some points of overlap between this material and Galfridian prophecy, these are predominantly separate prophetic traditions.

42 43

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sources concerned with the shape of insular power from this long period. These formed the basis for further reaching fantasies of pan-European conquest, which are on occasion discussed here, but it is with their understanding of the relationship between insular territories that I am chiefly concerned. The first chapter begins, naturally, with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini. A study of the political conditions of his work and the nature of his debt to Welsh material is followed by an assessment of additional Welsh prophetic materials in circulation in England during the later twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the writings of Gerald of Wales and the border romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn. This material suggests the formative role of Welsh prophetic models in the development of national horizons of expectation. Yet it can also tell us much about the early partisan uses of prophecy in support of the political demands of non-royal dynasties: the defence of the territorial rights of Gerald’s family in Ireland, and the Fitz Warin claim to Whittington on the Shropshire–Powys border. All three authors, however, make use of a common vision of the unified island, whether literally or figuratively, to authorise relatively new territorial acquisitions. In this they engaged in the construction of a Norman, later Anglo-, centric vision of the insular past and future from which the Welsh were gradually written out. This marks the very beginning of the cultural imperialism that defines the English prophetic tradition. The second chapter considers the development of this imperial theme in English prophecies pertaining to Anglo-Scottish affairs composed during the reigns of Edward I, Edward II, and Edward III. A time of considerable interest in the political reality of English pan-insular sovereignty, the dominant English prophetic tradition of this period envisages total insular conquest by the king of England. This chapter details the textual influences, both English and Scottish, on one of the most significant Galfridian prophecies of the later Middle Ages: the Prophecy of the Last Six Kings, or the Six Kings to follow John. The text is a combination of English jingoism expressing a right to pan-insular sovereignty, and a deep-rooted pessimism inspired by contemporary Scottish anti-English prophecies. It is a vision both of the attainment and the loss of English pan-insular rule. The Six Kings and its derivative prophecies possessed a particular utility on the northern English border, where I suggest the prophecy itself may well have been composed. In this region we see an important intersection between the interests of the locality and the nation, with the latter held to be coterminous with the former. Here threats to landed interests were understood as threats to England as a whole. The Six Kings set the tone for a long-lived English tradition of political prophecy combining great expectations with a tenor of catastrophism: the prophecies ascribed to the lowland Scottish figure Thomas of Erceldoune, also known

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as Thomas the Rhymer. The development of Erceldoune prophecy during the fourteenth century is explored in Chapter 3. Although it stands in an important relationship to decidedly anti-English Scottish background traditions, the earliest Erceldoune texts are all English and exhibit a deep investment in English pan-insular rule. The earliest surviving Erceldoune prophecies were composed on the English side of the Anglo-Scottish border, drawing on and reformulating a number of lowland Scottish traditions in line with English political agendas. Their authors exhibit a marked interest in the geo-political authority of the king of England: in Edward III, in whom hopes for the English conquest of Scotland were long invested, and after him, in his grandson Richard II, whose prophetic reputation represents a lesser studied but nonetheless significant chapter in the history of political prophecy. However, the early Erceldoune tradition stands on the very edge of a remarkable period of transition: by the early fifteenth century, it had come to articulate opposition to the English crown from parties within England. This shift is the subject of my fourth and final chapter, which considers an important work in the Erceldoune tradition, named after its opening lines Cock in the North. Although a number of different theories have been suggested about this prophecy, I observe its alignment with political rumours disseminated by partisans of the Percy earls of Northumberland during the family’s rebellion against the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, in the early years of the fifteenth century. The prophecy belongs to the period of the Percies’ alliance with the Welsh leader Owain Glyn Dŵr, and is suggestive of a new kind of insular imagining: of a tripartite England and Wales that included a provision for an independent Welsh state alongside a great swathe of Percy territory stretching from Norfolk to the northern border. This imagination appears as a genuine political aspiration in the 1405 Tripartite Indenture, an arrangement between Owain, the Earl of Northumberland, and Sir Edmund Mortimer. This was one of the most important moments in the history of insular political prophecy, and a defining event of high politics in England and Wales. In part by virtue of the English text’s relationship to the Indenture, and interest in Owain’s revolt, Cock in the North had an important subsequent life in Welsh political-literary culture. The final part of this chapter explores the later life of Cock in the North in Wales, where it was first translated into Welsh during the 1450s as an anti-Lancastrian prophecy applied to part-Welsh political figures in the English line of succession: the dukes of York. In the 1480s, the final historical chapter with which this book is concerned, the prophecy found a new application to Henry Tudor, mab darogan (son of prophecy) of the Welsh tradition and high king of the English, and inspired new compositions forecasting Henry’s return from France at the head of a powerful army, to rule all Britain. In its Welsh cultural and linguistic context, Cock in the North came to function as a prophecy

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of British pan-insular sovereignty with much in common with Armes Prydein. Insular prophecy here comes full circle, and the Galfridian model is returned to the Welsh context in which it began. The interpretation of prophecy can be a dangerous thing not only for medieval rebels, but modern scholars as well. Prophetic signifiers are notoriously unstable, and modern scholarly attempts to affix meaning to individual prophecies have often been regarded as exercises in futility – the assigning of largely arbitrary meanings to a body of material famous for its obscurity. Understandably, recent literary scholars of prophecy have pursued an ahistorical literary critical approach, even understanding the ambiguities of prophecy as a metaphor for the subjectivity of the critical process itself; while recent historical approaches have focused on a reader-reception history more interested in cultural context than textually constructed meanings.44 Neither is an option for the material with which I am here concerned: both strategies sidestep the relationship between the text and the world beyond it. The prophecies surveyed in this book functioned as a mode of political commentary, created within and intended to inform specific political situations. We cannot hope to understand these texts without taking into account the textually and culturally constructed frameworks of meaning of the audiences through which they circulated, and those of their authors who themselves were also readers of prophecy. We need to consider the place of individual prophetic texts in a broader developmental model, charting the changing meanings of prophetic formulae and ciphers as the tradition grew: seeking to identify the specific historical figures and circumstances with which they were concerned. In short, we must combine literary history with political. It is only from here that we can begin to answer the broader question of what precisely political prophecy was, and why it was so important, in medieval Britain. The answers given here cannot, as with any study of the subject, ahistorical or otherwise, be any more than theoretical. My hope is that they will mark the beginning of a broader conversation about this material, and the creation of new theories in turn.

44

Jones, Darogan; Aled Llion Jones, ‘Prophecy as Criticism: MS Peniarth 50, Tradition and Translation’, Translation Studies 9(2) (2016): 137–51; Thornton, Prophecy, Politics and the People, pp. 12–13.

chapter 1

‘Cadualadrus Conanum uocabit’ Political Prophecy in England, the Welsh March, and Ireland, c. 1130s–1260s

T

he story of political prophecy in England began in Oxford, where Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Normanised cleric with a familiarity with the political function of Welsh language prophecy, composed the foundational text in the English prophetic canon: the Prophetiae Merlini.1 In the Prophetiae, Geoffrey reworked a long-lived tradition of Welsh prophecy engaged with a threefold historical progression: from the unity of the (legendary) British past to a period of oppression under Saxon domination, followed by Saxon overthrow and the restoration of British supremacy. This formed the very basis of his understanding of the island of Britain as a single coherent territory, belonging to a single people, and under single governance. However, for Geoffrey the rightful heirs to the island were not the insular Britons, the Welsh, but the Norman rulers of England, and their time was not to come, it was already here. We can understand Geoffrey’s political-literary activity, borrowing a useful phrase from the philosopher and cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek, as a historical intervention: a revisiting and rewriting through which ‘the scene from the past become(s) what it always was’.2 For Geoffrey, British prophecy was fulfilled in Norman history: his manipulation of Welsh themes recreates British prophecy as in some sense always about the coming of the Normans, and suggests that the previous meanings of these ciphers rested on a profound misrecognition.3 And yet as we shall see, in an earlier and continuing Welsh oppositional context, this same vision of pan-insular sovereignty articulated a contemporary threat to Norman Historia VII. Salvoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), pp. 59–60.  3 I refer to the ruling and cultural elite in England during this period as Norman. I follow Stephen Knight in this usage, for which see Arthurian Literature and Society (London, 1983), pp. 38–67. Of course, the term is a simplification of a complicated cultural situation, the study of which, however, lies beyond the scope of this chapter. For discussion of the limits of Normanitas, see Ashe, Fiction and History in England, pp. 55–60.  1  2

political prophecy

c.

1130s–1260s

19

hegemony of which both Geoffrey and his earliest readers were keenly aware. British prophecy and the insular future it conveyed were resistant to the imposition of a singular hegemonic meaning. This was an instability Geoffrey exploited in a work which was at once highly jingoist and deeply pessimistic. Nonetheless, even in its pessimism the Prophetiae was intended to speak to the interests of a political elite in England. The Prophetiae saw a rapid and widespread reception.4 Alongside the 217 surviving manuscripts of Geoffrey’s history of the legendary British past, the Historia Regum Britanniae, in which it appears as Book VII, the Prophetiae survives as a separate text in seventy-six (catalogued) manuscripts, often paired with later Latin prophecies inspired by it.5 It also appears inserted in a number of other chronicles and histories. It is the single most influential prophetic text of the insular Middle Ages, and stands at the head of the tradition we name, after Geoffrey, Galfridian. During the first generations of its reception, Galfridian prophecy saw two of its most enthusiastic proponents in Gerald of Wales and another like-minded author with Welsh and border connections, the author of a political prophecy incorporated in the thirteenth-century romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn. Alongside an acquaintance with Galfridian material, these authors adopted and further modified Welsh prophetic elements to provide commentary on contemporary political events and actors, and the perceived pan-, and on occasion trans-, insular dominance of the English crown. The works of all three authors are indicative of the broader movement of Welsh material into English circulation during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, by which Welsh prophetic elements came to function as part of an increasingly naturalised political discourse in England. This is an activity we must locate in the broader context of a functional Anglo-Welsh For the reception of the Historia, see Julia C. Crick, ed., The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV: Dissemination and Reception in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1991). For discussions of the early reception history of the Prophetiae Merlini, see Michael J. Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, Speculum 57 (1982): 217–49; Ad Putter, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin’, in Anglo-Norman Studies 31: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2008 (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 90–103; Julia Crick, ‘The British Past and the Welsh Future: Gerald of Wales, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Arthur of Britain’, Celtica 23 (1999): 60–75; Julia Crick, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecy and History’, Journal of Medieval History 18 (1992): 357–71; Julia Crick, ‘Geoffrey and the Prophetic Tradition’, in The Arthur of Medieval Latin Literature, ed. Siân Echard (Cardiff, 2011), pp. 67–84; Victoria Flood, ‘Political Prodigies: Incubi and Succubi in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium and Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Cambriae’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 57 (2013): 14–30.  5 Julia Crick, Geoffrey of Monmouth III. A Summary Catalogue of the Manuscripts (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 330–32. See further, Caroline D. Eckhardt, ‘The Prophetiae Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Latin Manuscript Copies’, Manuscripta 26 (1982): 167–76.  4

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bilingualism, informing prophetic production from the Welsh March to Oxford and Ireland.6 In approaching these cross-border borrowings, there are a few important caveats that we must first address. While there is evidence of a substantial Welsh thematic and structural debt in these Latin and French texts, there is no demonstrable linguistic trace of this. Although a number of personal and place names are borrowed from Welsh, along with a few other linguistic details of note, neither Geoffrey’s nor Gerald’s works can be properly called Cambro-Latin as can, for example, much of the material found in the earlier Historia Brittonum (a text discussed further below).7 Similarly, there is no trace of Welsh loanwords in the French of the Fouke-author. This is common practice in English re-workings of Welsh material. Indeed, into the later Middle Ages, as we shall see in Chapter 4, Welsh prophecy was far more open to the incorporation of English linguistic borrowings than prophecy produced in England ever was to Welsh. My argument in this chapter, therefore, is built on the analysis of sources and analogues. This in itself might be understood to be problematic: no Welsh political prophetic texts are found in manuscripts any earlier than the mid-thirteenth century (a late survival common to Welsh literature more generally). Yet these later manuscripts certainly preserve earlier material, and we are particularly fortunate in the study of political prophecy in that here we find historical-political allusions that can sometimes (although by no means universally) aid in the dating of a particular text or textual layer (a number of recorded Welsh prophecies appear to be accretive). There are overt signposts of Welsh source material in the writings of all three authors, who make very specific British or Welsh source claims for their prophecies. Nonetheless, as authorising as this Welsh association was, we must recognise the place of these texts and authors in a broader history of English cultural imperialism. As Simon Meecham-Jones has observed, Welsh themes in medieval English texts are often subject to distortion and even erasure.8 In political prophetic terms, this is a process that began with the three authors with whom this For comment on bilingualism and the cross-border movement of literary material during this period, see Constance Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters and the Matter of Britain (Cardiff, 1966), esp. pp. 10–18; Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 105–07.  7 For a discussion of the linguistic competencies of Geoffrey and Gerald, see T. D. Crawford, ‘On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’, Medium Aevum 51 (1982): 152–62; Stefan Zimmer, ‘A Medieval Linguist: Gerald de Barri’, Études Celtiques 35 (2003): 313–50. See further, Ad Putter, ‘Multilingualism in England and Wales, c. 1200: The Testimony of Gerald of Wales’, in Medieval Multilingualism: The Francophone World and Its Neighbours, ed. Christopher Kleinhenz and Keith Busby (Turnhout, 2010), pp. 83–105 (pp. 99–100).  8 Simon Meecham-Jones, ‘Where Was Wales? The Erasure of Wales in Medieval English Culture’, in Authority and Subjugation, pp. 27–56.  6

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c.

1130s–1260s

21

chapter is ­concerned, who placed Norman, later English, political actors at the centre of a modified Welsh historical-prophetic structure. This was a fundamentally Anglicising movement, which laid the foundation for an English prophetic tradition that largely occluded Welsh political actors from visions of the British future.9

Prophetiae Merlini and the Anarchy The cultural affiliations of Geoffrey of Monmouth have long been controversial. Although his engagements with British legendary material are widely accepted, his cultural position, the communities with which he positively identified, and the ideological agenda he pursued in his writings remain debated. This is a question often associated with the indeterminacy of his ethnic background: his locative identification places his early life in Monmouth, on the Welsh March. In the Norman strongholds of the March, Norman, Welsh, English, Breton, and even Flemish communities met and intermingled, and forged relationships defined by shifting cross-cultural antipathies and sympathies.10 By turns, Geoffrey has been understood to be a Welshman championing the lost history of his people; a Breton possessed of enormous pride in his countrymen; and a Normanised cleric closing off a dangerously contemporary Welsh interest in restoration in the distant insular past.11 In more recent years, he has also been understood – like For a comment on the absence of Welsh political actors from English engagements with prophecy, as an elite discourse, see Helen Fulton, ‘Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Uses of Prophecy’, Studia Celtica 39 (2005): 105–21 (p. 108). 10 Janet Meisel, Barons of the Welsh Frontier (Lincoln, NE, 1980); A. J. Otway-Ruthven, ‘The Constitutional Position of the Great Lordships of South Wales’, TRHS, Fifth Series, 8 (1958): 1–20; R. R. Davies, ‘The Law of the March’, Welsh History Review 5 (1970–71): 1–30; R. R. Davies, ‘Kings, Lords and Liberties in the March of Wales, 1066–1272’, TRHS, Fifth Series, 29 (1979): 41–61; R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400 (Oxford, 1978); Kevin Mann, ‘The March of Wales: A Question of Terminology’, Welsh History Review 18 (1996): 1–13; Max Lieberman, The Medieval March of Wales: A Creation and Perception of a Frontier, 1066–1283 (Cambridge, 2010); A. C. Reeves, The Marcher Lords (Landybie, 1983). I understand the Welsh March during this period as a term encompassing both the northern and the southern AngloWelsh border, and the conquest states of south Wales. 11 For an argument concerning his rehabilitation of Welsh cultural material, see John Gillingham, ‘The Context and Purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain’, in The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values (Woodbridge, 2000), pp. 19–39. For Geoffrey’s Breton association, see J. S. P. Tatlock, Legendary History: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History and its Early Vernacular Versions (New York, 1974), pp. 399–402; E. K. Chambers, Arthur of Britain (London, 1927), p. 24. For Geoffrey’s ‘closing off’ of the Welsh past in the service of  9

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Gerald of Wales – as an author who is culturally hybrid: at once Norman and Welsh.12 This is a rich line of investigation, but in political terms it is largely meaningless: political agendas are not the stuff of split subjectivities, and we must not forget that the Prophetiae Merlini is first and foremost a political text. To this end, while it cannot necessarily tell us anything about Geoffrey’s cultural identity, the Prophetiae offers some important clues in solving the puzzle of the geo-political orientation of his early literary activity, as well as the broader cultural climate to which he belonged. The Prophetiae was originally composed as a text separate to the Historia, and it has been suggested that there was an unfinished version in circulation as early as the 1120s.13 The earliest complete form in which it survives, however, is as Book VII of the Historia, where it is prefaced with a separate dedication to Alexander Bishop of Lincoln. The composition of the text, and its engagements with Welsh political prophecy, stand on the edge of the so-called English Anarchy: the dispute concerning the succession between Henry I’s nephew Stephen and his daughter Matilda, following Henry’s death without a direct male heir.14 This was a period of particular anxiety about the stability, and indeed the very legitimacy, of Norman hegemony in England and, in particular, in the Welsh March. The Welsh kingdoms increasingly felt the force of Norman domination during the reign of Henry I, and Henry’s death presented a great opportunity for re-conquest. The Norman establishment in Wales saw its first direct attack in the murder of Richard Fitz Gilbert de Clare, Lord of Ceredigion, in April 1136, and the years 1136–37 saw the Welsh recovery of Ceredigion and neighbouring districts. There was also significant Norman retreat from the Shropshire borderlands, where the kingdom of Powys made significant territorial gains; and the kingdom of Gwynedd dramatiNorman political agendas, see Michael Faletra, ‘The Conquest of the Past in The History of the Kings of Britain’, Literature Compass 4 (2007): 121–33; Faletra, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination, pp. 19–54. 12 Warren, History on the Edge, pp. 25–26. For discussions on the hybridity of Gerald, see Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 77–109; Faletra, Wales and the Medieval Colonial Imagination, pp. 136–72. 13 Bernard Meehan, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecies of Merlin: New Manuscript Evidence’, BBCS 28(1) (1978): 37–46. 14 For a discussion of this period, and applicability of the term Anarchy, see Edmund King, ed., The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign (Oxford, 1994); Keith Stringer, Reign of Stephen: Kingship, Warfare and Government in Twelfth-century England (London, 1993); Graeme J. White, ‘The Myth of the Anarchy’, Anglo-Norman Studies 22: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1999 (Woodbridge, 2000): 323–37; David Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen, 1135–1154 (Harlow, 2000), esp. pp. 1–7; Hugh M. Thomas, ‘Violent Disorder in King Stephen’s England: A Maximum Argument’, in King Stephen’s Reign (1135–1154), ed. Paul Dalton and Graeme J. White (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 139–70.

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1130s–1260s

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cally extended its reach across Wales, particularly in formerly Norman-occupied territories in the north-east.15 Although we cannot assume, as did earlier historians, that the Welsh attacks of these years constituted a ‘national revival’, there does appear to have been a sense of common grievance against the Normans, and this is the kind of climate in which political prophecy might well have assumed a contemporary efficacy.16 As John Gillingham has observed, it is probably no coincidence that Geoffrey made use of ‘the theme of the British recovery […] just at that moment when it seemed to be becoming historical reality’.17 Although the work’s status as a translation of a complete but now lost Welsh prophecy collection, as posited by Rupert Taylor over a century ago,18 is an idea scholars have long abandoned, Geoffrey’s use of Welsh political prophecy in the Prophetiae is now widely recognised.19 Merlin is a Latinisation of the name of the Welsh prophet Myrddin, appearing in texts from the tenth century onwards, but rooted in traditions that may go back earlier still.20 Prophecy is an important part of Geoffrey’s oeuvre, and material rooted in Welsh traditions feature not only in the Prophetiae but also in the prophecies inserted in his later life of the prophet Merlin, the Vita Merlini (c. 1148–55).21 Geoffrey also shows an acquaintance with other Welsh poetic techniques: the animal ciphers characteristic of the Galfridian tradition bear a debt to the animal epithets of Welsh heroic verse, which like the Prophetiae is full of dragons, lions, and boars.22 Despite the absence Davies, Ages of Conquest, pp. 45–46. See further, Crouch, Reign of King Stephen, pp. 54–59. For possible allusions to events of this period in the Historia, see Gillingham, ‘Context and Purposes of History of the Kings of Britain’, pp. 33–34. 16 Relevant historiography is briefly discussed by Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 47–48. 17 Gillingham, ‘Context and Purposes of History of the Kings of Britain’, p. 38. 18 Taylor, Political Prophecy, p. 47. 19 Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Welsh Historical Tradition’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 20 (1976): 29–40 (pp. 38–39); Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 68–79; Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics, pp. 5–6; Karen Jankulak, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Cardiff, 2010), p. 80. 20 A. O. H. Jarman, ‘The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy’, in Arthur of the Welsh, pp. 117–45; A. O. H. Jarman, The Legend of Merlin (Cardiff, 1960); Peter Goodrich, ed., The Romance of Merlin: An Anthology (New York, 1990); Oliver Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Merlin Legend’, CMCS 51 (2006): 37–65; Stephen Knight, Merlin: Knowledge and Power through the Ages (Ithaca, NY, 2009). For discussion of the later continental development of the legend, see Paul Zumthor, Merlin le prophète: un thème de la littérature polémique de l’historiographie et des romans (Geneva, 2000). 21 Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Life of Merlin, ed. Basil Clarke (Cardiff, 1973); Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Vita Merlini, ed. John Jay Parry (Urbana, IL, 1925). For discussion of the date of the text, see Michael J. Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth (Oxford, 1994), pp. 110–11. 22 Doris Edel, ‘Geoffrey’s So-called Animal Symbolism and Insular Celtic Tradition’, 15

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of pre-­Galfridian Welsh language prophetic manuscript material (as with Welsh literary survivals more generally), there are a number of Welsh prophetic texts that although recorded in later manuscripts are generally understood to pre-date Geoffrey in some form, and to have influenced him considerably. Certainly, his works were received enthusiastically in Wales, and appear to have possessed some measure of commensurability with Welsh literary culture. The Historia was translated into Welsh by the thirteenth century at the latest, in a text generally known as the Brut y Brenhinedd (History of the Kings), and along with the Welsh laws, the brutiau are the most frequently copied texts in surviving Welsh manuscripts. The Prophetiae was also translated into Welsh as a separate text, with three versions known to exist.23 This formed the basis of a long-lived engagement with Galfridian political prophecy in Wales.24 When Geoffrey began work on the Prophetiae, Welsh political prophecy appears to have been a subject of clerical discussion beyond Wales and the March. In its prologue, the Prophetiae is introduced as a collection of the prophecies of Merlin translated ‘de Britannico in Latinum’ (9) for Bishop Alexander, who had apparently requested such a work. Geoffrey writes that this request was one among many: he was pressed to the task by ‘contemporanei mei’ (2). There appears to have been an enthusiasm for British literary culture in Oxford during this period. Geoffrey writes in the prologue to the Historia of another British source, a ‘Britannici sermonis librum uetustissimum’ (9–10), brought to him by Walter Archdeacon of Oxford, a man well-versed in foreign histories. Although the existence of this book has long been thought to be spurious,25 the circulation of British material in Oxford is certainly plausible. It has been argued that Breton material may have reached Geoffrey through connections among members of his inner circle to northern France (where the Prophetiae saw early circulation).26 We might envisage a broad pattern of learned cultural interest and exchange in Oxford during this period, spanning England, the Welsh March, and Normandy. Studia Celtica 18–19 (1983–84): 96–109. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia Regum Britanniae and Brut y Brenhinedd’, p. 111; John J. Parry, ‘The Welsh Texts of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia’, Speculum 5 (1930): 424–31; J. J. Parry, ed., Brut y Brenhinedd: Cotton Cleopatra Version (Cambridge, 1937); Edmund Reiss, ‘The Welsh Versions of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia’, Welsh History Review 4 (1968–69): 97–127. 24 For the development of the Galfridian tradition of prophecy in Wales, see Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 195–213; David Johnston, ‘Iolo Goch and the English: Welsh Poetry and Politics in the Fourteenth Century’, CMCS 12 (1986): 73–98; Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics, pp. 21–26. 25 See D. R. Howlett, ‘The Literary Context of Geoffrey of Monmouth: An Essay on the Fabrication of Sources’, Arthuriana 5(3) (1995): 25–69. 26 Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Welsh Historical Tradition’, p. 38. 23

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1130s–1260s

25

When Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy during the mid-1130s, encountered an early version of the Prophetiae, he understood it as a text concerned with Anglo-Welsh affairs. In his Historia Ecclesiastica, Orderic alludes to a prophecy of Ambrosius Merlin, offering a short extract from a longer book of Merlin, which extends to Prophetiae, 114. A few minor confusions aside, this is fundamentally consistent with the historical portions of the Prophetiae as it appears in the Historia. He then offers a commentary on the fulfilment of the prophecy, alluding to a number of near-contemporary events and persons, such as the fates of the sons of William the Conqueror – interpretations which, judging from near-contemporary and later commentaries, appear to have been largely conventional.27 He glosses the whole as an account of the rulers of the English and the Britons, to the time of Henry I and Gruffudd ap Cynan, Prince of Gwynedd, who still await, he writes, the fulfilment of God’s inscrutable will (which is to say, both were then still living – Gruffudd died two years after Henry, in 1137). Orderic’s allusion to Gruffudd is notable. During the early decades of the twelfth century, Gruffudd, regarded by some within Wales as a high king, amassed a considerable power base in north Wales, drawing local dynasties into his orbit, even extending his power across the borders of Gwynedd into Powys. In 1114, Henry reminded Gruffudd of his status as a client king, through a successful royal expedition into north Wales which checked the recent advances of the Welsh princes.28 Orderic appears to have had this broader political situation in mind as he read an early version of the Prophetiae and meditated on its near-historical applications. One of the primary interests of the Prophetiae was understood to be territorial contestation between the kings of England and the Welsh princes. Before we consider precisely how Geoffrey modified prophecies of British sovereignty as Norman – a formative act in the English prophetic tradition – we must first attempt to reconstruct how he understood the function of Welsh political prophecy as a contemporary and historical oppositional discourse. As is well noted, the Prophetiae is indicative of anxieties about threats to Norman rule and, like the Historia as a whole, warns of the powers beyond England’s borders which threatened a divided aristocracy.29 As Michael Curley has observed, the text can be read chronologically, and it contains a number of allusions to contemporary

M. Chibnall, ed. and transl., The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, 6 vols (Oxford, 1978), VI, pp. 380–89. 28 Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 42–45. 29 Paul Dalton, ‘The Topical Concerns of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae: History, Prophecy, Peacemaking, and English Identity in the Twelfth Century’, Journal of British Studies 44 (2005): 688–712 (699–700); Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 9–10. 27

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Norman history.30 This includes thinly veiled references to events of the 1120s and 1130s: the drowning of Henry I’s heirs in the sinking of the White Ship in 1120, who appear as lion’s cubs who become fish of the sea; and the ascendancy of the Empress Matilda, figured by virtue of her imperial title as the eagle, implicated in a broken covenant (Prophetiae, 84–86).31 Originally, there appears to have been no direct reference in the text to Henry’s death in 1135, although there is in a version produced as early as 1147, which if not the work of Geoffrey was penned by a like-minded author.32 Henry had an important place in the imaginations of contemporary authors, as a strong king who stabilised the nation’s borders. Geoffrey presents him as the ‘leo iusticiae, ad cuius rugitum Gallicanae turres et insulani dracones tremebunt’ (‘the lion of justice, whose roar will set trembling the towers of France and the island dragons’, 78–79).33 An awareness of Henry’s subjugation of threats to Norman rule in England is a feature of a number of chronicle accounts from the years following his death. For example, the author of the Gesta Stephani recorded that when the king died, the peace and harmony of the kingdom was buried with him, and a time of violence followed, in particular on the Anglo-Welsh border.34 This was an incipient disaster with a particularly British dimension. Geoffrey’s treatment of contemporary affairs in the Norman time of the Prophetiae extends to accounts of violence in Gwynedd and Cornwall: ‘Venedocia rubebit materno sanguine, et domus Corinei sex fratres interficiet’ (‘Venedotia will run red with a mother’s blood, and the house of Corineus kill six brothers’, 86–87). These have been speculatively identified as allusions to familial murders among the ruling families of Gwynedd in 1125 and 1132; and a spate of vengeance-killings in Cornwall during the same period, which assumed an anti-Norman character.35 Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 63–69. This is certainly how these allusions were glossed in early commentaries. See Jacob Hammer, ‘A Commentary on the Prophetiae Merlini’, Speculum 10 (1935): 3–30 (p. 16). See also, Jacob Hammer, ‘Another Commentary on the Prophetiae Merlini’, Bulletin of the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America 1 (1942–43): 589–601 (p. 599). For discussion of the date of the earliest complete commentary on the Prophetiae, produced between 1147 and 1154, see C. D. Eckhardt, ‘The Date of the Prophetia Merlini Commentary in MSS Cotton Claudius B. vii and Bibliothèque Nationale fonds latin 6233’, Notes and Queries NS 23 (1976): 146–47. See further, Crick, Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV, pp. 85–86. 32 Eckhardt has suggested that this was Geoffrey’s own inclusion, although it does not appear in all his recensions of the text. Eckhardt, ‘The Date of the Prophetiae Merlini Commentary’, p. 147. See also, Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 67-69. 33 For an early recognition of this cipher see Orderic Vitalis, VI, pp. 386-89. 34 K. R. Potter, ed. and transl., Gesta Stephani (Oxford, 1976), pp. 14-15. 35 Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 66-67; Oliver Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Cornwall’, CMCS 8 (1984), 1-27 (pp. 20-27). 30 31

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1130s–1260s

27

For Geoffrey, these were foretastes of the types of suffering to follow Henry’s death.36 Indeed, the unrest in Cornwall and Gwynedd of this passage finds a calamitous extension in Geoffrey’s most pronounced treatment of British hostility in Prophetiae, 110–14, a sequence generally understood to be the final chapter of the text’s Norman period: Cadualadrus Conanum uocabit et Albaniam in societatem accipiet. Tunc erit strages alienigenarum, tunc flumina sanguine manabunt, tunc erumpent Amorici montes et diademate Bruti coronabuntur. Replebitur Kambria laeticia, et robora Cornubiae uirescent. Nomine Bruti uocabitur insula, et nuncupatio extraneorum peribit. (Cadualdrus will summon Conanus and make Scotland his ally. Then the foreigners will be slaughtered, the rivers flow with blood, and the hills of Brittany burst forth and be crowned with Brutus’s diadem. Wales will be filled with rejoicing and the Cornish oaks will flourish. The island will be called by Brutus’s name and the foreign term will disappear.)

This forecasts the return of the Britons, and the restoration of the island’s name to that of Brutus – ‘Britannia’, presumably as opposed to ‘Anglia’ and ‘Wallia’ (Geoffrey seems to have regarded ‘Wallia’ and ‘Walenses’ as in some sense pejorative, denoting a loss of status associated with the arrival of the Saxons).37 This vision of concerted British military activity is a direct borrowing from a Welsh political prophetic source model, found in its most complete form in the antiEnglish union of Armes Prydein Vawr (Great Prophecy of Britain).38 Although preserved only in the fourteenth-century Book of Taliesin (MS NLW Peniarth 2), Armes Prydein is thought to have been composed c. 927–42, possibly in Gwynedd (although the poet makes an appeal beyond a local audience), and it is generally considered to be the oldest surviving Myrddin prophecy.39 The prophecy Throughout his career, Geoffrey appears to have associated Welsh rebellion with fratricidal murder. See Vita Merlini, lines 603–04. 37 Huw Pryce, ‘British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales’, The English Historical Review 116(468) (2001): 775–801 (p. 785). 38 This influence is well-noted. In addition to n. 19, see Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 71–72. 39 Armes Prydein, ed. and transl. I. Williams and Rachel Bromwich (Dublin, 1972). For the most recent dating and historical analysis of the poem, see T. M. Charles-Edwards, Wales and the Britons, 350–1064 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 519–35 (esp. p. 532). For a translation of the poem, and a different argument concerning its origin, see G. R. Isaac, ‘“Armes Prydain Fawr” and St David’, in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. J. Wyn Evans and Jonathan M. Wooding (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 161–81. See further, 36

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envisages a s­trategic union between the Welsh, Bretons, Cornish, the men of Strathclyde, and non-British allies – the Norsemen of Dublin and the Scots – led by Cynan and Cadwaladr, against the expansionist ambitions of the English kingdom of Wessex: A chymot Kymry a gwyr Dulyn. Gwydyl Iwerdon Mon a Phrydyn. Cornyw a Chludwys eu kynnwys genhyn. Atporyon uyd Brython pan dyorfyn. Pell dygoganher amser dybydyn. (And there will be reconciliation between the Cymry and the men of Dublin, the Irish of Ireland and Anglesey and Scotland, the men of Cornwall and of Strathclyde will be made welcome among us. The Britons will rise again when they prevail for long was prophesied the time when they will come.) (9–13)

The prophecy contains one of the (if not, indeed, the) earliest prophetic allusions to the Cadualadrus and Conanus originals, the Welsh Cynan and Cadwaladr. Cadwaladr is generally understood to be the seventh-century legendary-historical prince of Gwynedd of the same name, who finds a place in English literature as the last British king of Geoffrey’s Historia.40 In Armes Prydein, he is placed at the head of a military host from Gwynedd. Cynan is generally understood to be Cynan Meriadoc, who belongs similarly to legendary history: the British ally of the imperial usurper Magnus Maximus (Macsen Wledig), and founder of Brittany. Cynan appears in a number of works of medieval Welsh literature, and like Cadwaladr is a character in Geoffrey’s Historia. In Armes Prydein he is generally understood to lead a British host returning from Brittany.41 A theme associated in Welsh history and prophecy with the overthrow of Saxon oppression, the returning Bretons r­ egarding texts from the Book of Taliesin, Marged Haycock, ed. and transl., Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, 2007); Marged Haycock, ed. and transl., Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin (Aberystwyth, 2013). 40 Rachel Bromwich, ed., Trioedd Ynys Prydein: The Triads of the Island of Britain (Cardiff, 2014), pp. 298–99; Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 85–86. 41 Bromwich, Trioedd, pp. 320–21; Bromwich, Armes Prydein, p. 46; Rachel Bromwich, ‘Cynon Fab Clydno’, in Astudiaethau ar yr Hengerdd: Cyflwynedig i Syr Idris Foster, ed. Rachel Bromwich and R. Brinley Jones (Cardiff, 1978), pp. 151–64. The latter chapter is an argument against M. E. Griffiths’s hypothesis that the prophesied Cynan was not originally associated with Brittany, but Cynan son of Clydno Eiddyn, who she regards as the only survivor of the northern British battle of c. 600, commemorated in Y Gododdin, for which see Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 111–18. See also Bromwich, Trioedd, pp. 326–27.

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1130s–1260s

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were at once representative of a returning diaspora, a homecoming, and an offshore reserve of military power. David Dumville has argued that in the tenth century the anti-English union, forecasting the return of Britons (or rather, Bretons) from across the sea, was already a political prophetic trope of some antiquity.42 It endured long in Welsh literary-political culture. We have strong reasons to believe that it retained its political efficacy into the twelfth century, and that prophecies of Cynan and Cadwaladr circulated in Wales during Geoffrey’s time. A revision of the Prophetiae composed c. 1153–54 by John of Cornwall, with multiple additions and a number of phrases in a Brittonic language or languages (Welsh, Cornish, or Breton), alludes to the return of Cynan from overseas (‘Conanus nauigat undas’).43 The precise linguistic context of John’s work remains uncertain, and it has been suggested that he drew on Cornish prophetic elements.44 However, there is no evidence for Cynanprophecy of this type from either Cornwall or Brittany, and Curley has observed the presence of a number of other allusions in common with Welsh prophecy in the text.45 Roughly contemporary with John, Geoffrey revisited the motif, and in a reiteration of Prophetiae, 110–14 in the Vita Merlini, Conanus’s (Cynan’s) association with Brittany, implicit in the Prophetiae, is made overt. He writes of British decline until Conanus ‘ab armorico ueniet temone’ (‘will come from Brittany by chariot’, 967).46 Alongside its invocation of the anti-English alliance, this sequence of the Prophetiae contains another marker of Geoffrey’s familiarity with Armes Prydein (or a lost analogue), and its association with contemporary Welsh anti-Norman feeling. We read of the river ‘Perironis’, diverted by an old man in white on a white horse, prior to a time of dissent among the Normans (the ‘alienigenae’), and the return of Conanus and Cadualadrus: Deinde reuertentur ciues in insulam; nam discidium alienigenarum orietur. Niueus quoque senex in niueo equo fluuium Perironis diuertet et cum candida uirga molendinum super ipsum metabitur. David Dumville, ‘Brittany and Armes Prydein Vawr’, Études Celtiques 20 (1983): 145–59. Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, p. 236. See further, Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Cornwall’, p. 21. 44 For a hypothesis concerning the inclusion of Cornish prophetic elements, see Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Welsh Historical Tradition’, pp. 39–40; an argument developed in its fullest form by Michael Faletra, ‘Merlin in Cornwall: The Source and Contexts of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 111 (2012): 304–38. 45 Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, pp. 225–27. 46 Parry, Vita Merlini, pp. 86–87. Modified version of Parry’s translation. 42 43

30

prophecy, politics and place (Then the natives will return to the island, for strife will break out among the foreigners. An old man in white on a snow-white horse will divert the river Periron and with a white rod measure out a mill on its bank.) (107–10)

The precise meaning of the old man remains obscure. Paul Dalton has suggested that he might be intended to figure Gruffudd ap Cynan, in his old age, or his son Cadwaladr, who is recorded in one source as having ridden a white horse, but the evidence here is decidedly slim.47 Folkloric referents have similarly been proposed, although again none fully convincingly.48 It is possible that Geoffrey was familiar with a similar allusion found in prophecy in the Black Book of Carmarthen, Yr Oianau (The Ohs, discussed further below). Here we read of, ‘vnic bariffvin gvehin dived’ (‘a singular whitebeard [or greybeard] ravaging Dyfed’, 15), although the function and context of this reference is too vague to afford any further speculation.49 The political meaning of the locale in Geoffrey’s prophecy is somewhat clearer. ‘Perironis’ is a Latinisation of Perydon, in Armes Prydein the river at which the Saxon tax collectors are met by the British hosts and the survivors driven as far back as Winchester, the capital of the English kingdom of Wessex, and from there to the sea and exile.50 Tellingly, the name of the river is corrected in one Welsh translation of the Historia from Geoffrey’s ‘fluuium Perironis’ to ‘auon Perydon’.51 Although the exact location of the river remains unknown – Ifor Williams tentatively identified it with the River Dee, or a tributary river – it is presented as a natural border between the Welsh kingdoms and the English, and a locus of Saxon defeat.52 Like Armes Prydein, in Prophetiae, 108 Geoffrey drew a clear division between the island’s rightful heirs and a band of foreign usurpers. The allusion to the Norman ‘alienigenae’ is a re-working of the anti-Saxon terminology of Armes Prydein, the ‘allmyn’ (foreigners or strangers) who came to the island with Horsa and Hengist, the legendary Saxon settlers who won British territory through treachery. The Historia Brittonum, a collection of Welsh and English historical Dalton, ‘The Topicality of the Historia’, pp. 699–700. Toby D. Griffen, ‘Aber Perydon: River of Death’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 15 (1995): 32–41 (pp. 34–35). 49 The parallel is noted in Griffiths, Early Vaticination, p. 93, although she makes no claim for a direct source relationship. Yr Oianau is printed in A. O. H. Jarman, ed., Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin (Cardiff, 1982), pp. 29–35; and translated in John K. Bollard, ‘Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition’, in Romance of Merlin, pp. 13–53 (pp. 24–30). The translation offered above is a slight modification from Bollard. 50 Bromwich, Armes Prydein, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi. 51 Henry Lewis, ed., Brut Dingestow (Cardiff, 1942), p. 107. 52 Bromwich, Armes Prydein, p. xl. 47 48

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1130s–1260s

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materials compiled c. 828–29, once thought to be the work of the Welsh monk Nennius, records Thanet, in Kent, as the first territory granted to the Saxons by the unwitting king of Powys, Vortigern (Gwrtheyrn).53 This originary moment of alien settlement is alluded to in Armes Prydein: ef gyrhawt allmyny alltuded. nys arhaedwy neb nys dioes dayar. ny wydynt py treiglynt ym pop aber. pan prynassant Danet trwy fflet called. gan Hors a Hegys oed yng eu ryssed. (The foreigners will be driven into exile: no one will receive them, they have no land. They do not know why they wander in every estuary, when they bought Thanet through false cunning, with Hors and Hengist, their power was straitened.) (28–32)54

As Patrick Sims-Williams has noted, this material is founded on an understanding of insular history which rests on two significant moments: the historical loss of British territory through Saxon trickery, and the future exile and slaughter of the Saxon oppressors.55 The central concern of Armes Prydein is the rightful possession of British territory by the Britons (as a broad ethnic group), and the expulsion of the English, characterised, even from the perspective of the tenth century, as a hostile incoming group. But what was Geoffrey doing with this material? Prophetiae, 110–14 is a prophecy of British restoration, constructed in the borrowed terms of Welsh political prophecy and its horizon of national expectations. It was intended as a warning of threats to the status quo, directed to the attention of a Norman elite. Geoffrey’s use of the Armes Prydein model in the Norman time of the text holds the historical Saxon kingdom of Wessex synonymous with contemporary Norman England, and suggests that he was aware of the customary equation between the Saxon and Norman periods of occupation we find in post-conquest John Morris, ed. and transl., Nennius: British History and the Welsh Annals (London, 1980), §31. Hereafter Historia Brittonum. Geoffrey reworks this material in Historia VI, lines 247–479. Discussed by Bromwich, Trioedd, p. 398. For a brief assessment of Vortigern’s place in Welsh historical traditions, see David Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain: History and Legend’, History 62 (1977): 173–92 (pp. 183–86). 54 For a comment on the translation of ‘ef gyrhawt’, in line 28, see Bromwich, Armes Prydein, pp. 29–30. See also D. Simon Evans, A Grammar of Middle Welsh (Dublin, 2003), p. 121. 55 Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories in Medieval Wales’, p. 112. 53

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Welsh political prophecy. By the twelfth century, the period of foreign oppression was extended in Welsh political prophecy from the Saxon to Norman occupation, and the Normans entered Welsh prophecy as a new national enemy. This appears in a number of important prophecies preserved in the Black Book of Carmarthen (MS NLW Peniarth 1), a mid-thirteenth-century manuscript containing material with claims to a twelfth-century core and other elements earlier still, similarly engaged with the matter of British restoration.56 Composite works, preserving accretive layers of historical-political material, these prophecies take the kings of Norman, and later Angevin, England as their antipathetic focus. Y Bedwenni (The Birch Trees), recalls the appearance of the Normans in their distinctive chainmail, preceding the rule of a royal one of Môn, presumably Cadwaladr (11, 20).57 Similarly, another Black Book prophecy, Yr Oianau, prophesies the arrival of the ‘Nortmin’ across the broad sea, the piercing of mail coats (115–16), and the achievements of two British rulers: A mi disgoganau e deu priodaur a luniont tegnevet o nef. hid laur. Kynan kadwaladir. (And I will prophesy two rulers who will create peace from heaven to earth. Cynan, Cadwaladr…) (120–22)58

There are strong grounds for positing Geoffrey’s acquaintance with material of this nature. Although it is often argued that he only became familiar with prophecies of the type found in the Black Book during the composition of the Vita Merlini in the 1150s, where in his reimagining of Merlin he drew heavily on the depictions of the wild man narrator of the Black Book prophecies,59 the ­reference

A. O. H. Jarman, ‘Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin: The Black Book of Carmarthen’, Proceedings of the British Academy 71 (1985): 333–56 (pp. 349–50). 57 The prophecy is printed in Jarman, Llfyr Du Caerfyrddin, p. 25; and translated in Bollard, ‘Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition’, pp. 21–22. Geoffrey drew on this material again in Vita Merlini, lines 654–57. 58 See above, n. 49. 59 The wild man is a character identified at some point in his history as Myrddin, although precisely when remains disputed. Prevailing opinion, based on Jarman’s analyses, are summarised succinctly and interrogated in Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Merlin Legend’. Padel suggests that the identification of the northern wild man of the Black Book as Myrddin might have been an innovation inspired by a familiarity with Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini. 56

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in the Prophetiae to the Normans as ‘populus […] in ligno et ferreis tunicis’ (‘a people clad in wood and tunics of iron’, 72), echoes the interest in Norman armour in the prophecies of the Black Book. As Stephen Knight has suggested, we have no reason to suppose that Geoffrey felt compelled to use all the Welsh prophetic material at his disposal in one fell swoop; rather he drew on material as it became relevant to his purposes.60 In the 1130s, the relationship between the arrival of the Normans and the appearance of the armies of Cynan and Cadwaladr was certainly timely. As Dalton has suggested, Geoffrey’s uses of Cynan-Cadwaladr material may well have acquired a certain credibility in England during a period when there were significant political actors in possession of these names: Cadwaladr ap Gruffudd, son of the prince of Gwynedd, and Conan III duke of Brittany, husband of Henry’s natural daughter (named like her sister the Empress) Matilda.61 In Wales itself, however, these deliverers were anticipated in terms that were by no means so literal. Any potential leader of Welsh restoration might be – regardless of his Christian name – a Cynan, a Cadwaladr, or later, an Owain.62 These names, effectively functioning as epithets, signified the mab darogan, a national hero who would restore the fortunes of the Welsh, and we have no reason to believe Geoffrey was so specific in his application of them. Although resting on a powerful vision of pan-insular restoration, certainly by the twelfth century prophecies of the returning British diaspora and the exile of the Saxons, and Normans, encoded more limited, and in political terms decidedly more meaningful, territorial ambitions: the unification of Wales under a single high king, who would compel the departure of the Normans from the Welsh kingdoms. One important prophecy in this vein, which we have strong reasons to believe circulated in Wales during this period, survives in the Historia Gruffud vab Kenan, a Middle Welsh translation of a now-lost twelfth-century Latin text.63 We read of a prophecy ascribed to ‘Merdin’ (a quasi-Cambricisation of the Latin ‘Merlinus’) of a ‘llyminauc Knight, Merlin, p. 32. Dalton, ‘The Topicality of the Historia’, p. 700. 62 A similar argument has been made by Elizabeth Schoales, who has noted the close relationship between praise poetry and prophecy. Elizabeth Schoales, ‘Welsh Prophetic Poetry in the Age of the Princes’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 24–25 (2004/05): 127–39. 63 D. Simon Evans, ed., Historia Gruffud vab Kenan (Cardiff, 1977), p. 5. For an English translation, see D. Simon Evans, ed., A Medieval Prince of Wales: The Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (Burnham-on-Sea, 1990), pp. 27, 58. The prophecy is also found in a sixteenth-century Latin version of the same, which its editor has understood as being very close to the earlier Latin source of the Welsh text. Paul Russell, ed. and transl., Vita Grifffini Filii Conani: The Medieval Latin Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan (Cardiff, 2005), pp.  58–59, 134–35. 60 61

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lletfer’, a savage, or half-wild, leaping one. ‘Llyminauc’ is a heroic epithet, probably meaning warrior, which saw a relatively broad utility in Welsh prophecy and poetry. It appears in a short prophecy related to Armes Prydein, also in the Book of Taliesin, beginning ‘Dygogan awen’ (‘the awen [prophetic inspiration] foretells’). We read here of a ‘llyminawc’ who will conquer north Wales, submitting to neither English nor Welsh.64 In the Historia, this figure is identified as Gruffudd, who, in the fashion of Cynan, will come from overseas, bringing slaughter. The prophecy is also given in Latin, a detail that suggests it was a component of the earliest text. The date and historical context of the original has long been controversial, but it can be relatively safely assumed that it was the work of an author with a vested interest in the political and ecclesiastical independence of the kingdom of Gwynedd, writing for a Venedotian audience at some point following Gruffudd’s death in 1137, probably during the early years of the reign of his son, Owain.65 Gruffudd, and his son Owain Gwynedd – who amassed considerable territorial gains in the aftermath of Henry I’s death, appear to have been the subject of a number of prophetically inflected works encoding expectations for Welsh reconquest.66 Aled Llion Jones has recently suggested that the long-lived allusions in Welsh prophecy to a ‘macwy dau hanner’ (a youth or lord of two halves), who fights a great battle (presumably against the Saxons, Normans, or English) aided by a Welsh and Irish retinue, provided a neat fit with the genealogy of Gruffudd, half-Irish and half-Welsh, who could potentially draw on supporters from both sides of the Irish Sea.67 This vision is again of a type with that of Armes Prydein, in that it introduces non-British allies as part of an anti-English alliance. This may have been a genuine political expectation during Gruffudd’s time, but political realities aside, the representative value of this imagining was profound: it is a vision of Norman destruction and Welsh restoration. This is precisely the type of prophetic material we would expect to have been in circulation during the 1130s, when Gruffudd’s sons rebelled against the Normans and dramatically extended the limits of the northern Welsh kingdom. Bromwich, Armes Prydein, pp. xli–xlv. The term appears elsewhere as a heroic, probably non-prophetic, epithet or even personal name. See ‘Teithi etmygant’, in Legendary Poems of the Book of Taliesin, pp. 373-86, line 44; 384 n. 44; ‘Preiddeu Annwn’, in Legendary Poems of the Book of Taliesin, pp. 433–51, line 19; 444 n. 19. 65 Nerys Ann Jones, ‘Historia Gruffud vab Kenan: The First Audience’, in Gruffudd ap Cynan: A Collaborative Biography, ed. K. L. Maund (Woodbridge, 1996), pp. 149–56. See further, Russell, Vita Griffini Filii Conani, pp. 43–47. 66 Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 79; Schoales, ‘Welsh Prophetic Poetry’, p. 136. For a brief discussion of Owain’s campaigns, see Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 48–49. 67 Jones, Darogan, pp. 134–35. It has been suggested that the reference to Gruffudd as ‘lletfer’ in the prophecy of the Historia Gruffud vab Kenan may similarly be an allusion to his mixed heritage. See Russell, Vita Griffini Filii Conani, p. 135. 64

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To Geoffrey and his contemporaries at Oxford, interest in Welsh prophecy was surely not only intellectually but also politically motivated. In his prologue to the Prophetiae, Geoffrey writes that such was the extent of the demands for publication of the prophecies that arose during the composition of the Historia that he broke off his task and turned his attention to the prophecies, a project which was as then incomplete. This fresh demand was inspired by ‘rumore’ of Merlin’s prophecies then circulating in Oxford (1–2). ‘Rumore’ here is generally translated as news, although the modern English rumour, gossip or hearsay, is a more precise rendering: we might wonder if Welsh prophecy was then the stuff of the partial conversation, paranoia, and political anxiety associated with rumours of oppositional prophecy throughout the Middle Ages. In this broader historical context, the collection, translation, and revision of Welsh prophetic material was not simply an intellectual exercise but also a political one. Geoffrey’s text brought valuable information to his Norman audience. There is more, then, to the prologue of the Prophetiae than the authorising fiction normally associated with the British book of the Historia: its claims directly pertain to the conditions through which Welsh prophecy came to be known in England. The requests that pre-empted the Prophetiae are evidence of the desire of a Norman, and Normanised, political elite to anticipate the terms of Welsh prophetic opposition during a period of heightened border threats. Indeed, in the course of the following centuries, Prophetiae, 110–14 provided convenient shorthand for English writers influenced by Geoffrey, a form of paranoid ventriloquism drawn on in times of threat from Wales and later Scotland, warning of the dangers of a weak king of England or divided government. By the later Middle Ages, it functioned as a staple figure through which threats to English sovereignty were both perceived and articulated in England and Scotland, as well as Wales. The historical importance of Geoffrey’s use of this Welsh prophetic motif cannot be over-stated: an entire literary history is unimaginable in the absence of this one moment. Although the Prophetiae was intended to function as a caution against dissension among the Norman elite, it is also highly nostalgic about the historical power of the Normans in Britain. This is Geoffrey’s second formative act of prophetic innovation: the reconstruction of Norman imperium as a claim to insular possession with considerable antiquity. Geoffrey presents a revisionist Norman history through an adaptation of one of the oldest known British prophecies: the Omen of the Dragons. The Omen is a prophetic episode staging British exile and restoration, incorporated in the account of the first wave of Saxon invasions in the Historia Brittonum.68 It recounts the building project in Snowdonia of Vortigern, Historia Brittonum, §42.

68

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a figure who we have noted was vilified in Welsh history and prophecy as the king whose foolhardy invitation to the Saxon mercenaries Hengist and Horsa resulted in the earliest wave of Saxon settlement.69 In the midst of the first invasion, Vortigern finds the foundations of his fortress (a metaphor for the foundations of his kingdom) troubled by an unseen presence beneath the earth, revealed in the course of the episode as two ‘vermes’ (probably worms or snakes, although possibly vermin).70 These are interpreted by the child-prophet Ambrosius as representative of two ‘dracones’ (dragons), which appear to be functioning as national standards.71 It is, he explains, a portent of the warring Saxons (the white dragon) and Britons (the red), hostilities which will conclude in the victory of the red and exile of the white. The Omen has been understood as evidence of an active Welsh culture of political prophecy during the ninth century, a Latin reworking of a vernacular theme.72 The original Omen belongs to the same prophetic culture that later produced Armes Prydein, whose author may well have known the Historia Brittonum, or common source material, for the names of the Saxon leaders Hengist and Horsa appear there similarly as terms of antipathy. It was an important motif in subsequent Welsh literature, and the opening passage of Geoffrey’s version was translated into Welsh, and appears in Welsh manuscripts as Y Broffwydoliaeth Fawr (The Great Prophecy).73 The episode also acquired a prequel, in the Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys (Story of Lludd and Llefelys), found in some versions of the Welsh Brut, which tells of how two dragons (as we find in Geoffrey’s version of the Omen, rather than snakes or worms, etc.) came to be buried.74 Geoffrey’s version, which frames the Prophetiae (in the Historia the prophecies are made by ‘Merlin Ambrosiuis’ to Vortigern), was largely faithful to the original Omen, and his first most significant deviation from it actually functions as a clear Welsh source marker. His identification of the prophet conflates Ambrosius of See above, n. 53. The third possibility was first suggested by Ifor Williams, ‘Hen Chwedlau’, THSC (1946/47): 28–58 (p. 57). 71 For a discussion of the historical use of dragon standards, see J. S. P. Tatlock, ‘The Dragons of Wessex and Wales’, Speculum 8 (1933): 223–35. Contemporary precedent appears to have been English rather than Welsh. 72 For the relationship of the Omen to Welsh historical and prophetic culture, and hypotheses regarding Welsh language background traditions, see Williams, ‘Hen Chwedlau’, pp. 57–58; Sims-Williams, ‘Some Functions of Origin Stories in Medieval Wales’, p. 106. For a brief discussion of the unity of Latin and vernacular historical traditions, see Patrick Sims-Williams, ‘The Early Welsh Arthurian Poems’, in Arthur of the Welsh, pp. 33–71 (pp. 34–35). 73 Jones, Darogan, pp. 120–21. 74 Brynley F. Roberts, ed., Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys (Dublin, 1975). 69 70

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the Omen with Myrddin (Merlin). However, his second major deviation presents a much more profound departure. In the Prophetiae, the Saxon threat is contained not by the resurgence of the red dragon of the Britons but the arrival of the Normans, a people of wood and iron who chase the Saxons from the island and restore its original inhabitants: Vix obtinebit cauernas suas Germanicus draco, quia ultio prodicionis eius superueniet. Vigebit tandem paulisper, sed decimatio Neustriae nocebit. Populus namque in ligno et ferreis tunicis superueniet, qui uindictam de nequitia ipsius sumet. Restaurabit pristinis incolis mansiones, et ruina alienigenarum patebit. (The German dragon will be hard put to keep possession of its caves, since retribution will be visited on its treason. Then it will prosper for a short time, but Normandy’s tithe will injure it. A people will come clad in wood and tunics of iron to take vengeance on its wickedness. They will restore the former inhabitants to their dwellings, and the ruin of the foreigners will be plain to see.) (69–74)

So influential was this substitution that in the early thirteenth century, another political prophetic author writing in England, after the fashion of Geoffrey, invented a dark dragon of the Normans as a counterpart to the red and white.75 Geoffrey’s pro-Norman conclusion of the Omen is in keeping with a decidedly Norman political-historical perspective. The account of the white dragon’s treachery and downfall must be regarded (as it was seen by later medieval commentators on the Prophetiae) as incorporating a component of post-Conquest This prophecy appears in a collection known as the Prophecy of the Eagle, or the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester. Parry prints a Latin version of two component texts of this collection, in Brut, pp. 225–26. An earlier edition of the text appears in San-Marte, ed., Gottfried’s von Monmouth: Historia Regum Britanniae und Brut Tysylio (Halle, 1854), pp. 463–65. An English translation of the version in MS Leningrad, Saltykov-Shchedrin State Public Library, lat. F.IV.76, is printed in Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Richard III’s Books: VIII: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae with The Prophecy of the Eagle and Commentary: 2. Prophecy and Commentary’, The Ricardian 8 (1989): 290–304. See further, Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘Richard III’s Books: VIII. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae with The Prophecy of the Eagle and Commentary: 2. Prophecy and Commentary (Continued)’, The Ricardian 8 (1990): 351–62; Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, ‘The Dark Dragon of the Normans: A Creation of Geoffrey of Monmouth, Stephen of Rouen, and Merlin Silvester’, Quondam et Futurus 2(2) (1992): 1–20; Anne Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, Richard III’s Books: Ideals and Reality in the Life and Library of a Medieval Prince (Stroud, 1997), pp. 190–95.

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Norman historical revisionism: the broken oath of Harold Godwinson.76 Harold is understood to have sworn submission to William of Normandy in order to gain release when shipwrecked in Ponthieu in 1064. Norman propagandists made much of this when William’s claim to the English crown was opposed by Harold – the scene of Harold’s oath to William is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry. This is an event which, Stephen Knight has suggested, finds a coded reference in the oath sworn by the shipwrecked Guichtlacus, King of the Danes, to the British king Belinus in Historia III.77 However, in Geoffrey’s allusion to the white dragon’s treachery there is also a very specific engagement with a Welsh prophetic paradigm: the last English king is representative of the usurping Saxons of Welsh prophecy, and the Norman invaders are the instruments of his prophesied downfall. It is a scene of the end of British, and the beginning of Saxon, exile. Geoffrey’s portrayal of the moment of Norman vengeance is also an imagining of British territorial restoration, as we find it in Welsh political prophecy. He drew on the Omen as a form of historical British prophecy that could be reworked as the stuff of Norman realisation, a strategy of a type with Geoffrey’s better-noted uses of British history in the Historia as a mirror to Norman deeds, and positive standards of identification.78 British and Norman history were compatible in one fundamental sense, with particular pertinence for Geoffrey’s reapplication of Welsh prophecy. Both shared a genealogical legend applied to peoples across Europe, traced back to Troy. Working on the basis of the Historia Brittonum, Geoffrey writes in Historia I of the settlement of Britain, previously known as Albion, by Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas, leader of the exiled descendants of the survivors of the fall of Troy.79 Troy stands at the very foundation of British culture for Geoffrey: the period of Trojan exile and captivity in Greece, which precedes the foundation of Britain, reads very strongly as a counterpart to the broader theme of British exile in the Historia as a whole (drawn from Welsh historical and prophetic traditions). For Geoffrey, the period of Greek captivity shaped the development of the Trojan language, which he presents as the origins of the Welsh language. He explains that the name of the language of the Britons is derived from ‘curuum Graecum’ (crooked Greek), that Hammer, ‘Another Commentary on the Prophetiae Merlini’, p. 598; Hammer, ‘A Commentary on the Prophetiae Merlini’, p. 14; Matthaei Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols (London, 1872–82; RS 57), I, p. 201. 77 Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society, p. 47. 78 See Knight, Arthurian Literature and Society, pp. 45–66; Laurie Finke and Martin Shichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History (Gainesville, FL, 2004), pp. 38, 51–55; Richard M. Loomis, ‘Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’, in The Romance of Arthur, ed. James J. Wilhelm and Laila Zamuelis Gross (New York, 1984), pp. 57–86 (p. 58). 79 Historia Brittonum, §10, 11; Historia I. 76

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is Trojan.80 This is a false etymology for Cymraeg, meaning Welsh (language), based on a compound of the Welsh cam (crooked) and groeg (Greek). It suggests that Geoffrey was aware of initial mutation in Welsh, that is, ‘Groeg’ mutates to ‘roeg’ after the preceding adjective ‘cam’.81 Geoffrey also supplemented the British diaspora of Welsh political prophecy with an earlier Trojan prefiguration, a tale of exile and homecoming with a similarly prophetic onus. We have already noted Diana’s prophecy to Brutus concerning settlement of this island in the western ocean, a vision that claims the island as always-already Britain.82 Norman historians similarly drew on Trojan foundation legends. Following Dudo of St Quentin, a number of eleventh- and twelfth-century historical authors cast the Normans as members of the Trojan diaspora. As Francis Ingledew has noted, the claim to Trojan ancestry was an important element in Norman selfperceptions as a singular gens, and we might understand Geoffrey’s use of the Trojan narrative of the Historia Brittonum as a point of intersection not only with a British but also a pre-existing Norman historical culture. It was in this context, Ingledew suggests, that Geoffrey’s ‘classicizing achievement’ took form, reflective of a fundamentally Norman ‘world view’.83 From the perspective of their shared Trojan origins, and the diasporic nature of both the Trojan myth and Welsh political prophecy, the Norman conquests of England and Wales might be understood as a homecoming of sorts. Geoffrey prophesies, retrospectively, the arrival of a new Trojan contingent with a genealogical relationship to the old, marking the beginning of a new age of insular imperium. This is to say, for Geoffrey the coming of the Normans was the realisation of prophecy. There was also a more recent historical dimension to the association between the Normans and the Britons, which Geoffrey may have had in mind: the relationship between the Norman conquerors of England and the Bretons of Brittany. Breton hosts accompanied the Norman forces in 1066 as the largest group of auxiliaries in William’s army, and received substantial grants of land, many of them on the Welsh border.84 It is from among this cohort that J. S. P. Tatlock suggested Geoffrey’s ethnic origin.85 However, nothing in this sequence indicates Historia I, lines 461–62. Crawford, ‘On the Linguistic Competence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’, p. 155; Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 11–12; Zimmer, ‘A Medieval Linguist’, pp. 343–44. Zimmer suggests that this may also hang on a false etymological association of the Latin Troiana (Trojan) with the Welsh troi (to turn, twist, or distort). 82 See above, p. 5. 83 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. 682–86). 84 Knight, Arthurian Literature, pp. 40–41. 85 See above, n. 11. 80 81

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Breton self-identification. Rather, it rests on an acquaintance with the function of the British diaspora in Welsh political prophecy. Tellingly, one early Latin commentary on the text, produced between 1155 and 1159 by a Welsh writer, glosses the former inhabitants of the island, who are restored to their dwellings by the men clad in wood and iron, as the Britons who went with Conanus to Brittany, in the time of the Emperor Maximus, and who later returned with the Normans, that is, the Bretons.86 A similar conflation appears to have been extended by Geoffrey to the Norman conquerors themselves. That the return of Cynan and Cadwaladr was in Geoffrey’s mind when he envisaged the arrival of the Normans, is suggested by an allusion in Prophetiae, 74–76 to the enslavement of the Saxons under the Normans: Germen albi draconis ex ortulis nostris abradetur, et reliquiae generationis eius decimabuntur. Iugum perpetuae seruitutis ferent matremque suam ligonibus et aratris uulnerabunt. (The seed of the white dragon will disappear from our gardens and the remnants of its generation will be decimated. They will bear the yoke of unending slavery and wound their mother with hoes and ploughs.)

This corresponds closely to the Welsh restoration fantasy preserved in Armes Prydein, depicting the enslavement of the Saxons under Cynan and Cadwaladr: ‘ny alwawr gynhon yn gynifwyr /namyn kechmyn Katwaladyr ae gyfnewitwyr’ (‘The foreigners will not be called warriors, but the slaves and hucksters of Cadwaladr’, 183–84). Geoffrey’s account of the Norman Conquest makes use of a deeply entrenched, and long-lived, Welsh formulation of Saxon overthrow. This is precisely what enabled its re-working as a figure of Norman dominion in Britain, for the Normans brought the end of Saxon rule. British restoration became one and the same as Norman imperium. This precedent was enthusiastically followed throughout the Middle Ages, in application to the insular conquests of the English crown. Geoffrey’s vision of the Conquest suggests a perception of total insular control by the more powerful of the Norman kings of England from the 1060s to the death of Henry I, who, let us remember, in Prophetiae, 78–79, subdues the ‘insulani dracones’. This is an imagining that is more fantastical than it is historical. Although during this period, Scottish kings and the Welsh princes periodically entered Hammer, ‘A Commentary on the Prophetiae Merlini’, p. 14; Jacob Hammer, ‘A Commentary on the Prophetia Merlini: A Continuation’, Speculum 15 (1940): 409–31. See further, Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, p. 220.

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into some manner of client relationship to the kings of England, in practice they retained independence over their kingdoms.87 In his study of medieval and early modern conceptualisations of Britain, Alan MacColl has understood Geoffrey’s Historia to be indicative of a quasi-metaphorical understanding of Britain as one and the same as England.88 However, Geoffrey’s imaginings certainly did not stop at the borders of England. He constructed a vision of Norman pan-insular control, co-opted from a Welsh vision of total insular rule. This was powerful and compelling, particularly in a period when Norman interests in Wales were under threat from kingdoms such as Gwynedd and Powys, whose leaders were themselves imbued with a very real sense of historically ratified British territorial entitlement. Geoffrey’s re-working of the Omen was an ideologically motivated historical intervention in a potentially dangerous British history with contemporary political utility. He returned to a central scene in Welsh political prophetic imaginations: the conquest, or re-conquest, of the island and a conceptualisation of total insular ownership, revisiting the early medieval Welsh prophetic moment represented by the original Omen and Armes Prydein and reworking it in relation to a re-imagined Norman history. In something of a literary sleight of hand, he revealed Norman insular hegemony to be the subject of British prophecy all along. The Norman conquest of England and Wales was thus legitimised as long prophesied, and what is more, fundamentally restorative: it created rather than further fractured insular wholeness. This historical myopia is ideology in action, and Geoffrey’s innovation paved the way for the staging of the conquests and territorial claims of consecutive kings of England as acts of British restoration, offering a prophetic mandate for English insular hegemony throughout the Middle Ages. There was one Norman political figure in whose British credentials Geoffrey was particularly interested: Robert Earl of Gloucester and Lord of Glamorgan, an illegitimate son of Henry I, and one of Geoffrey’s patrons. Robert is often understood to be the model behind the British counts and dukes of Gloucester of the Historia.89 Geoffrey was not the only writer with British interests to court the support of Robert: Caradoc of Llancarfan did similarly.90 Robert probably had Dauvit Broun, Scottish Independence and the Idea of Britain: From the Picts to Alexander III (Edinburgh, 2007), p. 106; Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 24–55. 88 MacColl, ‘The Meaning of Britain’, p. 252. 89 Chambers, Arthur of Britain, p. 43; Tatlock, Legendary History, p. 170; Knight, Arthurian Literature, p. 46; Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and Cornwall’, p. 10. 90 Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters, p. 14. We might note that Robert was also the focus of more firmly Anglo-centric literary productions. See Robert B. Patterson, ‘William of Malmesbury’s Robert of Gloucester: A Re-evaluation of the Historia Novella’, American Historical Review 70 (1965): 983–97. 87

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at least a passing acquaintance with Welsh literary-political traditions, perhaps through the interpreters, who Constance Bullock-Davies has termed the ‘royal and baronial latimers’, who facilitated conversations between the Marcher lords and the Welsh kingdoms.91 He also had significant involvements with native religious houses and was a patron of the Cistercian monastery at Margam, a site of multilingual literary production where commentaries on the Prophetiae are known to have circulated.92 It was even suggested by earlier scholars that Robert was the son of the southern Welsh princess Nesta (about whose actual descendants more presently), and that prophecies about him circulated in Welsh.93 Although this claim is without substance, Robert was certainly part of a highly politicised, multilingual milieu. To such a patron, visions like Prophetiae, 110–14 were not necessarily so much a warning as an invitation. After all, this was a man who in the years that followed led an army drawn from both sides of the Anglo-Welsh border into battle against a king of England understood, like the white dragon of the Omen, to be a usurper and a traitor. Robert made use of a substantial Welsh force against Stephen in 1139, and again in 1144.94 From as early as 1136, he received the adherence of Welsh magnates on the borders of his lands in south Wales, and in the case of Morgan ap Owain, a prince of Gwent, formal homage.95 Depending on one’s perspective, Prophetiae, 69–76 was not the only point of positive political transference in the text. This is important historical context for our understanding of Geoffrey’s incorporation of the Prophetiae in the Historia. Robert appears in all named dedications, and is generally understood to have been the original patron of the text. In some manuscripts, he is named alongside Waleran of Meulan, who was named Earl of Worcester by Stephen in 1138, one of a number of redistributions of earldoms in the West Midlands to counterbalance the growing western powerbase of Robert.96 In one surviving witness, Robert appears alongside Stephen himself. The political rationale behind these various dedications, their relationship to the political antipathies and allegiances of this period, and their implications for the For the fullest discussion of latimers on the Welsh March during this period, see BullockDavies, Professional Interpreters, pp. 12–15. Bullock-Davies locates Robert within this cultural context. See also Davies, ‘Peoples of Britain IV’, p. 6. 92 Reeves, The Marcher Lords, p. 140; Crick, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecy and History’, p. 368. 93 Griffiths, Vaticination, p. 132. 94 Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 47; Gillingham, ‘Context and Purposes of History of the Kings of Britain’, pp. 36–37. 95 Crouch, Reign of King Stephen, pp. 58–59. 96 David Crouch, ‘Waleran, count of Meulan and earl of Worcester (1104–1166)’, ODNB [last accessed 11 February 2016]; Patterson, ‘William of Malmesbury’s Robert of Gloucester’, p. 991. 91

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dating of the Historia, has birthed a number of competing theories.97 However, the geo-political positioning of Geoffrey’s work is clear. He addressed his Historia to powerful political actors with a vested interest in the politics of western England and the March, and the place of the magnates of this region in the balance of power in the Anglo-Norman realm as a whole. The Historia cannot be understood (as it has typically been) as an example of border writing, in the sense of a work produced on the periphery at a remove from geographically central hegemonic interests and power structures.98 As he inserted the Prophetiae into the Historia, Geoffrey was not writing from the margins to the centre but from Oxford to the March, during a period when the border was a locus of considerable aristocratic power. The intended political centrality of Geoffrey’s appropriated Welsh models must not be underestimated: his intention was to deliver both a vision of power; and an admonition, a presentiment of its loss, to the politically powerful. The Prophetiae is invested in the interests of a particular class. Geoffrey employed a strategy of national address to speak to an elite invested in the fate of insular Norman hegemony. Its essential elements were borrowed from much earlier and contemporary Welsh models, a source tradition that appears to have been familiar to his early clerical audience. For Geoffrey, insular imaginings were a kind of threat-response, and were on occasion highly pessimistic; but they also provided a model through which he could create a horizon of national expectations of pronounced utility to the ecclesiastical and royal audiences to whom he directed his work. The Prophetiae was not intended to be read as an antiquarian record of a historical British discourse: rather it was an active text which encoded pertinent political information. Through it, Geoffrey wrote a united Anglo-Norman kingdom into being, and warned of its dissolution in the face of alternative visions of the British future. Yet it is from these alternatives that his project took its impetus, and indeed its very endorsement.

The Giraldian Collection and the Governance of Ireland After Geoffrey, British prophecy allegedly derived from Welsh sources came to be understood as an acceptable mode of address, even petition, to English kings. This is at the heart of Gerald of Wales’s engagement with prophecy some fifty Historia, Prologue, lines 17-33. For discussion of the dedications, see Crick, Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth IV, pp. 113-20; Curley, Geoffrey of Monmouth, pp. 8-10; Finke and Schichtman, King Arthur and the Myth of History, pp. 46-51; Knight, Arthurian Literature, pp. 45-46; Tatlock, Legendary History, pp. 436-37. 98 For analysis of Geoffrey’s work as border writing in this sense, see Warren, History on the Edge, pp. 25–59. 97

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years later, as he directed his own political prophecies towards a royal audience.99 Prophecy is an instrumental political tool in Gerald’s 1189 account of the late twelfth-century so-called English (perhaps more accurately, Cambro-Norman) conquest of Ireland, the Expugnatio Hibernica.100 He referred to the work across his writings as a ‘Vaticinalis Historia’, prophetic history, and one of his chief concerns in it was the realisation of prophecy.101 The text was dedicated to Richard I, addressed in the preface as Count of Poitou and ‘Anglorum rector mox future’ – and so it has been suggested that the preface was written, and the text directed towards royal attention, between Henry II’s death in July 1189 and Richard’s coronation in September 1189.102 The Expugnatio charts the activities in Ireland of the Cambro and later Hiberno-Norman dynasty to which Gerald belonged, the Geraldines, who played an important part in the early years of the conquest.103 A perceived lack of Geraldine advancement and recognition in Ireland colours the Expugnatio, and Gerald’s prophetic engagements.104 As Robert Bartlett has put it, Gerald appears as a ‘spokesman for the Marchers. He was their eulogist and apologist.’105 Certainly, the work exemplifies a particularly Marcher mentality carried over from the Welsh border to the other side of the Irish Sea. From the establishment of Norman holdings on the Welsh border in the late eleventh century to the 1536 There is a rich field of scholarship on Gerald of Wales contextualising his provenance, education, and cultural identity. For overviews of his life and works, see F. M. Powicke, ‘Gerald of Wales’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 12 (1928): 389–410; J. Conway Davies, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis: 1146–1946’, Archaeologia Cambrensis 99 (1946–47): 85–108, 256–80; Michael Richter, Giraldus Cambrensis: The Growth of the Welsh Nation (Aberystwyth, 1976); Michael Richter, ‘Gerald of Wales: A Reassessment on the 750th Anniversary of his Death’, Traditio 29 (1973): 379–90; Brynley F. Roberts, Gerald of Wales (Cardiff, 1982); Robert Bartlett, Gerald of Wales: A Voice of the Middle Ages (Stroud, 2006). 100 For discussion of the problem of terminology in discussing the conquest, which involved consecutive waves of conquerors of mixed heritage and diverse origins, see Seán Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages (Basingstoke, 1997), p. 59. 101 Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, ed. and transl. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin (Dublin, 1978), p. lxii. Hereafter, Expugnatio. For a discussion of Gerald’s interests in prophecy more broadly, see Putter, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin’. 102 Expugnatio, pp. xvi, 20–25. 103 There is a wealth of scholarship on the conquest, for which Gerald’s account presents an important source. W. L. Warren, Henry II (New Haven, CT, 2000), pp. 192–206; Robin Frame, Colonial Ireland, 1169–1369 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 8–23; Marie Therese Flanagan, Irish Society, Anglo-Norman Settlers, Angevin Kingship (Oxford, 1989), esp. pp. 136–64; Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages, pp. 57–80. 104 For a brief discussion of this political situation, see Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, pp. 25–29. 105 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 24.  99

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Act of Union, the Marcher lords enjoyed virtually autonomous rule at a remove from the direct authority of the king of England. This perceived autonomy was applied to Irish affairs also. A number of Gerald’s prophecies suggest a wariness of royal over-involvement in the newly conquered Irish territories. To this end, we see the reapplication of Welsh literary-political paradigms, originally pertaining to the independence of native Welsh rulers, in defence of Geraldine dynastic ambitions. This strategy has strong claims to be rooted in the political mentalities of, and cultural encounters in, the Welsh March. The prophetic strategies of the Expugnatio may well not have been solely Gerald’s innovation, but – I suggest – are indicative of a broader Geraldine manipulation of Welsh frameworks of meaning. This cross-linguistic literary-political interaction must be understood in the broader context of the Geraldines’ well-noted insinuation within native Welsh power structures.106 Through the progenitress of the broader familial group, the Welsh princess Nesta, the daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, the family were related to the princes of Deheubarth, with whom they entreated outside the direct sphere of influence of the English crown.107 Prophecies invested in the territorial dominion of the princes of Deheubarth appear to have been in circulation during this period, and I suggest that this relationship formed the basis of Geraldine engagements with elements of Welsh political prophecy. The various prophecies of the Expugnatio include reputedly Gaelic works of Irish prophets; borrowings from the Prophetiae ascribed to Merlin Ambrosius; and new material ascribed to a second Merlin, Merlin Silvester or Caledonius. It is this third category of prophecy with which this chapter is concerned. Gerald claimed that the prophecies of Merlin Silvester were his own discovery. In the second book of the Expugnatio, he writes of his uncovering of a Welsh book of the prophecies of this Merlin on the Llŷn Peninsula, during his journey through Wales in 1188 preaching the Third Crusade with Archbishop Baldwin.108 This is recounted also in the Itinerarium Kambriae (c. 1191), Gerald’s account of that same journey. Here he specifies that he found the book in Nefyn, where the company stopped for the night.109 Although the discovery of a lost British book is a familiar literary trope from this period, most famously found in Geoffrey’s prologue to the Historia, there is no reason to dispute the existence of a book of Welsh language prophecy In addition to n. 99, see Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 102–03. A Geraldine genealogy is printed in Expugnatio, p. 266. For the importance of Deheubarth in Gerald’s writings, see Huw Pryce, ‘In Search of a Medieval Society: Deheubarth in the Writings of Gerald of Wales’, Welsh History Review 1987 (13): 265–81. 108 Expugnatio, pp. 254–57. 109 Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales, ed. and transl. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 183. Hereafter, Journey through Wales.

106

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at Nefyn, which came to Gerald’s attention.110 Deep in Welsh-held Wales, Nefyn is a feasible location for such a manuscript. It is possible that Gerald discovered the book at a Welsh monastic house – perhaps the Augustinian foundation endowed by Cadwaladr ap Gruffudd, brother of Owain Gwynedd, earlier in the century.111 Gerald certainly appears to have been aware of the circulation of political prophecy through Welsh religious houses during this period.112 However, he probably had very little comprehension of the precise dimensions of the book as a whole, other than materials mediated to him by the contemporaries to whose translation skills he appealed: ‘peritis […] lingue Britannice viris’ (‘men skilled in the British language’). There is no evidence that he had any detailed knowledge of Welsh, although he appears to have had a basic (although sometimes confused) familiarity with some aspects of the language.113 He was, however, well placed to receive mediated Welsh materials. Although Gerald promised a full translation of his prophetic book in the third book of his Expugnatio (at the request of Henry II, no less), this was never to materialise.114 The full dimensions of the book at Nefyn remained forever beyond his grasp. As they stand, his prophecies of Merlin Silvester are not based on any singular Welsh source, although certainly, their functional claims have much in common with prophecies associated with the territorial interests of the dynasty of Deheubarth that we have reason to believe were known to him. He was certainly also, however, indebted to the Prophetiae. It has long been suggested that Gerald was acquainted with a Welsh language or Cambro-Latin ‘imitation’ of the Prophetiae.115 The existence of any such work remains uncertain, and we have no reason to presuppose his possession of a Welsh model, for we can align his activities with a broader vogue for the production of commentaries on, and political applications of, the Prophetiae among both secular and monastic clerics during the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.116 In fact, a Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales and Welsh Tradition’, in The Formation of Culture in Medieval Britain, ed. Françoise H. M. Le Saux (Lampeter, 1995), pp. 129–47 (p. 143). 111 For the presence of the Augustinian order at Nefyn, see David Stephenson, ‘The Rulers of Gwynedd and Powys’, in Monastic Wales: New Approaches, ed. Janet Burton and Karen Stöber (Cardiff, 2013), pp. 89–102 (pp. 92–93). 112 This is generally discussed in relation to Gerald’s tale of the prophet Meilyr in Journey through Wales, pp. 116–21. See Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales and Welsh Tradition’, p. 142; Flood, ‘Political Prodigies’, pp. 38–40. 113 For analysis of Gerald’s erroneous Welsh translations, see Zimmer, ‘A Medieval Linguist’. See also Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales and Welsh Tradition’, pp. 139–40. 114 Expugnatio, pp. 252–53. 115 Chambers, Arthur of Britain, p. 99. 116 Crick, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecy and History’, pp. 363–71; Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing III’, pp. 168–69; Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, pp. 220–22. 110

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number of Gerald’s Merlinian prophecies were collected by an enthusiastic reader at some point during the mid-1210s, and combined with other Galfridian materials, collated into a single text, beginning ‘Sicut rubeum’, and extended as a form of political commentary on English politics from the Norman Conquest to the reign of John. This prophecy, an important piece of Geraldian reception history, appears in the much-copied prophetic collection known to modern scholars as the Prophecy of the Eagle or the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester, and circulated in both England and Wales, although it is probably of English origin. It was incorporated in some versions of the Welsh Brut as the prophecy of Geoffrey’s Eagle of Shaftsbury, and also circulated separately in Welsh translation.117 Gerald’s Galfridian and Welsh engagements meet in the figure of Merlin Silvester, who features in Gerald’s writings on both Wales and Ireland. Gerald gives him a short biography in the second book of his Itinerarium, where he draws a distinction between this Merlin and Geoffrey’s Merlin Ambrosius. Gerald writes of Ambrosius as the prophet of the Historia, who prophesied in Vortigern’s time; and Silvester as a northern wild man driven mad in battle, who fled to the Caledonian Forest, and lived in the time of Arthur.118 The latter character is drawn from the Vita Merlini, and is loosely based on the northern British wild man known in northern sources as Lailoken (material that was probably also familiar to Gerald), and with some relationship to the wild mannarrator of the Black Book.119 The differentiation between the two was probably based on monastic practices of cataloguing Geoffrey’s works by drawing on the temporally disparate characterisations of Merlin in each: we find the same division between Geoffrey’s works and prophets in a roughly contemporary library catalogue from Bec, in Normandy.120 Following A. O. H. Jarman, it is generally In addition to above, n. 75, see Parry, Brut, pp. 30–31. For a discussion of the contexts of the prophecy, in both Latin and Welsh, in later medieval Welsh manuscripts, see Jones, Darogan, pp. 120–21. It has been suggested, on the basis of the Welsh version, that the collection might be traced back to a Welsh bardic source, known to Gerald. However, Gerald’s prophecies appear to have pre-dated the collection, and his prophecies of Merlin Silvester can most intelligibly be read as his own innovations, rooted in an acquaintance with Galfridian and Welsh models. For the bardic source argument, see Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 61. This is based on a problematic argument forwarded by Barbara Lynne McCauley, ‘Giraldus “Silvester” of Wales and his Prophetic History of Ireland: Merlin’s role in the Expugnatio Hibernica’, Quondam et Futurus 3 (1993): 41–62. 118 Journey through Wales, pp. 192–93. 119 For discussions of the development of the Myrddin/Merlin legend see above, n. 20. 120 David Dumville, ‘An Early Text of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae and the Circulation of Some Latin Histories in Twelfth-century Normandy’, Arthurian Literature 4 (1985): 1-36 (pp. 3–4); Sonya Jensen, ‘Merlin: Ambrosius and Silvester’, in Words and Wordsmiths: A Volume for H. L. Rogers, ed. Geraldine Barnes, John Gunn, Sonya Jensen, and Lee Jobling (Sydney, 1989), pp. 45–48 (p. 47). 117

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accepted that in his invention of a separate biography for Merlin Silvester, Gerald attempted to reconcile incongruities in Geoffrey’s works, an activity based on an acquaintance with a similar range of prophetic sources.121 Gerald’s desire to clarify the relationship between the two is understandable: Galfridian material remained his touchstone for his understanding of the broader dimensions of political prophecy. It was from Galfridian prophecy that Gerald appears to have derived his understanding of the shape of Welsh prophecy. In his second work on Wales, the Descriptio Kambriae (c. 1194), he writes of Geoffrey’s two Merlins as prophets of the destruction of Britain, as Cassandra was of Troy, foretelling the coming of the Saxons and later the Normans.122 The shape of this alleged prophetic content clearly owes much to the Prophetiae, and its classical gloss to the Trojan foundation legend of the Historia, yet – as for Geoffrey – the structuring place of the two invasions is based on a fundamentally Welsh prophetic-historical principle. Similarly, earlier in the Descriptio, Gerald records contemporary Welsh hopes enshrined in the restoration prophecies of Merlin, that the ‘exterorum nuncupatio’ (foreign term or name) will pass from the island, and the Welsh (the ‘Britones’) will exult in their ancient name.123 This is a close reworking of Prophetiae, 114 (‘Nomine Bruti uocabitur insula, et nuncupatio extraneorum peribit’), yet we might remember that this is a unit of the Prophetiae with a strong claim to a direct Welsh source: it follows from an anti-English alliance of the type preserved in Armes Prydein. Notably, there is a slippage in Gerald’s categorisation of the two Merlins: a singular Merlin emerges, who, even as he functions as a Galfridian signifier, is also at once the Welsh Myrddin. Gerald may have understood his encounters with political prophecy in line with Galfridian structures but there was a genuine Welsh dimension to these perceptions. The Prophetiae was a type of guidebook for Gerald to Welsh prophetic culture: a tool through which he navigated a difficult discourse, linguistically removed from him, but highly useful. Gerald’s differentiation between the two Merlins was certainly a successful act of clerical clarification, and the distinction appears in a number of later English chronicles, where significant use was made of Gerald’s account in the Jarman, ‘The Merlin Legend and the Welsh Tradition of Prophecy’, p. 136. Although Jarman expresses some uncertainty, I understand Gerald of Wales to have been familiar with the Vita Merlini; see Victoria Flood, ‘Arthur’s Return from Avalon: Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Legend’, Arthuriana 25(2) (2015): 84–110 (pp. 95–96). For a modification to Jarman’s argument, see Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Merlin Legend’, pp. 60–64. 122 Description of Wales, p. 248. 123 Opera, VI, p. 216; Description of Wales, p. 265. 121

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Itinerarium.124 Yet there is more to Gerald’s Merlin Silvester than the actions of a tidy mind. He was interested not simply in the Merlin of the Prophetiae but a Merlin whose prophesied heroes were not exclusively royal. There was a strong convention in place during this period regarding the application of Galfridian material to the first Plantagenet king, and as Nicholas Vincent has noted, the Prophetiae provided the ‘dominant imagery of kingship within the Plantagenet realm’.125 In the Expugnatio there is a perceptible division between the function of the prophecies of Merlin Ambrosius and Merlin Silvester. On the three occasions that the prophecies of Merlin Ambrosius – all borrowings from the Prophetiae – are quoted by Gerald, it is in relation to the activities of Henry II, and in two of the three, Henry is equated with the imperial Sextus of Prophetiae, 99–105, a British high king who after a troubled youth unites the five provinces of Ireland and restores the holy places of the saints.126 (We might note that Sextus appears to have functioned as a prophetic signifier over and above a designation of a place in a king list – Henry II was actually the fifth king after the conquest, although perhaps for some prophetic commentators this seemed close enough.) Gerald writes of Henry’s securing of the homage of the Irish kings: ‘Quinque porciones in unum redigentur, et sextus Hibernie menia subvertet’ (‘The five parts will be reduced to one, and the sixth will overthrow the walls of Ireland’). This direct borrowing from the Prophetiae is a figure of pan-insular rule transplanted westwards, which we might situate in the broader context of post-1171 interest in Henry’s trans-insular conquests. Merlin Silvester possessed no such prior royal function. He is presented as a counterpart to Geoffrey’s Ambrosius, but his prophecies endorse the prowess and territorial possessions not only of royalty but those involved in the first conquests of Ireland. This partisan agenda is apparent in the first ‘vatis enigma’ (of which Gerald is the privileged interpreter) in which Merlin Silvester prophesies: ‘Miles bipartitus armis Hibernie claustra primus irrumpet’ (‘A knight, sprung of two different races, will be the first to break through the defences of Ireland by force of

Frank Scott Haydon, ed., Eulogium historiarum sive temporis, 3 vols (London, 1858– 63; RS 9), II, pp. 137–38; J. R. Lumby, ed., Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden monachi Cestrensis, 9 vols (London, 1865–86; RS 41), I, pp. 416–23. 125 Nicholas Vincent, ‘The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies: The Lives of the Plantagenet Kings of England 1154–1272’, in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Woodbridge, 2006), pp. 237–57 (p. 247). 126 Expugnatio, pp. 96–97, 208–09. The third prophecy is given in relation to the Council of Clarendon, in Expugnatio, pp. 218–19. For discussion of the contemporary uses of Merlinian material in relation to the dispute between Henry and Becket, see Crick, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecy and History’, pp. 364–65. 124

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arms’).127 Gerald explains this as a reference to Robert Fitz Stephen, his kinsman, to whose genealogy he alludes: the son of a Norman father and a Welsh mother (Nesta).128 This prophecy belongs to the very dawn of Cambro-Norman activity in Ireland: the 1169 Irish campaign led by Robert, in response to the request for aid from the dispossessed king of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada. In part, the prophecy functions as a memorialisation and ratification of Diarmait’s granting of the control of Wexford to Robert and Maurice Fitz Gerald (another of Gerald’s uncles, and founder of the Irish Geraldines) following the taking of the city.129 Importantly, by the time of writing these were no longer possessions of the Geraldines – in 1171, Henry deprived Robert and Maurice of Wexford and other lands from Diarmait.130 In light of this, Gerald’s use of a prophetic strategy, elsewhere associated with Henry, is notable. He presents the conquest of Wexford as the overthrowing of the defences of Ireland – reminiscent of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Sextus: ‘Hibernie menia subvertet’. This is a reformulation of the Sextus-prophecy, substituting a royal referent with a dynastic one, and reimagining localised conquest as insular conquest. It stakes a territorial claim. The prophecy closely recalls a speech Gerald ascribes to Robert, delivered to his Cambro-Norman company on the eve of battle against the Irish king, Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair: Troiano partim ex sanguine linea descendimus originali. Ex Gallis quoque propaginem ex parte trahimus et naturam. Hinc nobis animositas, illinc armorum usus accedit. (In part we come of Trojan stock [blood] by direct line of descent. But we are also partly descended from the men of Gaul, and take our character in part from them. From the former we get our courage, from the latter our skill in the use of arms.)131

This undoubtedly shows the influence of the Trojan narrative of Geoffrey’s Historia: the conquest of Ireland is re-imagined as the British foundation legend in miniature. In this framework of imaginative engagement, Ireland is a second Britain, its conquest prophetically ratified as was the first. Although, like a number of the speeches Gerald ascribes to both the Irish and Norman protagonists of the

Expugnatio, pp. 30–31. Expugnatio, pp. 293, n. 29. 129 Expugnatio, pp. 34–35. 130 Flanagan, Irish Society, pp. 151, 153. 131 Expugnatio, pp. 48–49. 127 128

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Expugnatio, this is a variation on a literary theme, some of the details of Robert’s speech may not be the author’s invention entirely. As the most recent editors of the text have noted, it suggests a strategy particular to the Cambro-Norman parties involved in the early conquest of Ireland.132 This statement embodies a sense of a specifically Cambro-Norman identity, and has been much commented upon by scholars interested in Gerald and his Marcher provenance.133 It recalls not only the conquest of Brutus but its later Galfridian counterpart, the Norman conquests of England and the Welsh border. This paradigm rests heavily on the insular imaginings of Galfridian prophecy. Robert’s speech exhibits a Welsh genealogical interest also, although this engagement is certainly more complicated. The euphemistic use of the term Trojan for Welsh suggests that the legendary Trojan past was a more appealing mode of British endorsement than the Welsh present. Indeed, Robert’s speech might be read as a politically necessary act of disavowal. Marcher involvement in Ireland has been understood in the broader context of Welsh revival during this period, focused in particular in south Wales, which threatened territorial possessions on the border and inspired the Marcher lords to look for new opportunities in Ireland.134 However, other, more culturally complex, dynamics were also at work. Gerald writes that Robert turned his attention to Ireland when he found himself torn between competing allegiances to Henry II, and Rhys ap Gruffudd. Robert was captured by Rhys in 1165, and was held imprisoned for three years. He was only released on the understanding that he would bear arms for his Welsh kinsman against Henry. Gerald casts this as a problem specific to Rhys’s mixed heritage, a confusion of loyalties that could only be solved by Robert’s departure for Ireland, following the mediation of his half-brothers, Maurice Fitz Gerald and David, Bishop of St David’s, who entreated with Rhys.135 The Geraldines existed, unavoidably, within Welsh frameworks of meaning, and however uncomfortable these might prove to be, this context influenced political perceptions, behaviours, and identifications. For, like Gerald himself, Robert does not claim to be simply Norman: the Welsh connection (however it is encoded) clearly functioned as a source of cultural pride and the force of Norman armour alone is not enough. Robert’s speech suggests a possible engagement with Welsh prophetic material: it shares the interest in Norman armour we find in prophecies of the type preserved in the Black Book. Furthermore, as we read in Y Bedwenni, Robert does not refer to the armour of the Normans (normanni) but the French (galli). Expugnatio, pp. 278, 297 n. 52. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 23; Cohen, Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity, pp. 82–83. 134 Flanagan, Irish Society, pp. 145–49; Frame, Colonial Ireland, pp. 13–14. 135 Expugnatio, pp. 28–31. 132 133

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In Y Bedwenni we read of ‘y freigc in lluricogion’ (‘the French in coats of mail’, 11).136 The identification of the Normans as French, in Welsh ‘ffranc’ (Y Bedwenni: ‘freigc’), is relatively commonplace in medieval Welsh literature. The term was used interchangeably to mean Norman, Frenchman, or Frank (the latter being its etymological origin). According to the GPC, Y Bedwenni preserves the earliest attestation of its use. Robert’s frame of reference corresponds very closely to a decidedly Welsh conceptualisation of the Norman conquerors – although his usage is certainly more positive. We have reason to believe that prophecy of the type preserved in the Black Book circulated in Wales during the reign of Henry II. A. O. H. Jarman has noted a number of allusions to events of the reigns of Henry and his sons in the Myrddin prophecies of the Black Book, and suggests that these prophetic units – manifestly political and topical – were composed relatively close in time to the events described.137 It has also been suggested that prophecy of the Black Book type plausibly may have been known to Gerald.138 In order to understand Gerald’s uses of the prophecies of Merlin Silvester, we must consider his presentation of this prophet and his prophecies in a Welsh context. All of the prophecies Gerald explicitly associates with Merlin Silvester in his Welsh writings, apparently encountered during his journey through Wales in 1188, touch on the territorial interests of the princes of Deheubarth. He records in his Itinerarium a southern Welsh prophecy of Merlin Silvester: if a strong man with a freckled face were to reach as far as Rhyd Pencarn, he would defeat a Welsh army.139 Gerald observes that this prophecy was fulfilled in Henry II’s march against Rhys ap Gruffudd in 1163, and that this event was the subject of some interest for older Welshmen acquainted with the prophecy (although Rhys in fact surrendered not at Pencarn but at Pencader, a circumstance perhaps recalled in Gerald’s account of the Old Man of Pencader, a quasi-prophetic figure who appears in the Descriptio).140 There is a very strong likelihood that Gerald’s Rhyd Pencarn prophecy represents a reworking of genuine Welsh prophetic material, although the original almost certainly carried a very different meaning. As Michael Curley has noted, a similar allusion is found in the Gwasgargerdd Myrddin (Separation Song of Myrddin).141 Issued by the prophet Myrddin from his grave, the Gwasgargerdd See above, n. 57. Jarman, ‘Llyfr du Caerfyrddin’, p. 336. 138 Padel, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Development of the Merlin Legend’, p. 63; Jarman, ‘The Merlin Legend in Welsh Prophecy’, p. 136. 139 Journey through Wales, pp. 121–22. 140 Description of Wales, p. 274. 141 Curley, ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, pp. 227–28. See also Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales and Welsh Tradition’, pp. 143–44. 136 137

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is preserved in its earliest witness in the mid-fourteenth-century MS NLW Peniarth 4, part of the White Book of Rhydderch (MSS NLW Peniarth 4 and 5), an important reserve of early Welsh literary material.142 The prophecy, which we can tentatively date to the 1160s, incorporates a complaint against Norman and English abuses and corruption culminating in the appearance of a ‘brych cadarn’ (a strong freckled man), who, although mighty, is defeated by the ‘penndeuic prydein’: Pan dyuo y brych cadarn hyt yn ryt bengarn. lliwawt gwyr treuliawt karn. penndeuic prydein yno penn barn. (When the strong freckled man comes, as far as the ford of Pencarn, he will reproach the men, exhaust the troop [or wear down the hilt]. The noblemen of Britain will be chief of judgment there.) 143

The existence of this analogue suggests Gerald’s reworking of Welsh prophetic themes in line with Angevin agendas. Certainly, this would explain the substitution in his account of Henry’s historical victory at Pencader for one at Pencarn. The association of Henry with this figure appears to have been relatively commonplace. It is found in a Latin commentary on the Prophetiae, which records that Henry was called by the British ‘Brithtcadain’.144 This was a largely conventional Welsh description of English complexions, a variation on the pale English faces found in prophecies as early as Armes Prydein.145 We find another example in a prophecy in the Book of Taliesin, beginning ‘Yn wir dymbi Romani kar’ (‘Indeed there will come the friend of the Romans’). The prophecy, which shows a considerable investment in the kingdom of Gwynedd (although it cannot be tied clearly to any specific ruler or period), contains some material in common with Armes Prydein, and forecasts the arrival of Cadwaladr. We read of the retreat of the ‘lloegyr’ (English) during this period of re-conquest: gwelet ar tebet y gwyr brychwyn rwng saeth vereu a hayarn gwyn Jones, Darogan, p. 242. Welsh quotation is from the Red Book of Hergest version, col. 584, 17–20. J. Gwenogvryn Evans, ed., The Poetry in the Red Book of Hergest (Llanbedrog, 1911). Curley’s translation in ‘A New Edition of John of Cornwall’s Prophetia Merlini’, p. 227. For an alternative translation, see Bollard, ‘Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition’, pp. 47–50. 144 Roberts, ‘Gerald of Wales and Welsh Tradition’, p. 143. 145 Armes Prydein, line 62; see Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer (Prophecy of Myrddin to Gwenddydd his Sister), in Evans, Poetry in the Red Book, col. 582, lines 1–2. 142 143

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Gerald’s Rhyd Pencarn prophecy applies a description of an old Welsh enemy as a heroic royal epithet. There is another important Welsh restoration prophecy that Gerald ascribes to Merlin Silvester in his writings on Wales, again located in south Wales. An episode recounted in both the Expugnatio and the Itinerarium, Gerald writes that during Henry II’s visit to St David’s on his return from Ireland in 1171, the king was accosted by a Welshwoman who threatened him with a prophecy of Merlin (presumably Myrddin) attesting to the king’s death were he to cross the Llechlafar (talking stone), a bridge regarded as the subject of a local prodigy.147 Deep into Welsh-held Wales, the extension of the king of England’s authority here, whether directly or through his agents, was a fraught issue. Gerald records in his Itinerarium that the canons of St David’s put pressure on Rhys ap Gruffudd to oppose the extension of Archbishop Baldwin’s preaching tour to St David’s – it was understood to be potentially damaging to the metropolitan status of the see, and its ‘recovery’ of independence from Canterbury.148 The canons’ entreaty to Rhys suggests a clear awareness of the reciprocal relationship between English political power in Wales and the ecclesiastical subjection of the Welsh church by the English. As is well noted, the matter of St David’s metropolitan status was one with which Gerald became increasingly involved in the years following the production of the Itinerarium – an involvement which, it has been observed, saw the entry of a ‘new note of [Welsh] nationalism’ into his writings.149 St David’s had an important place in Welsh political imaginations: it was a point where the division between religious and political commitments blurred, and it functioned as an important signifier of Welsh national ambitions, both political and ecclesiastical. Although there is no precise Welsh analogue for the Llechlafar prophecy, there is material suggestive of the broader cultural context to which it might have belonged. The place of St David’s in a prophetic narrative of Henry’s defeat is an important feature of a sequence in Yr Oianau alluding to Henry’s Irish campaign of 1171, which probably owes its origins to this period. We read of five leaders

Haycock, Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin, pp. 154–75. For a comment on the pejorative uses of ‘brych’ and its compounds, see p. 170. 147 Expugnatio, pp. 106–07; Journey through Wales, pp. 167–68. 148 Journey through Wales, pp. 76–77. 149 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, pp. 44–53. 146

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from Normandy – the kings of England from the Conquest to Henry II – the fifth of whom (Henry) crosses the Irish Sea to make war and uproar in Ireland. The prophecy continues that the Irish will come to pay homage to the grave of Dewi (St David’s), and the English will suffer, concluding: ‘ac na bo guared bith y nortmandi’ (‘but may there never be deliverance to Normandy’, 43). This is a prophecy of an anti-Norman (functionally, in this period, anti-English) alliance between the displaced Irish and the men of south Wales, replaying a scene of devastation typical of the anti-English onus of Welsh political prophecies.150 Dewi was an important British saint, closely associated with conceptualisations of Welsh cultural identity. He is the patron saint of the anti-English alliance of Armes Prydein, where his intercession drives the ‘allmyn’ from Wales (105–06). His invocation in Yr Oianau presumably also owes much to St David’s status as a gateway to Ireland, a locale of potential alliances in Welsh political prophecy, and recent history also.151 This traditional vision, however, may have been inspired by decidedly contemporary events: the theatricalities of Henry II who at St David’s in 1171 actively cast himself as a ruler of an Irish Sea base. The Yr Oianau sequence imagines this insult returned in kind: the Irish follow the ‘conqueror’ back to St David’s, where they presumably join with the men of south Wales, and wreak havoc in England. The conquest of Ireland may have appeared to Gerald’s English contemporaries as an event cementing Henry II’s western power base, but for Welsh prophetic commentators in the 1170s, it was hoped that Ireland might prove to be his downfall. In Gerald’s writings on Wales, Merlin Silvester speaks to the contemporary and historical territorial interests of the kingdom of Deheubarth; in his Irish, of the Geraldines in Ireland. In the former, we potentially find a model for the latter. Notably, it is with Merlin Silvester that Gerald chose to locate all prophecies related to the early conquests. A number of his prophecies of Merlin Silvester are concerned with another wave of Marcher activity in Ireland under Richard Fitz Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Pembroke, nicknamed Strongbow, who arrived in Ireland in the summer of 1170, accompanied by a number of Gerald’s relatives.152 This was an important moment in the history of Geraldine interests in Ireland. It is generally accepted that the taking of Waterford, and retaking of Dublin, by Strongbow; and his marriage to Diarmait Mac Murchada’s daughter, Aoife, and new status as heir to the kingdom of Leinster, prompted Henry II’s personal

For a good example of this, in addition to Armes Prydein, see ‘Glaswawt Taliesin’, in Haycock, Prophecies from the Book of Taliesin, pp. 45–46. 151 For an overview of Irish involvement in Welsh political struggles during the late eleventh and twelfth centuries, see Flanagan, Irish Society, pp. 61–67. 152 Flanagan, Irish Society, p. 100. 150

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intervention in Ireland in October 1171.153 Gerald records that the rapid spread of news of Strongbow’s claim to Irish territories, prompted Henry to issue an edict demanding the return of his subjects from Ireland.154 Of Strongbow’s arrival in Ireland, Gerald records the fulfilment of this prophecy: ‘Tunc impletum est illud Celidonii: “Igneum rogum fax preveniet. Et sicut scintilla facem, sic fax rogum provocabit”’ (‘Then was fulfilled the saying of Merlin of Celidon: “A torch will precede the fiery pyre, and just as the spark calls forth the torch, so will the torch call forth the pyre”’).155 Strongbow is the spark, Henry is the fire. Similarly, in Gerald’s account of Henry’s arrival in Ireland, ascribed to Merlin Silvester and the Irish saint Moling: Tunc impletum est illud Merlini Silvestris: ‘Igneus ab euro globus ascendet et Hiberniam in circuitu devorabit’. Et illud Hibernici Melingi: ‘Veniet ab aurora turbo validus, qui in occidentum irruens, Herimonie robora cuncta prosternet’. (Then was fulfilled that famous prophecy of Merlin Silvester: ‘A fiery ball will rise in the East and, as it circles the sky, will engulf Ireland.’ And the prophecy of Moling of Ireland: ‘There will come from the East a mighty whirlwind. As it storms its way towards the West it will overthrow all the oaks of Herimon.’)156

These prophecies stage the same movement as Gerald’s Sextus prophecy: the extension of Angevin power to Ireland (Herimon appears in Gerald’s Topographia Hibernica as the first king of the Irish).157 However, unlike Gerald’s borrowings from the Prophetiae, these encode competing meanings and loyalties. They look first and foremost not to the rights of the crown but to the interests of the Geraldines: the king who stormed to Ireland was intent on impressing his will not only on the Irish but the Marcher lords who went before him. Here we see a high regard for the power of Henry II, coupled with an anxiety concerning his intervention in Ireland: he is a fire, a whirlwind, a destroyer, who like Sextus (the over-thrower of walls) possesses the island entirely. This imagining is consistent with Gerald’s depictions of Henry’s stormy temperament during this period – he Warren, Henry II, p. 199; Flanagan, Irish Society, pp. 119–21; Frame, Colonial Ireland, pp. 18–19. 154 Expugnatio, pp. 70–71. 155 Expugnatio, pp. 64–65. 156 Expugnatio, pp. 92–93. 157 Gerald of Wales, The History and Topography of Ireland, ed. and transl. John J. O’Meara (Harmondsworth, 1982), p. 98. 153

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writes elsewhere in Expugnatio of the king’s raging at the magnates of south Wales for allowing Strongbow’s crossing to Ireland.158 Yet these prophecies imply that Ireland is not entirely Henry’s to conquer. They frame an assertion of a type with Gerald’s prophecy of Robert Fitz Stephen’s acquisition of Wexford: as much as the king’s arrival in 1171 was prophetically ratified, so were the campaigns that preceded him. They pertain to the very heart of historical Geraldine interests in Ireland. Although elsewhere in the Expugnatio, Strongbow’s role is significantly downplayed in favour of the foregrounding of Gerald’s relatives (and Gerald is far from complimentary about him on a number of occasions), his activities, and Henry’s response, were an important chapter in this history of the Geraldine claim to Irish territories. In many respects, this was a traumatic period in Geraldine history. Gerald records that following Henry’s arrival in Ireland, Robert Fitz Stephen was brought before the king in chains and imprisoned prior to his renewed oath of fealty.159 The prophecies of Merlin Silvester embody this same uneasy acquiescence, at once a statement of loyalty to Henry and a defence of hard-won territorial possessions, which is as much to say: we went first. With this, our understanding of Gerald’s use of the prophecies in a text with a royal dedicatee assumes a new dimension: the prophecies themselves are an envoy for Geraldine rights in Ireland. They demand recognition for the torch that called forth the pyre. Although both occupy a very similar framework of meaning, envisaging panand trans-insular conquest, Gerald’s prophecies of Merlin Silvester stand at a significant conceptual distance from his direct Galfridian borrowings. They make a dynastic claim which while not overtly oppositional to the English crown, contains oppositional potential. The prophecies of the Expugnatio stand on the very edge of a period in which political prophecy, Galfridian included, was used in the articulation of opposition to unpopular royal policies. Material from the Prophetiae saw hostile application to John following the 1204 cession of Normandy to France, a loss long remembered. John was identified as the lynx of Prophetiae, 105–07, a descendant of Sextus, in whose reign Normandy loses two islands, and its former honour.160 In one of the most famous prophecies to incorporate an anti-John bias, known as the Prophecy of the Eagle, but in its earliest witnesses titled the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester, a composite collection from the 1210s, Gerald’s own Merlinian prophecies even made an appearance, a debt apparent in the early title

Expugnatio, pp. 90–91. Expugnatio, pp. 94–95; Flanagan, Irish Society, pp. 150–51. 160 Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 50–51. The prophecy was also associated with John’s acceptance of Pope Innocent III as his feudal lord in the settlement of the Interdict of 1208–12, for which, see Crick, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth, Prophecy and History’, p. 368. 158 159

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of the collection.161 Alongside the use of Prophetiae, 105–07, material in the collection admonished John as worthless and empty, echoing sentiments also found in contemporary chronicles.162 We might wonder if the well-noted excision of most of the prophecies of Merlin Silvester in a variant version of the Expugnatio Hibernica, termed by its most recent editors the beta text, dates to this period. Although, in the present state of evidence, the date and provenance of the beta text remains uncertain, it has been suggested that Gerald alluded to this version in a letter of 1209 dedicating the work to King John, and certainly, a policy of excision would fit with this particular intended royal reader.163 It is also possible that in the aftermath of the St David’s controversy, Gerald was wary of associating himself too closely with material with a putative Welsh connection – towards the end of his unsuccessful campaign, the chief support for which was drawn from the Welsh princes, Gerald faced accusers in England who cast him as a dissident, stirring up Welsh rebellion.164 The evidence suggests that the prophecies of Merlin Silvester were the product not only of Gerald’s authorial innovation but broader familial political investments and probably rhetorical practices also. A mediated acquaintance with Welsh material, combined with (by this period) stock Galfridian allusions, allowed Gerald (and his family) to engage in transferred insular imaginings: constructing Ireland as a second Britain, founded by Robert Fitz Stephen and his companions. This familial group emerges not only as a contemporary counterpart to the Norman conquerors of the previous century but the insular Britons also. In relation to this, Gerald effected a second substitution, recreating the Welsh Merlin (Myrddin) as the prophet of the Geraldines in Ireland. Welsh prophetic structures were gradually being transformed into increasingly de-Cambricised cultural properties.

Fouke le Fitz Waryn and Opposition to John The final Anglo-Welsh prophetic encounter with which this chapter is concerned is found in the thirteenth-century romance Fouke le Fitz Waryn.165 This is a See above, n. 75. Putter, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin’, p. 99; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 63. 163 Expugnatio, pp. xl–lxxv; Putter, ‘Gerald of Wales and the Prophet Merlin’, pp. 97–98. See further, Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, p. 56. 164 Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, pp. 51–52. 165 E. J. Hathaway, P. A. Ricketts, A. Robson, and A. D. Wilshere, ed. Fouke le Fitz Waryn (Oxford, 1975; ANTS 26–28), hereafter Fouke. 161 162

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highly embellished account of Fouke III’s rebellion against King John over the latter’s refusal to recognise Fouke’s ancestral right to Whittington on the northern Shropshire–Powys border. The romance’s relationship to the interests of the English barony during the thirteenth century has been well-noted.166 However, its political interest is certainly more local than national, and the relationship between the text and Shropshire history and legend has been the subject of both literary and historical enquiry.167 The romance has some claim to preserving historical material in regional circulation, which tells us something about the uses of oppositional prophecy in the Welsh March during the reign of John. It contains material combining Galfridian prophecy with prophetic strategies indebted to contemporary Welsh prophecies, and represents an important moment in the history of political prophecy in England. A Welsh prophetic model is drawn on not only in the service of dynastic territorial claims but as an articulation of overt, and unapologetic, opposition to the interventions of the English crown in the Welsh March. We might understand it as a later use of prophecy on the same trajectory as the Merlin Silvester prophecies of Gerald’s Expugnatio. The romance originally entered circulation in a now-lost French verse version in the mid-thirteenth century, most probably at some point between the death of Fouke III in around 1258 and the death of Fouke IV at the Battle of Lewes in 1264, although it has been suggested we might date it as late as the reign of Edward I.168 The relationship of the author to the Fitz Warins remains controversial, and there are a number of competing theories. The direct patronage of the family is impossible to prove, and the many historical errors of the text would appear to militate against this – although by no means definitively.169 The original romance is thought to have inspired a later French verse text and a Middle English version, Rosalind Field, ‘The King over the Water: Exile-and-Return Revisited’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 41–53; Susan Dannenbaum [Crane], ‘Anglo-Norman Romances of English Heroes: “Ancestral Romance”?’, Romance Philology 35 (1982): 601–08. 167 Alison Williams, ‘Stories within Stories: Writing History in Fouke le FitzWaryn’, Medium Aevum 81(1) (2012): 70–87; Ralph Hanna, ‘The Matter of Fulk: Romance and History in the Marches’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 110 (2011): 377–58; Meisel, Barons of the Welsh Frontier, pp. 132–38; David Stephenson, ‘Fouke le Fitz Waryn and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’s Claim to Whittington’, Shropshire History and Archaeology 78 (2002): 26–30. 168 Meisl, Barons of the Welsh Frontier, p. 133; Stephenson, ‘Fouke le Fitz Waryn and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’s Claim to Whittington’, pp. 28–29. For an argument for a later date of composition, see Fouke, p. xxxv. 169 Syndey Painter, ‘The Sources of Fouke fitz Warin’, Modern Language Notes 50 (1937): 13–15; Meisl, Barons of the Welsh Frontier, p. 133; Stephenson, ‘Fouke le Fitz Waryn and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’s Claim to Whittington’, p. 29. 166

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but the story of Fouke survives now only as a French prose romance in MS BL Royal 12. C. xii, compiled between 1316 and 1340, in the hand of the Ludlow scribe of MS BL Harley 2253, who, Carter Revard has suggested, may have worked under the patronage of the Ludlows of Stokesay, who had an ancestral connection to the Fitz Warins.170 Revard has dated the inclusion of the first part of the romance in the manuscript to the first period of compilation, 1322–27, and the second, following an interruption, in 1338–41.171 It has been suggested that the romance was originally composed in Ludlow, where it came into the possession of the Royal 12. C. xii scribe.172 However, it certainly draws on elements of earlier Shropshire tradition. Among the early kernel of material carried over from the verse romance into the prose are two variations of a prophecy pertaining to Fouke III’s rebellion against John and re-winning of Whittington, identified as the ‘Blaunche Launde’, a term borrowed from Arthurian romance.173 An underlying verse-structure is detectable in both, and editors of the text customarily print these passages in verse. The utility of this material is not only literary but also political, and it has strong claims to an earlier life, in the reign of John. The first version of the prophecy is ascribed to the demonic giant Geomagog (a figure lifted from Geoffrey’s Historia I) to Payn Peverel, through whose descendants Whittington came into the possession of the Fitz Warins: E de ta maunche issera Ly loup qe merveilles fra, Q’avera les dentz aguz, E de tous serra conuz E serra si fort e fer Qu’il enchacera le sengler Hors de la Blaunche Launde, Tant avera vertue graunde. Ly leopard le loup sywera E de sa cowe le manacera. Ly loup lerra boys e montz, En ewe meindra ou peschons E tresnoera la mer; Environera cet ydle enter. Carter Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript: The Scribes, Contents, and Social Contexts of British Library MS Harley 2253, ed. Susanna Fein (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), pp. 21–109 (pp. 77–81). 171 Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, pp. 72–73, 108–09. 172 Fouke, pp. xxxv–xxxvii. 173 Hanna, ‘Matter of Fulk’, pp. 341–42. 170

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Au dreyn veyndra le leopart Par son engyn e par son art. Pus en ceste lande vendra; En ewe son recet tendra. (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 [or encompass] 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.)174

These essential details are reiterated in the second account of the prophecy towards the end of the romance, where it is ascribed to Merlin and identified as a prophecy pertaining to the fate of ‘Bretaigne la Graunde’ (Britain the Great). This is interpreted in accordance with heraldic identifications. Fouke is the wolf, which appears alongside twelve indentations (in the prophecy, teeth) on the Fitz Warin crest. King John is the leopard, a heraldic cipher for the king of England, drawn on in political prophecy from both England and Wales. The boar is presumably Morys of Powys (Meurig ap Roger, historically a latimer of King John), to whom the king grants Whittington in the romance, and whose arms are mentioned elsewhere in the text.175 This prophetic vision (consistent across both versions) draws on the paninsular vision of Galfridian political prophecy. Britain appears in both versions of the prophecy as an integral whole, encircled (or encompassed) by the hero in the first version; and in the second, identified as ‘Bretaigne la Graunde’. Both conceptualise the island as the totus insula of the Galfridian tradition. Ralph Hanna has even suggested that the description of Fouke’s encircling of the island might be read as an allusion not only to the hero’s exile but his capacity for pan-insular rule, a capability in which King John is understood (in the romance, as in the world beyond it) to be distinctly lacking.176 Whether or not we read it as a comment on the quasi-royal potential of Fouke, the prophecy suggests an Fouke, p. 6; translated in Glyn Burgess, ed. and transl., Two Medieval Outlaws: Eustace the Monk and Fouke Fitz Waryn (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 132–83 (p. 135). For Geomagog (Geomagus), see Historia I, lines 469–89. 175 Fouke, pp. 60–61. For a brief discussion of Meurig ap Roger, see Bullock-Davies, Professional Interpreters, p. 16. 176 Hanna, ‘Matter of Fulk’, p. 341. 174

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imaginative ­investment in the notion of Britain as a singular kingdom. Certainly, this is the broader context in which the prophecy is found in the romance. In its first appearance, it is integrated as an extension of the foundation legend of Payn Peverel’s defeat of Geomagog. This is a re-imagining of Historia I: the slaying of the giants by Brutus and Corineus (the founder of Cornwall) upon their settlement of Britain. This context represents more than recognition of the Galfridian auspice of the prophecy. The integral unity of the island functions analogously to the indivisibility of Whittington, total possession of the Fitz Warins by right of conquest as was Britain to the Britons, and later the Normans. The prophecy coheres to an Anglicised frame of political meanings, for which Geoffrey’s Prophetiae laid the groundwork. Comfortably Anglo-centric as this vision is, it may have been informed not only by Galfridian models of territorial wholeness but Welsh also. The integrity of Ynys Prydein had a particular utility in Welsh political culture during the thirteenth century, appearing in prophecies of the reign of John and later retrospectives holding the independence of the Welsh kingdoms similarly synonymous with the indivisibility of the entire island. The version of Yr Oianau preserved in the Black Book, a prophecy concerned with the matter of insular sovereignty, contains an important historical accretion concerning this period. It alludes to John’s 1211 expedition against Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, Prince of Gwynedd: ‘g[yfranc] lloegir a llyuelin’ (‘a clash of England and Llywleyn’, 67), which concludes with a vision of vengeance upon the ‘frangc’ (John is the historically latest king of England to appear as this in Welsh political prophecy): ‘advit frangc ar ffo’ (‘the Frank will be in flight’, 70), chased from north Wales by a triumphant youth. The passage also contains an allusion to the wrath of St Deiniol, the patron saint of Bangor, and we might conclude, with M. E. Griffiths and John Bollard, that the incident in question was the burning of Bangor by John in his campaign against Llywelyn.177 We find a similar vision in the Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer (Prophecy of Myrddin and Gwenddydd his Sister), a prophecy preserved in its fullest form in the Red Book of Hergest (MS Jesus College Oxford 111; compiled c. 1382), which sets forth the claim of the princes of Gwynedd to Welsh high kingship, hailed as the architects of English exile from Britain and insular restoration.178 This contains one particularly telling parallel to the Fouke prophecy: the appearance of ‘brenhin llew llawdiwreid gyluin geuel gauel bleid’ (‘a lion of a Griffiths, Early Vaticination, p. 91; Bollard, ‘Myrddin in Early Welsh Tradition’, p. 21. Daniel Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts (Cardiff, 2000), pp. 60, 82. See also Manon Bonner Jenkins, ‘Aspects of the Welsh Prophetic Verse in the Middle Ages’ (PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1990), pp. 33–90, for the MS NLW Peniarth 50 version. Charles-Edwards has suggested that the prophecy is built on a tenth-century prophetic king list of the kings of Gwynedd. See Wales and the Britons, pp. 337–39.

177 178

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king with an uprooting hand, beak-like tongs, with the grasp of a wolf’) (col. 580, 15–16). The lion king (a play on Llywelyn’s name) with the grasp of a wolf, figures Llywelyn’s resistance against John, and his hold on Welsh territory. His uprooting hand is an allusion to the chasing of the king’s army out of Gwynedd, as we find in Yr Oianau. This sequence has a strong claim to a thirteenth-century circulation: it appears in the fragment of the text that survives in the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century MS NLW Peniarth 3. ii.179 While I am not suggesting that either are necessarily a direct source for the Fouke prophecy (although the use of the wolf in the Cyfoesi is notable), these Welsh prophecies present instructive analogues. The dispossessed heir who chases John from his territory may occupy the place of a Welsh prince as much as a Galfridian hero. The Fouke prophecy actually has a much closer correspondence to anti-John material produced in Wales than in England (discussed above), in which we might note the absence of a heroic figure, encoding expectations for deliverance from the abuses of John, like Llywelyn or Fouke. A Shropshire origin for the prophecy would place it in a region where we would expect fairly substantial interaction between Welsh and English. Llinos Beverley Smith has identified sizable Welsh linguistic influences in deeds produced in Shropshire, and in Whittington itself, during the thirteenth century, the consequence of significant Welsh re-settlement in the northern March from the twelfth century onwards.180 This Welsh substratum could plausibly have exerted an influence on the level of political discourse in a period of shared English and Welsh opposition to John. Welsh political prophecy could very plausibly have entered broader transmission in this region during the reign of John, in the period preceding the signing of Magna Carta, which, it is often forgotten, made provisions for the Welsh princes (most prolifically, Llywelyn ap Iorwerth) as well as the barons.181 This is part of the universe of the romance also, which, as Max Lieberman has observed, is one of normalised Anglo-Welsh interaction.182 It incorporates a rare English recognition of the title ‘prince de Gales’ (prince of This is printed by Ifor Williams, ‘Y Cyfoesi a’r Afallennau yn Peniarth 3’, BBCS 4(2) (1928): 112–29 (pp. 114–21). For the date of Peniarth 3. ii, see Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, p. 58. For discussion of other manuscripts containing later versions, or fragments of, the prophecy, see Bonner Jenkins, ‘Aspects of Welsh Prophetic Verse’, pp. 42–44. 180 Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘The Welsh Language before 1536’, in The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins (Cardiff, 1997), pp. 15–44 (pp. 18–19). 181 J. Beverley Smith, ‘Magna Carta and the Welsh Princes’, English Historical Review 49 (1984): 344–62. 182 Max Lieberman, ‘The English and the Welsh in Fouke le Fitz Waryn’, in Thirteenth Century England XII, ed. Janet Burton, Phillip Schofield, and Björn Weiler (Woodbridge, 2009), pp. 1–11. 179

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Wales), applied across the text to princes from the royal house of Gwynedd. This title means more than simply Welsh prince – it encompassed the expansive and oppositional policies of the kingdom of Gwynedd, and was used by Llywelyn (who appears in the romance). It remained a feature of the Anglo-Welsh political landscape during the reigns of Llywelyn’s successors, down to the time of his grandson, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Llywelyn the Last.183 There may be some evidence of a reciprocal influence between English and Welsh elements in the March during this period in the preservation of Fouke’s name in later Welsh panegyrics, where he appears alongside heroes of the British past.184 The earliest of these is found in the poetry of Iolo Goch in the fourteenth century, but use of the name endured later still. We find an important example from the early sixteenth century in Tudur Aled’s cywydd to the Denbighshire justice Robert Salbri, where we read: ‘Syr Ffŵc Waring, sarff ceyrydd, / Anturiwr wyt yn troi’r iau’ (‘Sir Fouke Waryn, serpent of ramparts, you [Robert] are an adventurer overturning oppression’, 50–51).185 The epithet applied to Fouke (and Robert), ‘sarff ceyrydd’ could well be an allusion to the red dragon of the Omen. Certainly, Fouke is appropriated by Tudur as a Welsh hero. It is generally accepted that references to Fouke in Welsh poetry were not derived from a Welsh reception of the romance (there is no evidence of this), but rather the independent circulation of the historical legend of Fouke.186 This is a literary-political imagining born from the same field of cross-border influences as was the Fouke prophecy. Although we can say little of the original author of the Fouke prophecy, it was produced in an environment where Welsh and English cultural elements mixed, and in which Welsh political discourses were open to appropriation by an English author who allied himself with a Marcher dynasty. The prophecy-author places a regional lordship in a metonymic relationship to the entire island, a strategy that potentially was borrowed not only from Geoffrey of Monmouth but from contemporary Welsh prophecies, in particular those associated with the kingdom of Gwynedd. The heightened rhetoric of pan-insular restoration is certainly drawn on in a manner similar to contemporary Welsh uses, to authorise claims for Stephenson, ‘Fouke le Fitz Waryn and Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’s Claim to Whittington’, p. 29. 184 Williams, ‘Stories within Stories’, p. 77. 185 Tudur Aled, ‘Cyngor i Anturiwr: Cywydd i Robert Salbri o Ial’, in Gwaith Tudur Aled, 2 vols, ed. T. Gwynn Jones (Cardiff, 1926), I pp. 272–75. Fouke appears to have been a family name; we might think of Foulk Salesbury, Dean of St Asaph. For a brief comment on the broader interest of the Welsh poets in this family, who were of mixed English and Welsh descent, see Michael Powell Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry, 4 vols (Aberystwyth, 1991–2006), I, p. 135. 186 Williams, ‘Stories within Stories’, p. 77. 183

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regional autonomy from the English crown, or at the very least a rejection of the authority of John. I suggest that it rests on a displacement of precisely the type we have noted in the Prophetiae and the Giraldian prophecies of Merlin Silvester: the substitution of Welsh figures, and interests, for English.

Conclusion During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Latinate and Francophone clerical authors with Welsh and Marcher connections drew on Welsh prophetic materials concerned with British restoration, in the articulation of the dynastic political interests of Marcher families and the English crown. Visions of insular wholeness lifted from Welsh models were used to endorse historically recent territorial possessions: Norman hegemony in England and Wales; the Irish claims of the Geraldines; and the dynastic possessions of the Fitz Warins on the northern Welsh border. These territorial claims were cast back into a distant British past and re-imagined as the stuff of ancient prophecy. Prophecy was used to re-enforce a distinctive ideology of pan-insular, and later trans-insular British and Irish, conquest to which its elite audiences subscribed. This is the very foundation of the imperialist vision that would come to define the uses of political prophecy in England into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet the prophetic practices of the three authors discussed in this chapter were heavily indebted to the place of prophecy in not only historical but contemporary movements for Welsh re-conquest and independence. In their engagements with this material, all three authors effect important substitutions, of Welsh political actors and issues for English, and the dominant vision is of Norman, later English, imperium, enacted on the national or local level. This innovation set the stage for an English vision of the insular future from which Welsh political actors were to disappear for more than a century. The English prophetic tradition was born in the elision of the Welsh.

chapter 2

‘E si finerount les heirs d’engleterre hors de heritage’: Galfridian Prophecy and the Anglo-Scottish Border, c. 1301–30s

T

he late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries saw a new use of the Galfridian vision of insular unity as an expression of English ambitions in Scotland. This movement stands contemporary with the beginnings of the Scottish Wars of Independence. During these years, political prophecies rooted in Galfridian principles, constructing claims to insular overlordship, were composed in northern England and circulated widely. This was in many respects a reaction to the contemporary uses of political prophecy in Scotland, opposed to English expansionism. The exclusivity of the Galfridian concept of Britishness, a vision of a singular people whose rule is rightly pan-insular, made it a powerful piece of political rhetoric on both sides of the border. In Scotland, however, this material depended on an authorising alliance of the Scots with the true Britons, the Welsh, in imaginings of a Scottish-led anti-English confederation. This oppositional construction informed the development of political prophecy on both sides of the Anglo-Scottish border, and entered into a reflexive relationship with high politics, both reacting to and informing political decision-making. The Anglo-Scottish border of the later Middle Ages has been regarded as a frontier society governed by local feuds and affiliations capable of overriding the sympathies and obligations necessitated by national politics.1 From this, historians have put forward the concept of a shared system of heroic values common to northern English and southern Scottish communities, envisaging a military society that displayed mutual respect. This vision is essentially at one with the medieval world depicted in the Scottish border ballads of the sixteenth century.2 However, the Anglo-Scottish border was a space not only of common martial values but the frontline in a conflict zone where national identifications mattered intensely. The E.g. Anthony Goodman, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Marches in the Fifteenth Century: A Frontier Society?’, in Scotland and England, 1286–1815, ed. Roger A. Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 8–33.  2 James Reed, ‘A Ballad and the Source: Some Literary Reflections on The Battle of Otterburn’, in War and Border Societies in the Middle Ages, ed. Anthony Goodman and Anthony Tuck (London, 1992), pp. 94–123 (pp. 106–13).  1

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rigidity of these were at the very foundation of the production of political prophecy in England and Scotland, and were fundamental to elite ideologies. Of course, this obscured a much more complicated reality. Numerous Scottish dynasties of Norman descent historically held lands on both sides of the border and had at times been subject to both the Scottish and English kings – including contenders for the Scottish throne, the Balliols and the Bruces.3 Furthermore, significant Norman settlement in Scotland during the previous centuries complicated clear national distinctions, which in the lowlands were impossible to support genealogically or linguistically.4 These conditions fostered the linguistic and cultural commonality that enabled the cross-border borrowings that shaped English and Scottish prophetic production (ironically, so concerned with national difference). Authors of prophecy in northern England and Scotland, working in Latin and French, and later English, drew on the same source materials, first and foremost Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae and Historia. The political prophecies of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries produced in aid of the English king or the Scottish lords, later the Bruces, read as documents of a partisan struggle between groups drawn from the same political class, with the same cultural frames of reference. Yet this was a struggle which, at least in textual terms, was cast in definitively national colours, and rested on a perception of a defined national-cultural boundary, however uncertain that may have been in reality. To borrow a phrase from Anthony Goodman, if there was a regional sense of brotherhood during the Scottish Wars of Independence, it was ‘a brotherhood of hostility’, which experienced ‘some degree of material acculturation’.5 The movement of prophetic material belongs to the same climate as the partisan verses and songs recorded by English chroniclers from the late thirteenth century onwards: anti-Scottish songs and rhymes concerned with Scottish dishonesty and deviancy, celebrating Scottish defeat; alongside similar verses understood to be in Scottish circulation, with English targets.6 Scholars Colm McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces: Scotland, England, and Ireland 1306–1328 (East Linton, 1997), p. 4; A. A. M. Duncan, The Nation of the Scots and the Declaration of Arbroath (London, 1970), p. 10.  4 Geoffrey W. Barrow, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Border: Growth and Structure in the Middle Ages’, in Grenzen und Grenzregionen, ed. Wolfgang Haubrich and Reinhard Schneider (Saarbrucken, 1993), pp. 197–212 (pp. 202–03, 210–11); Ranald Nicholson, Scotland: The Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1974), p. 25; Duncan, Nation of the Scots, p. 11.  5 Goodman, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Marches in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 19. See further, Barrow, ‘The Anglo-Scottish Border’, p. 208.  6 Lionel Stones, ‘English Chroniclers and the Affairs of Scotland, 1286–1296’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages: Essays Presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davies and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford, 1981), pp. 323–28 (pp. 337–38); R. M. Wilson, The Lost Literature of Medieval England (London, 1952), pp. 207–08, 212–13;  3

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are increasingly moving towards a cross-border comparative perspective in their treatment of these texts – understanding them to be the products of cross-border rewriting, re-contextualisation, and even ventriloquism, taking into account the movement not only of political content but literary styles across national lines, a context of ‘cultural interdependence’.7 In northern England and southern Scotland, political prophecies were written and circulated in a climate of virulent opposition, germane to the composition of highly antipathetic productions – framed even as genocidal fantasies – which were received on both sides of the border, inspiring literary reactions and counter-reactions.

Edward I’s Letter and Pierre de Langtoft’s Merlinian Prophecy In the early years of the development of political prophecy in northern England, we do not see any evidence of the same hostility towards the interventions of the English crown that we have noted in Ireland and the Welsh March during the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. There is no indication of this as a presence in political prophetic discourse in the northern counties until the early fifteenth century, a very different political landscape (discussed in Chapter 4). The political prophetic authors of the early period were deeply invested in the extension of the authority of the king of England as far as Scotland, and it is probably for this reason that prophecies pertaining to border affairs circulated across England. The English application of prophetic material to Anglo-Scottish affairs appears to have begun with the Galfridian engagements of Edward I. Following the death of Alexander III of Scotland in 1286 and the ensuing crisis of Scottish kingship, coupled with the death of the last Welsh Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, in rebellion against the English crown in 1282, total English overlordship of Britain became a genuine possibility. During the same period, Edward I shored up the institutional presence of English royal authority in Ireland, and, as R. R. Davies has observed, ‘never had the physical presence of English power Thea Summerfield, ‘The Political Songs in the Chronicles of Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng’, in The Court and Cultural Diversity, ed. Evelyn Mullally and John Thompson (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 139–48; Matthews, Writing to the King: Nation, pp. 60–67; Andrew Galloway, ‘The Borderlands of Satire: Linked, Opposed, and Exchanged Political Poetry during the Scottish and English Wars of the Early Fourteenth Century’, in The Anglo-Scottish Border and the Shaping of Identity, 1300–1600, ed. Katherine Terrell and Mark P. Bruce (New York, 2013), pp. 15–32.  7 E.g. Galloway, ‘Borderlands of Satire’, esp. pp. 28–29. For discussion of the movement of literary texts, more generally, across the Anglo-Scottish border during periods of conflict, see Emily Wingfield, The Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature (Cambridge, 2014), p. 16.

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[…] been so ubiquitously and awesomely present in the outer zones of the British Isles, as in the last fifteen or so years of Edward I’s reign’.8 With this, a distinctively English imperial ideology developed in support of these territorial claims, drawing heavily on Galfridian prophecy and history. Edward’s uses of Galfridian material pertaining to insular high kingship are well-noted. His presence at the re-interment of the reputed bones of Arthur and Guinevere at Glastonbury Abbey in Easter 1278 is commonly regarded as a political claim directed at contemporary Welsh rebellion: Edward, not Arthur, became the heir of the Britons.9 In a similar vein, we might note the ‘discovery’ of Magnus Maximus’s body during the building of Caernarfon Castle in 1283, and his re-interment, supposedly at Edward’s command; and the Round Table Edward held at Nefyn in 1284, the same site in north-west Wales where Gerald discovered his book of Welsh prophecy.10 This discourse was at its most powerful, however, in relation not to Edward’s conquest of Wales but his assertions of overlordship in Scotland. The uses of Galfridian material in relation to English ambitions in Scotland finds one of its earliest, and most important, articulations in Edward I’s response to Pope Boniface VIII’s bull opposing English intervention in Scotland, in 1301. Edward composed a letter to the pope defending his actions, drawing on Geoffrey’s Historia to offer a long historical precedent for contemporary designs.11 He drew on Historia II, which tells of the division of Britain into three territories (England, Scotland, and Wales) between the three sons of Brutus: Locrinus, Kamber, and Albanactus, from whose names Geoffrey constructs etymologies Davies, The First English Empire, pp. 26–28. James P. Carley, ‘Arthur in English History’, in Arthur of the English: The Arthurian Legend in Medieval English Life and Literature, ed. W. R. J. Barron (Cardiff, 1999), pp. 47–57 (pp. 50–51); J. C. Parsons, ‘The Second Exhumation of King Arthur’s Remains at Glastonbury, 19 April 1278’, Arthurian Literature 12 (1993): 173–77; Davies, First English Empire, p. 32. The most extensive statement on Edward’s Arthurian engagements is R. S. Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, Speculum 28 (1953): 114–27, although the extent of Edward’s enthusiasm has been questioned by F. M. Powicke, The Thirteenth Century, 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 515–16; Michael Prestwich, Armies and Warfare in the Middle Ages: The English Experience (New Haven, CT, 1996), pp. 227–29. 10 Davies, First English Empire, pp. 30–32. 11 Edward’s 1301 letter is printed in E. L. G. Stones, ed. and transl., Anglo-Scottish Relations, 1174–1328: Some Selected Documents (Oxford, 1970), pp. 192–219. See further, Walter Ullmann, ‘On the Influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth in English History’, in Speculum Historiale: Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsdeutung, ed. Clemens Bauer, Laetitia Boehm, and Max Mueller (Freiburg and Munich, 1965), pp. 257–76 (p. 267); Loomis, ‘Edward I, Arthurian Enthusiast’, pp. 121–22; Carley, ‘Arthur in English History’, pp. 51–52; Thea Summerfield, ‘The Testimony of Writing: Pierre de Langtoft and the Appeals to History, 1291–1306’, in The Scots and the Medieval Arthurian Legend, ed. R. Purdie and N. Royan (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 25–41 (pp. 32–33).  8  9

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for England (Loegria), Wales (Kambria), and Scotland (Albania). The whole was held under the high kingship of the first of Brutus’s sons and king of England, Locrinus.12 In his use of this, Edward ratified English insular imperialism through British history: the king of England is, and always was, the rightful overlord of the component territories of Britain. As Brynley F. Roberts has observed, Geoffrey’s account of Brutus’s division of the island represents an influential re-working of traditional Welsh conceptualisations of the divisions of Britain (Lloegr, Cymru, and yr Alban), as well as a Welsh historical and prophetic notion of the original unity of Britain, under a single king.13 This formulation sat very neatly with the contemporary ambitions of Edward I. His Galfridian engagements were also a manifestly Arthurian representation of insular relations. The 1301 letter drew on the historical precedent of Arthur’s conquest and overlordship of Scotland, arguing the binding nature of this arrangement into the present day. In subsequent English literary tradition, the three crowns of Brutus were displaced by the three crowns of Arthur, a motif which also appears to have had a long life in visual culture.14 This in large part explains the interest of late medieval Scottish chroniclers in the question of Arthur’s illegitimacy, and their foregrounding of the claim of his sister, Anna, and her sons by Loth, lord of Lothian. A number of Scottish histories present Mordred, in the English Galfridian tradition Arthur’s treacherous nephew (and later his incestuously conceived son), as a rightful Scottish king of Britain, usurped by his uncle. This is not to say, however, that all Scottish authors rejected Arthurian material – the Scottish reception of Galfridian history was certainly less uniform than that.15 The application of Galfridian and Arthurian material to Scottish affairs in Edward’s papal letter had a huge impact on the prophetic literature of northern England. The impression of Edward I’s Arthurian self-casting was felt here for centuries. The prophetic life of Arthur (in the form we recognise it today) owes far more to Geoffrey and his English reception history than any supposed Welsh Arthurian prophetic sources, and its most forceful invocations in the early Historia II, lines 1–11. Roberts, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Welsh Historical Tradition’, p. 37. 14 Cedric E. Pickford, ‘The Three Crowns of King Arthur’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 38 (1954): 373–82. 15 Flora Alexander, ‘Late Medieval Scottish Attitudes to the Figure of King Arthur’, Anglia 93 (1975): 17–34; Susan Kelly, ‘The Arthurian Material in the Scotichronicon of Walter Bower’, Anglia 97 (1979): 431–39; Juliette Wood, ‘The Arthurian Legend in Scotland and Cornwall’, in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, ed. Helen Fulton (London, 2009), pp. 102–16 (pp. 103–06); Juliette Wood, ‘Where Does Britain End? The Reception of Geoffrey of Monmouth in Scotland and Wales’, in The Scots and the Medieval Arthurian Legend, pp. 9–24 (pp. 11–15). 12 13

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f­ourteenth century can be found not on the western border but the northern. This suggests a radical de-stabilisation of a number of prior critical suppositions regarding the function of Arthur in English political prophecy, and its commonly supposed debt to Welsh Arthurian messianism.16 Evidence of the rapid assimilation of this Galfridian construction of insular overlordship is found in the virulently anti-Scottish Chronique of Pierre de Langtoft, written in insular French.17 Composition appears to have begun late in the reign of Edward I and was completed after the king’s death, either by Langtoft or a continuator.18 Little is known of Langtoft beyond his writings, although he is thought to have been a canon of the Augustine Priory at Bridlington in East Yorkshire (a significant site of prophetic production in the later Middle Ages), where he probably also authored his rhymed translation of the correspondence between Pope Boniface and Edward I concerning English overlordship in Scotland.19 The chronicle survives in twenty witnesses, nine of which preserve the entire narrative from the Brutus story, reworked from Geoffrey’s Historia, to the death of Edward I. The most recent editor of the text, Jean-Claude Thiolier, has noted that all of the nine are of northern English origin.20 Although it achieved broad circulation, and in around 1338 was translated into Middle English by Robert Mannyng, a Gilbertine monk writing in the East Midlands, Langtoft’s investment in northern English political affairs bespeaks a distinctly northwardslooking perspective.21 The patronage of the work remains uncertain, although it has been tentatively connected with John of Sheffield, Sheriff of Northumberland.22 However, as Thea Summerfield has observed, on a number of occasions, the Chronique is positioned in relation to two important authorities: Edward I and Anthony Bek, the Bishop of Durham, whose interests are treated in depth; and in later parts of the text, the See R. S. Loomis, ‘The Legend of Arthur’s Survival’, in Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages: A Collaborative History, ed. R. S. Loomis (Oxford, 1959), pp. 64–71; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 43. For discussion of the spurious foundation of the association of Arthur’s return with Welsh messianic expectations, see Flood, ‘Arthur’s Return from Avalon’. 17 Thomas Wright, ed. and transl., Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, 2 vols (London, 1866–68; RS 47). Hereafter, Pierre de Langtoft. See also, Jean-Claude Thiolier, ed., Édition Critique et Commentée de Pierre de Langtoft: Le règne d’Édouard 1er (Paris, 1989). 18 Thea Summerfield, The Matter of Kings’ Lives: The Design of Past and Present in the Early Fourteenth-century Verse Chronicles by Pierre de Langtoft and Robert Mannyng (Amsterdam, 1998), pp. 15–27; Matthews, Writing to the King, pp. 72–80. 19 Printed in Pierre de Langtoft, II, pp. 386–425. 20 Thiolier, Pierre de Langtoft, p. 147; Summerfield, Matter of Kings’ Lives, p. 22. 21 Summerfield, Matter of Kings’ Lives, pp. 129–58. 22 Summerfield, Matter of King’s Lives, pp. 17, 81–82. 16

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young Edward II also.23 It remains controversial whether the text was intended as a direct or more loosely imaginative form of royal address,24 but certainly, like his earlier counterparts, discussed in Chapter 1, Langtoft was concerned with the deeds of high political actors, in relation to whom he oriented his literary activity. For the study of political prophecy, there is one royal address in the Chronique which is of particular importance: a short Merlinian verse pertaining to the English king’s rights in Scotland: Ha, Deus! ke Merlyn dist sovent veritez En ses prophecyes, [si]cum wa les lisez! Ore sunt les ij. ewes un aryvez, Ke par graunz mountaynes ount esté severez; Et une realme fet de [deus] diverse regnez Ke solaint par deus rays estre governez. Ore sunt les insulanes trestuz assemblez, Et Albanye rejoynte à les regaltez Des quels li rays Eduuard est seygnur clamez. Cornewaylle et Wales sunt en ses poustez, Et Irelaunde la graunde à ses voluntez. (Ah God! How often Merlin said truth in his prophecies, if you read them! Now are the two waters united in one, which have been separated by great mountains; and one realm made of two different kingdoms which used to be governed by two kings. Now are the islanders all joined together, and Albany reunited to the royalties of which king Edward is proclaimed lord. Cornwall and Wales are in his power, and Ireland the great at his will.)25

Edward I fulfils the oldest Merlinian prophecies of British unity.26 Langtoft reworks the anti-English union of Prophetiae, 110–14 as a prophecy of his conquests. Rather than the calling of Wales to Albany, Albany is re-united to the ‘regaltez’; and the hills and streams which rejoice in the Prophetiae are here boundaries that are overcome by the English king. In this reworking of British unification as English conquest, Langtoft follows a general convention from this Summerfield, Matter of King’s Lives, pp. 69–98. Matthews, Writing to the King, p. 78. 25 Pierre de Langtoft, II, pp. 264–65. All quotations are given from Wright in preference to Thiolier, as the most readily available parallel English translation of the text. 26 Thea Summerfield, ‘The Arthurian References in Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronicle’, in Text and Intertext in Medieval Arthurian Literature, ed. Norris Lacy (New York, 1996), pp. 187–208 (pp. 191–93); Summerfield, ‘The Testimony of Writing’, pp. 25–26. 23 24

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period. In a closely contemporary commentary on the Prophetiae, the work of an author who claimed competency in Welsh, English, and Latin, preserved in the fourteenth-century MS TCD, 496 E. 6. 2, Prophetiae, 110–14 is glossed as a prophecy of Edward I’s conquest of Wales in 1283. The commentator understands the restoration of Brutus’s name to have been achieved through Edward’s Welsh conquest, an act which restores the name ‘Bretland’ to the island. This, the commentator writes, was interpreted by the Welsh as marking the passing away of the name ‘Walenses’, a ‘nomen extraneum’ which the commentator holds in an etymological relationship to Queen Galaes, the eponymous Welsh queen of Historia XI, whose rule corresponds with the diminishing territorial hold of the Britons.27 This presumably refers to a perception of the loss of Welsh native power post-1283, but it is twisted into a relationship with Edward I’s imperial ‘British’ conquests. For an author – even one with Welsh connections – working in the context of an English intellectual culture suffused in Galfridian history and prophecy, Edward’s pan-insular ambitions were the stuff of prophetic fulfilment. This attitude towards Prophetiae, 110–14 represents an important moment in English Galfridian reception history: the scene of British (Welsh) vengeance upon the Saxons, derived ultimately from the Armes Prydein model, was interpreted as a figure of English aggrandisement; the rule of Edward I over other insular nations, high king as once was Brutus. The pan-insular alliance was no longer the subject of Welsh prophecy but of English history. We might note also the echo of the imperial theme of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: the subjugation of Ireland, understood as a singular domain (we might compare ‘Irelaunde la graunde’ to ‘Bretagne la graunde’ of the Fouke-prophecy). Edward is the conqueror of island territories in their entirety. We see here the legacy of the Irish conquests of the reign of Henry II, which in the reign of Edward I saw a renewed sense of Britain and Ireland as twin spheres of English conquest – an early development of the imperialist notion of the ‘British Isles’, incorporating Ireland, which we might trace back, at least in prophetic terms, to the Sextus prophecies of Henry’s reign. Langtoft supplements this with another Galfridian element, also in use in Edward I’s 1301 letter, the identification of this British high king with Arthur: Jacob Hammer, ‘An Unedited Commentary on the Prophetiae Merlini in Dublin, Trinity College MS 496. E. 6. 2, Part 1’, in Charisteria Thaddeo Sinko: Quinquaginta abhinc annos amplissimis in philosophia honoribus ornato ab amicus collegis discipulis oblata, ed. Kazimierz Feliks Kumaniecki (Wratislaviae [Wrocław], 1951), pp. 81–89 (p. 88). In another commentary by an author with possible Welsh connections, probably working at Ludlow in the early fifteenth century, we see a similar association of Prophetiae, 110–14 with Edward’s conquest of Wales, and also Scotland. MS BL Cotton Nero A. iv, fol. 72v. This text is discussed further below, p. 91.

27

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prophecy, politics and place Rays n’y ad ne prince de tuz les countrez Fors le ray Eduuard, ke ensi les ad joustez; Arthur ne avayt unkes si plainement les fez. Desore n’y ad ke fere for purver ses alez Sur li ray de Fraunce, conquere ses heritez, Et pus porter la croyce où Jhesu Cryst fu nez. (There is neither king nor prince of all the countries, except king Edward, who has thus united them; Arthur had never the fiefs so fully. Henceforward there is nothing to do but provide his expedition against the king of France, to conquer his inheritances, and then bear the cross where Jesus Christ was born.)28

The introduction of the crusading element is notable. Prophetic crusading expectations were long associated with Edward I, for although he never crusaded while king, he was involved in crusading activity during the early 1270s, and remained a focus for expectations of Christian recovery in Jerusalem from writers working not only in England but in France also.29 Edward may have been the subject of a number of additional crusading prophecies produced in England, although these cannot be dated with any certainty, and may belong to the reign of his grandson, Edward III.30 Behind Langtoft’s Arthurian imagining of Edward’s crusading career is a long-lived pan-European prophetic motif: prophecies of the Last World, or Last Roman, Emperor. An important element of political eschatology, the Last World Emperor played a role in the imperial self-casting of kings and princes across Europe from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance.31 Customarily, the Emperor achieves widespread conquest, defeats the tribes of Gog and Magog (Ezekiel 38.1–3; Revelation 20), wins the Holy Cross, and then, placing his empire into the hands of God, renounces his crown at Golgotha or Mount Olivet prior to the arrival of Antichrist and the End Times. This narrative is derived from the late seventh-century Revelation of Pseudo-Methodius and the fourth-century Pierre de Langtoft, II, pp. 266–67. Michael Prestwich, Edward I (New Haven, CT, 1997), pp. 66–85. 30 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 80–81. 31 Although, thanks to the researches of Anke Holdenried, there is now an increasing scholarly appreciation for the religious reception, and understanding, of sibylline texts in the Middle Ages, the political utility of the theme of the Last World Emperor is undeniable. Anke Holdenried, ‘The Bedan Recension of the Sibylla Tiburtina: New Manuscript Evidence and its Implications’, in Latin Culture in the Eleventh Century, ed. Ross Gilbert Arthur, Michael W. Herren, and C. J. McDonoug (Turnhout, 2002), pp. 410–43; Anke Holdenried, The Sibyl and Her Scribes: Manuscripts and Interpretation of the Latin Sibylla Tiburtina, ca.1050–1500 (Aldershot, 2006). 28 29

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Tiburtine Sibyl, both founded on late Byzantine re-applications of Judaic messianism to a Christian schema, specifically the New Testament Apocalypse.32 The relationship between these two texts remains uncertain, but the imperial theme as it appears in both had a pronounced influence on the development of European apocalyptic literature. As a component of the long-lived political traditions derived from political readings of the prophetic writings of the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore, the Emperor appears in texts from across Europe as a great reformer who ushers in a golden age, offering a brief respite from the turmoil of the reign of Antichrist that follows.33 The association of Arthur with the Last World Emperor potentially took its inspiration from Geoffrey of Monmouth. It has been suggested that Arthur’s Roman campaign in Historia IX–X conforms to a crusading paradigm: he leads a Western European army against the ‘kings of the Orient’, who fight for Rome.34 Importantly, it is identified as the subject of sibylline prophecy (IX, 491–94). Considerations of the source of Arthur’s imperial journey have yielded a number of different theories: from composite re-imaginings based on leaders of subRoman Britain, such as Macsen Wledig,35 and other more obscure candidates,36 Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York, 1998), pp. 44–45; P. J. Alexander, ‘Byzantium and the Migration of Literary Works and Motifs: The Legend of the Last World Emperor’, Medievalia et Humanistica: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture NS 2 (1971): 47–68; P. J. Alexander, ‘The Medieval Legend of the Last Roman Emperor and its Messianic Origins’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 41 (1978): 1–15; Marjorie Reeves, ‘Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor’, in Joachim of Fiore in Christian Thought, ed. Delno West, 2 vols (New York: Franklin, 1975), I, pp. 511–58; M. Reeves, ‘The Development of Apocalyptic Thought: Medieval Attitudes’, in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (Manchester, 1984), pp. 40–72 (p. 45); Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, pp. 30–33; Lerner, ‘The Black Death and Western European Eschatological Mentalities’, p. 544. 33 For the place of the Last World Emperor in political Joachimism, see Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1993), pp. 306–19; Reeves, ‘Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor’; P. J. Alexander, ‘The Diffusion of Byzantine Apocalypses in the Medieval West and the Beginnings of Joachimism’, in Prophecy and Millenarianism: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Reeves, ed. Ann Williams (Harlow, 1980), pp. 57–75. 34 Helen Fulton, ‘History and Myth: Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae’, in A Companion to Arthurian Literature, pp. 44–57 (pp. 53–54); Judith Weiss, ‘Arthur, Emperors, and Antichrists: The Formation of the Arthurian Biography’, in Writers of the Reign of Henry II, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York, 2008), pp. 239–48. 35 Dumville, ‘Sub-Roman Britain’, p. 181. 36 Geoffrey Ashe, ‘“A Certain Very Ancient Book”: Traces of an Arthurian Source in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History’, Speculum 56 (1981): 301–23. 32

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to a reflection of far-reaching Norman ambitions.37 Only recently has it been considered in relation to the twelfth-century vogue for eschatological prophecy. Judith Weiss has suggested that Geoffrey drew on Last World Emperor prophecy, creating a hero who might be understood either as that imperial hero, or his dark double, Antichrist, who appears in German and Italian political prophecy used against the Empire during this period.38 However, there is no reason to suppose that Geoffrey’s purposes were so subversive. They were certainly not received as such. A counterpart to Geoffrey’s Arthurian cipher, the boar of Cornwall (Prophetiae, 39–42), appears in Prophetiae, 114–18: an ‘aper bellicosus’, descended from ‘Conanus’ (as he appears in the Norman age of the prophecies), whose career reads as a variation on the theme of Arthur’s conquests. We might remember that in the Historia, Arthur himself is descended from the line of Breton kings which begins with the historical Conanus. Like Arthur, this second boar conquers France and extends his rule to the edges of a great eastern empire: ‘qui infra Gallicana nemora acumen dentium suorum exercebit […] Tremebunt illum Arabes et Affricani; nam impetum cursus sui in ulteriorem Hispaniam protendet’ (‘who will sharpen his tusks on the forests of France […] The Arabs and Africans will tremble before him; for his charge will carry him all the way to further Spain’). During the twelfth century, the suppression of the ‘Arabes et Affricani’ as far as Spain, must be understood as a reference to the Islamic territories of the Iberian Peninsula, which in the 1130s were the focus of Christian attention. Like Arthur’s Roman campaign, this is suggestive of Geoffrey’s engagement with a crusading paradigm. Arthurian apocalypticism presented powerful cultural capital for English authors concerned with Anglo-Scottish affairs, and was aggressively employed. Its utility in part lies in the nature of apocalyptic prophecy itself. Prophecies of the Last World Emperor codified a perception of Christian togetherness, constructed in highly militaristic terms, against peoples on the margins of Christendom: initially against Muslims, Jews, and heretics. This came to be used in the definition of new boundaries, functioning as a distinctively factionalist and nationalist term of address throughout the later Middle Ages, articulating antipathy towards enemies both non-Christian and Christian. The political employment of this material by opposed imperial and papal factions in Italy and Germany during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries has been documented by Marjorie Reeves, and this was by no means a unique situation, as we find in Langtoft’s employment of it in

Loomis, ‘Arthur in Geoffrey of Monmouth’, p. 58. Weiss, ‘Arthur, Emperors, and Antichrists’, pp. 241–43.

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relation to the Scots.39 However, the apocalyptic onus of prophecy in northern England was not just the product of fevered wartime mentalities, but the result of the cross-border circulation of Scottish political prophecies. For contemporary with Langtoft, an anti-English and highly apocalyptic re-working of Prophetiae, 110–14 was produced and entered circulation in Scotland and England. It is this to which I now turn.

Galfridian Prophecy and Scottish Independence The earliest composition of political prophetic texts in Latin in Scotland dates to the beginning of the Scottish Wars of Independence. Although prophecies commenting on early Scottish history survive in Middle Irish, this material stands at a remove from any direct dialogue with the other insular traditions discussed in this book, and, as far as I am aware, there is no surviving textual evidence of the use of Gaelic prophecy in Scotland during this period.40 It is certainly possible that material of this nature saw broader transmission during the period of the Bruce ascendancy, a family with Gaelic ancestry, and strong connections to Gaelic western Scotland and Ireland.41 However, surviving prophecies in Scottish circulation during the fourteenth century with a place in post-medieval Gaelic traditions, such as those ascribed to Thomas of Erceldoune, all derive from Latin, French, and English language sources.42 As the historical record survives, the dominant prophetic tradition during this period in Scotland appears to have been, as in England, Galfridian. In order to understand the uses of Galfridian prophecy in Scotland, we must begin with the complex conditions of its reception. The Scottish dismissal of Galfridian history following Edward I’s 1301 letter is well-noted.43 During this period, Scottish Reeves, Influence of Prophecy, pp. 306–19. Benjamin T. Hudson, ed. and transl., Prophecy of Berchán: Irish and Scottish High-Kings of the Early Middle Ages (London, 1996). It has been suggested that post-medieval Gaelic prophecies preserve a cultural development continuous with the Prophecy of Berchán. However, Gaelic prophetic composition was oral, and no early sources survive. John MacInnes, ‘Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition’, in Dùthchas nan Gàidheal: Selected Essays of John MacInnes, ed. Michael Newton (Edinburgh, 2006), pp. 3–33 (pp. 20–21). 41 Seán Duffy, ‘The Bruce Brothers and the Irish Sea World, 1306-09’, CMCS 21 (1991): 55–86 (pp. 72–76); McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, esp. p. 4. There is some evidence of Bruce partisan engagement with prophecies reputedly in circulation in Ireland and the Western Isles, for which see Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, p. 71; Edward J. Cowan, ‘For Freedom Alone’: The Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 (East Linton, 2003), p. 69. See also, below, p. 133. The source of these remains, however, uncertain. 42 The sources for the early Erceldoune tradition are discussed in Chapter 3. 43 See above, n. 15. 39 40

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authors drew on their own counterpart to the Trojan foundation legend co-opted by the English from Geoffrey’s account of British origins, used to assert English hegemony in Scotland.44 They made use of a legend known in Scotland from at least the early thirteenth century, pertaining to the descent of the Scots and Irish from Scota, a daughter of the Pharaoh of Egypt. An earlier version of this narrative appears as an Irish foundation legend in the Lebor Gabála (The Book of Invasions), with related material in the Historia Brittonum.45 It has been suggested that it was first used in Scotland in Latin texts written by Gaelic churchmen.46 By the fourteenth century, Scottish versions of the legend identified Scotland, rather than Ireland, as the true homeland of the ‘Scoti’ (the conventional Latin translation of ‘Gaídil’, which, dependent on context could be translated as Gaels, Irish, or Scots).47 It appears to have played an important role in Scottish royal self-representations from at least the thirteenth century: John of Fordun’s Chronicle records that when Alexander III was inaugurated as king of Scotland at Scone in 1249, his genealogy was recited back to Scota.48 The legend saw increased use during the Wars of Independence, and was cultivated as a counterweight to English Galfridiana. It is a conceptualisation of Scottish national identity that looks north and west in its literary influences, and would appear to occlude the English Galfridian vogue.49 However, from the end of the thirteenth century, and enduring into the seventeenth, even as Scottish writers issued their most virulent rejections of Geoffrey’s prophet Merlin, others enthusiastically invoked the terms of Galfridian political prophecy.50 One of the earliest, if not indeed the earliest, examples of Scottish Nonetheless, Trojan material did see considerable Scottish circulation, for which see Wingfield, Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature. 45 The fullest account of the Scottish development of the legend is found in Dauvit Broun, The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots (Woodbridge, 1999). See also E. J. Cowan, ‘Myth and Identity in Early Medieval Scotland’, Scottish History Review 63 (1984): 111–35 (pp. 120–24); Wood, ‘Where Does Britain End?’, p. 14; Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 61–62; Roger Mason, ‘Scotching the Brut: Politics, History, and National Myth in Sixteenthcentury Britain’, in Scotland and England 1286–1815, ed. Roger Mason (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 60–84 (pp. 64–65); Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 74–75, 104–05; Wingfield, Trojan Legend in Medieval Scottish Literature, pp. 9–10. 46 Broun, Irish Identity, p. 115. 47 Broun, Irish Identity, pp. 7, 119–20. 48 Broun, Irish Identity, pp. 183–93; Davies, ‘Peoples of Britain and Ireland: IV’, p. 18; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 18–19. 49 We might note, however, that it has been suggested that treatments of the legend also drew on material modified from Geoffrey’s Historia. See Broun, Irish Identity, pp. 79–80. 50 Thornton, Prophecy, Politics, and the People, p. 49; David Allan, ‘“Arthur redivivus”: Politics and Patriotism in Reformation Scotland’, Arthurian Literature 15 (1997): 185– 204; Zumthor, Merlin le Prophète, pp. 62–66. 44

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prophecy, which occupies an interesting position between the rejection and utilisation of Galfridian narratives, is Regnum Scotorum,51 which has been dated to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century, following English intervention in the Scottish succession.52 The prophecy was widely disseminated, and is found in a number of English manuscripts alongside Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronique; and in Scotland, it was incorporated in the Chronicle of John of Fordun, and its fifteenth-century continuation by Walter Bower, the Scotichronicon.53 It begins with a paratactic historical retrospective, from Brutus’s foundation of Britain, and Albanactus’s rule of Scotland, from whom the land receives its first name, ‘Albania’; to the coming of Scota, after whose name the kingdom is called ‘Scotia’. It then recounts the Scots’ defeat of the Britons and various other insular peoples and would-be conquerors, establishing independent rule until the death of Alexander III.54 The text fosters the same association of Alexander with an unbroken succession of Scottish kings all the way back to Scota, like the genealogy recited at his inauguration. After Alexander’s death, Scotland is governed by an unkingly king, John Balliol; and then an English-born king, Edward I, identified as a ‘rex avarus’, and the Scots will not prosper again until after the English king’s death. The prophecy appears to have been in circulation prior to Edward’s death, although it is possible that the passage alluding to Edward and Balliol is a later interpolation.55 Certainly, Printed in Pierre de Langtoft, II, pp. 448–50; William F. Skene, ed., Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, and Other Early Memorials of Scottish History (Edinburgh, 1867; RS 100), pp. 117–18. 52 J. S. P. Tatlock, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Date of Regnum Scotorum’, Speculum 9 (1934): 135–39; M. O. Anderson, ‘The Scottish Materials in the Paris Manuscript, Bib. Nat., Latin 4126’, Scottish Historical Review 28(1) (1949): 31–42 (pp. 33–34). 53 Thiolier, Pierre de Langtoft, p. 36; Scotichronicon, II, pp. 60–61, 212–14n. 54 See further, Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 72–73. The prophecy shares its opening lines with a historical text printed in Skene, Chronicles of the Picts and Scots, pp. 330–31. 55 Anderson, ‘The Scottish Materials in the Paris Manuscript, Bib. Nat., Latin 4126’, p. 34. One piece of contextual evidence suggests its circulation during Edward I’s lifetime. Ranulph Higden recalls in his Polychronicon (completed in 1342 or 1344) a prophecy in circulation on the northern English border during the reign of Edward I concerning the extermination of the English ‘per Dacos, Francos, et Scottos’ (Trevisa’s translation: ‘þe prophecie seide þat Englische men schulde be destroyed by Danes, by Frensche men, and by Scottes’). This appears to be a reworking of Regnum Scotorum. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, VIII, pp. 286–87. The inclusion of the Danish contingent here is puzzling, but we might note the inclusion of ‘Dacos’ as an ethnic group in Regnum Scotorum, although among peoples historically defeated by the Scots rather than a potential Scottish ally. It is possible that the terms of the prophecy were not always transmitted coherently, although its anti-English implication was understood consistently. For the use of Dacia as coterminous with Dania, see Scott D. Westrem, 51

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the negative depiction of Balliol sits more comfortably in the period of the Bruce ascendency.56 Future prosperity is forecast through a union with the French, an allusion to the anti-English alliance between Scotland and France formalised during the rebellion of the Scottish barons in 1295–96.57 The author also expresses some anxieties about threats to Scottish territories from Norway, and a king of the north appears who afflicts the Scots. It has been suggested that this refers to Haakon IV of Norway, who led an expedition into Scotland in 1263.58 This anxiety might also be understood in relation to the Franco-Norwegian alliance of 1295, a French policy designed to support a seaborne Norwegian invasion of England alongside a Scottish ground invasion, which sat counterintuitively with old Scottish-Norwegian antipathies.59 Regnum Scotorum was probably composed in an ecclesiastical milieu, for it reads tellingly alongside the uses of the Scota narrative by Scottish churchmen in their legal refutation of Edward I’s claim to Scotland before the papal curia in 1301, in the Instructiones and Processus, two companion texts generally attributed to Baldred Bisset. Like Regnum Scotorum, these assert the primacy of Scota’s claim, displacing that of Brutus; and make a case for the long historical independence of the Scottish kings, whose dominion in Scotland endures far beyond that of the Britons.60 The focal role played by the Scottish church in the ‘production of national ideology’, from the Processus to the Bruce of Archdeacon Barbour has been well remarked upon; and we might safely associate the prophecy-author with a similar clerical endorsement of elite interests.61 The prophecy intersects with broader movements in Scottish national identity construction during this period, and articulates the same sense of territorial entitlement. It draws on the narrative of the national foundation, and national destiny, of ‘Scotia’ that would later be used (although in reduced form) in the 1320 Declaration of Arbroath, which, although it omits reference to Scota herself, tells of the wanderings of The Hereford Map: A Transcription and Translation of the Legends with Commentary (Turnhout, 2001), p. 198. With thanks to Dale Kedwards for bringing this identification to my attention. 56 For discussion of the place of antipathy towards Balliol in material produced in support of Robert Bruce’s kingship, see Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 86–87. 57 Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 47–48; Duncan, Nation of the Scots, pp. 11–12. 58 Scotichronicon, II, p. 214n. 59 Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 47–48. 60 Printed in Scotichronicon, VI, pp. 135–89 (pp. 142–45; 182–83). The authorship and political contexts of the Intentiones and Processus are discussed by R. James Goldstein, ‘The Scottish Mission to Pope Boniface VIII in 1301: A Reconsideration of the Context of the Instructiones and Processus’, Scottish Historical Review 70(1) (1991): 1–15; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 66–78. See also Broun, Irish Identity, pp. 120–21. 61 Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 140–41.

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the Scoti from Scythia to Scotland; their conquest of northern Britain from the Britons and the Picts; their withstanding of attacks from all would-be conquerors; and the 113 Scottish kings who ruled, without interruption, before Alexander III.62 It is aligned with traditions engaged in the delineation of a Scottish nation, invested in a Gaelic heritage, distinct from the Anglo-centric ‘Britishness’ of contemporary English historiography and prophecy. In one respect, Regnum Scotorum reads as a solidly anti-Galfridian piece, written in opposition to English Galfridian historical self-representations. However, in its uses of the figure of an anti-English alliance, it is by its very nature indebted to the Galfridian tradition. What is more, in both English and Scottish manuscripts, Regnum Scotorum is paired with another prophecy from the same period, similarly known to later chroniclers, with which it runs continuously, and which is distinctively Galfridian. The prophecy begins ‘Bruti posteritas cum Scotis’, and is a direct re-working of Prophetiae, 110–14. It is often discussed by modern scholars as a part of Regnum Scotorum, although its interests and frame of reference are substantially different enough to suggest a separate origin, and it does appear to have circulated separately to Regnum Scotorum. Like (and with) Regnum Scotorum, it survives in a number of variant versions, although certain material is consistent across all: Bruti posteritas cum Scotis associata Anglica regna premet matre labore nece. Flumina manabunt hostili tincta cruore. Perfida gens omni lite subacta ruet. Quem Britonum fundet Albanis juncta juventus. Sanguine Saxonico tincta rubebit humus. Regnabunt Britones Scotorum gentis amici. Antiquum nomen insula tota feret. Ut refert aquila veteri de turre locuta, Cum Scotis Britones regna paterna regent. Regnabunt pariter in prosperitate quieta hostibus expulsis judicis usque diem. (The posterity of Brutus allied with the Scots will press hard on the Anglian kingdoms with war, hardship, slaughter. Rivers will flow stained with enemy blood. The treacherous nation subdued by all kinds of dispute will perish. The The text is printed by Duncan, Nation of the Scots, pp. 34–37. See also Broun, Irish Identity, pp. 119–20. For discussion of the omission of Scota, see Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, p. 91.

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prophecy, politics and place youth of Britain united with the Albans will overthrow it. The earth will turn red, dyed with Saxon blood. The Britons friends of the Scottish race will rule. The whole island will bear its ancient name. As the eagle speaking from the old tower proclaims, the Britons along with the Scots will rule their ancestral kingdoms. They will rule equally in peaceful prosperity till Judgement Day, once the enemy is driven away.)63

The prophecy-author forecasts an alliance between the ‘Britones’, the Welsh, and the ‘Scoti’, the Scots. Although ‘Scoti’ might also encompass the Irish, the focus of the prophecy is on Britain rather than Britain and Ireland. Its author envisages, in the terms of Prophetiae, 110–14, the restoration of the island’s ancient name. It is in many respects indebted to Galfridian imaginings. The prophecy also contains an allusion to the treachery of the Saxons, the white dragon of Prophetiae, 69–71;64 and the prophetic eagle is presumably the eagle of Shaftsbury, whose prophecies Geoffrey disdains to repeat in the second book of the Historia, but who came to possess a long life in subsequent English prophetic traditions.65 However, the violent imaginings of this prophecy go far beyond anything found in the Prophetiae, and have something in common with Welsh prophecies. It has even been argued that Bower – who made use of two different variations on Bruti Posteritas, alongside an even closer reworking of Prophetiae, 110–14 understood to be of his own devising – may have known a distinctively Welsh version of the text.66 The prophecy was assimilated into Welsh political-literary culture, and appears in later medieval prophetic collections in both the Latin original and Welsh translation.67 However, there are no clear signs of a direct Welsh influence on the text, and lines of literary transmission between Wales and Scotland during this period remain uncertain.68 As Aled Llion Jones has noted, we might better understand this Scottish material as possessed of a remote Welsh ‘historical genesis’ (through Geoffrey of Monmouth), rather than a direct ‘literary origin’.69 Quotation and translation are taken from Scotichronicon, II, pp. 58–59. This passage is consistent with other extant versions, although there are some variations in line order. 64 See above, p. 37. 65 Historia II, lines 120–22. See above, p. 47. 66 Scotichronicon, VII, pp. 110–11, 198n. See further G. W. S. Barrow, ‘Wales and Scotland in the Middle Ages’, Welsh History Review 10 (1981): 302–19 (p. 318); Wood, ‘Where Does Britain End?’, p. 19–20. 67 Griffiths, Early Vaticination, p. 197. 68 For one possible Scottish reworking of Welsh prophetic material, see Victoria Flood, ‘An English Owain Prophecy: A New Diplomatic Transcription and Analysis of a Prophecy in All Souls College, Oxford, MS 33’, Journal of the Early Book Society 17 (2015): 283–92. However, the prophecy could also be northern English. 69 Jones, Darogan, p. 197. 63

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Nonetheless, there are some interesting points of comparison, which can tell us something about the common strategies of anti-English prophetic authors. The interest of the prophecy-author in an anti-English alliance between the Scots and the Welsh shows a remote debt to the Armes Prydein model. It rests on Geoffrey’s simplification of the anti-English alliance of Welsh prophecy in Prophetiae, 110–14. As we find it in Armes Prydein, the Welsh and Scots appear alongside each other as part of an alliance between the Britons and a number of potential opponents of the English. In the Welsh text, the Scots are not understood to possess any claim to Britain and are promised no territories – their function is purely instrumental, as part of a larger anti-English alliance. In Geoffrey’s reworking of this motif, however, Scotland appears as the chief ally of Conanus and Cadualadrus. This is presumably because in a twelfth-century context, Scotland presented a more meaningful threat to the Anglo-Norman realm than many of the other (by then obsolete) territorial and military groups of the tenthcentury Welsh prophecy. The Galfridian Scottish and the pre-Galfridian Welsh prophecy share a common impulse: the ejection of the English is to be the more effectively realised through an assault from two sides. There is some level of genuine military strategy in this perception: it engages the English in a war on multiple fronts. There was a genuine precedent for this ambition – the abortive alliance with Llywelyn ap Gruffudd engineered by the Comyns during 1258, which it has been suggested may have inspired the Bruti Posteritas-author.70 Furthermore, in the context of the depredations of Edward I, parity with the situation of newly conquered Wales must have seemed perfectly natural from a Scottish perspective. The notion of insular restoration, enduring until Judgement Day, is similarly a relatively well-attested theme in Welsh political prophecy. For example, in the Cyfoesi, we read of the insular high kingship of the princes of Gwynedd, which once established endures until the rising of the sea wall (a conventional apocalyptic omen) and the End Times, with which the prophecy concludes.71 Similarly, in Armes Prydein, the armies of Cynan and Cadwaladr will be honoured until Judgement Day.72 This commonality, however, is not strong enough to suggest a direct line of influence. It is more likely that the Bruti Posteritas-author took his inspiration from Geoffrey of Monmouth, where a loosely apocalyptic schema is in place: the text concludes with the rising of the sea wall, and the resurrection of the dead. He also may have been influenced by the Fifteen Signs before Nicholson, Scotland, p. 47; Tatlock, ‘Geoffrey of Monmouth and the Date of Regnum Scotorum’, p. 137. 71 See above, p. 62, n. 178. 72 See above, p. 27, n. 39. 70

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Doomsday, a millenarian prophecy derived from the apocryphal Apocalypse of Thomas, delineating the omens to precede the Last Judgement, recorded across Europe and in near-continuous circulation in Britain and Ireland from at least the eleventh century, if not earlier.73 The bleeding earth, rivers of fire, and the terror of divine judgement of the Signs find a secular counterpart in the rivers of blood, blood-dyed earth, and judgement and chastisement of the Saxons by the Britons and Scots in Bruti Posteritas. We might understand the battle for insular restoration in Bruti Posteritas, as, in the Welsh fashion, the last great secular act of judgement, prior to and prefiguring Judgement Day. Yet again we can see a strategy and mediating sources in common between Welsh and Scottish political prophecy, rather than a direct source relationship. Nonetheless, both present a vision of territorial possession that stretches from the British past to history’s end, establishing English domination as a short-lived historical blip in an otherwise continuous state of indigenous rule. In Scotland, this territorially defensive construction took its cue from Geoffrey, but importantly – unlike the Prophetiae – was engaged not with the matter of British unity but rather national separatism: in practice, this must be the meaning of the equal insular rule of the Britons and Scots established at the end of the prophecy. Bruti Posteritas was a call for Scottish and Welsh independence from England. This vision of the tripartite island would continue to fire Scottish and Welsh imaginations in the centuries to come, and would haunt English prophetic consciousness as the greatest threat to dreams of pan-insular rule. Indeed, it is detectable in the background of nearly every English prophecy concerned with Anglo-Scottish affairs produced during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a dangerous possibility to be contained and reworked as English. The appeal of political prophecy in Scotland was particularly pronounced during the period of the Bruce ascendancy, in the early decades of the fourteenth century. Prophetiae, 110–14 was of considerable utility to the Bruce faction. Prophecies forecasting a Cambro-Scottish alliance and English exile from Britain were circulated by Bruce partisans in Scotland from as early as 1307. A letter dispatched to an English courtier at Carlisle during this year, believed to have been sent by the English commander at Forfar, records a prophecy of Merlin manipulated by Bruce partisans: that after the death of ‘le Roy Coveytous’ they

Robert Williams, Selections from the Hengwrt Manuscripts, 2 vols (London, 1876–92), II, pp. 627, 750–51; W. W. Heist, The Fifteen Signs before Doomsday (East Lansing, MI, 1952); W. W. Heist, ‘Welsh Prose Versions of the Fifteen Signs before Doomsday’, Speculum 19 (1944): 421–32; Catherine McKenna, ‘Fifteen Signs before Doomsday’, in Celtic Folklore and Christianity: Studies in Memory of William W. Heist, ed. Patrick Ford (Los Angeles, CA, 1983), pp. 84–112.

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will join with the Welsh and rule in peace until the end of the world.74 This is a French translation of Regnum Scotorum with Bruti Posteritas. Regnum Scotorum may well have been revised during the period 1307–14, with Robert Bruce’s activities in mind – it has been suggested by one scholar that the allusion to the revival of Scotland’s fortunes following the death of the avaricious king is a late addition, directly alluding to Bruce’s successes.75 The Forfar letter is consistent with the notion of an anti-English alliance, which both Robert Bruce and his brother Edward used in terms that were certainly not merely rhetorical. It has been suggested that the prophetic material noted in the letter was used by Robert Bruce in 1306–07 as a direct address to potential Welsh allies.76 Certainly, this fits with his broader coalition building during this period: it was in these years that he wrote his first letter to the Irish. As Seán Duffy has noted, the Bruces acted in concert in Wales and Ireland, and this was a strategy in which, at least in address to the Welsh, political prophecy was utilised.77 In 1316, Edward Bruce employed a similar tactic, when his agents disseminated letters to the princes of Wales, stating that Edward was prepared to reconquer Wales for them if they were content to hold their land from him rather than the English king. This strategy is very similar to that employed by Edward and his Ulster ally Domnall Ua Néill – Edward was declared king of Ireland in 1315, although this title appears to have held little sway beyond Ulster itself.78 However, as appears to have been the case in 1306–07, the terminology he applied in relation to Welsh affairs, unlike Irish, appears to have been Galfridian, utilising Galfridian historical and prophetic frames of reference.79 McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, p. 41; Anderson, ‘The Scottish Materials in the Paris Manuscript, Bib. Nat., Latin 4126’, p. 34; Nicholson, Scotland, p. 76. 75 Scotichronicon, p. 214n. 76 Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, pp. 83–85. 77 Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, pp. 83–85. 78 McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, pp. 190–99; Frame, Colonial Ireland, pp. 132–36; Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 92–93. For a similar Irish letter from this period, see Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers and the Irish Sea World’, pp. 83–84. For a general discussion of the policy of the Bruces during these years, see G. W. S. Barrow, Robert Bruce and the Community of the Realm of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1988). 79 Although certainly a matter of military strategy, there is no evidence of a prophetic engagement with the concept of a pan-Celtic alliance, spanning Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, by either of the Bruce brothers. Although this is a familiar critical argument, the origin of this prophetic model appears to be English, see below, p. 101. As Seán Duffy notes, as a piece of conceptual terminology, when applied to this period, ‘pan-Celtic’ is highly anachronistic, and is best used in reference to relationships between the ‘Celticspeaking peoples of Wales, Ireland, the Isles, and Scotland: it does not imply that they all shared a sense of common origins, let alone of “Celticness”’. Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, p. 58. There is no reason to believe that prophecies of the anti-English alliance would have operated as a compelling political trope in Ireland, as they did in Wales. 74

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A copy of what is generally understood to be Edward Bruce’s letter to the Welsh princes survives in a late manuscript witness, alongside a positive response from Gruffudd Llwyd, one of the most important powers in native Wales during this period. (Llwyd appears previously, and indeed later, to have been a stalwart supporter of Edward II, and the precise circumstances behind his letter remain obscure.)80 Gruffudd (whose letter is given first) writes in support of an alliance, effected through Edward Bruce, between the Welsh, the Scots under Robert Bruce, and the Irish under Edward, which will drive the ‘Saxones’ from Britain, restoring the pristine state of the time of Brutus. This body of allusions suggests an acquaintance with Welsh prophecy of an anti-English alliance of the Armes Prydein-type, coupled with Prophetiae, 110–14, which forecasts the restoration of the island to the name of Brutus.81 He may also have known material from Bruti Posteritas, or have echoed terminology lifted by Edward Bruce from the same: he writes of the division of territory ‘inter Britones et Albaneos’. Edward Bruce may well have had Bruti Posteritas in mind. In his letter, he writes of the common experience of English oppression, and envisions: ‘Albanicus et Britannicus populus expulsis hostibus in perpetuum fiet unus’ (‘The Scottish and British people, driving away the enemy, forever will be made one’). This recalls the final lines of Bruti Posteritas: ‘Regnabunt pariter in prosperitate quieta / hostibus expulsis judicis usque diem’ (‘They [the Welsh and Scots] will rule equally in peaceful prosperity till Judgement Day, once the enemy is driven away’). This exchange of letters shows that Galfridian history and prophecy functioned as a nodal point, connecting otherwise geographically and culturally remote insular political literatures. It provided a genuinely pan-insular political vocabulary. Through it, Llwyd could tap into a Welsh prophetic discourse that went back much further than Geoffrey, to the native Welsh tradition, and be understood by Edward Bruce, in the context of a broader exchange conducted in terms consistent with the self-mythologising of the Bruces. This material was, above all, diplomatically appropriate. But there is more to its use than political flattery – and the proposed Cambro-Scottish union expresses more than nostalgia for supposedly ancient legends of British and Scottish fellowship. Prophecy provided a platform for political imaginings with high stakes, nothing less than the fate of the nation, structuring diplomatic strategy and elite self-identifications. J. Beverley Smith, ‘Gruffydd Llwyd and the Celtic Alliance’, BBCS 26 (1976): 463–78. The letters are printed on pp. 477–78. See further McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, pp. 190–94; Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 387. 81 It is interesting that while Edward Bruce refers to the ‘Anglicanus’, the English, Llwyd uses the term ‘Saxones’. This may be a self-conscious association with the terms of Welsh political prophecy, or a word selected for its closeness to the Welsh ‘Saeson’, English (earlier, Saxon). 80

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The Last Six Kings to Follow John In the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Prophetiae, 110–14 represented a field of contested political meanings, with competing applications. On the one hand, it was a sequence figuring the conquests of Edward I, and on the other, a call to arms against English hegemony. As they were understood from the English side of the Anglo-Scottish border, both frameworks of meaning were drawn on in one of the most influential political prophecies of the later Middle Ages: the Prophecy of the Six Kings, also known as the Last Six Kings of the English. The prophecy survives in a number of different versions in insular French, Latin, English, and Welsh, although the earliest, which T. M. Smallwood has termed the Original Prose Version, belongs to the reign of Edward II, and was composed in insular French sometime after 1312.82 Although we cannot determine the location of composition with absolute certainty (early witnesses of the Six Kings proliferate from across England), the author of the prophecy drew on English and Scottish prophecies relating to the Anglo-Scottish wars, and was in receipt of literary material from the border region, both English and Scottish. The Six Kings was enthusiastically received by later prophetic authors working in northern England, and inspired a long-lived regional prophetic discourse. The prophecy forecasts the reigns of Henry III, identified as the lamb, followed by the dragon (Edward I), the goat (Edward II), the boar (Edward III), and finally, the ass, who is deposed by a mole (identified in the fifteenth century as Richard II and Henry IV). One of the primary texts through which Galfridian prophecy circulated in England during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the value of the Six Kings in the study of English political prophetic culture is immense. Although long associated by scholars with the rebellion of the Percies and Owain Glyn Dŵr, once thought to be the key to its provenance, it is now recognised as a fourteenth-century composition, written in support of the deposition of Edward II and the accession of his young son, Edward III, imagined as a hero cast in the mould of Edward I.83 It is in part history, and part pure prophecy projected into the future reign of the Edward III and beyond. We cannot understand, as has elsewhere been suggested, the composition of political prophecy in insular French during this period, rather than Latin, as evidence of a widening social engagement with the discourse.84 French was

T. M. Smallwood, ‘The Prophecy of the Six Kings’, Speculum 60 (1985): 571–92. Welsh translations of the prophecy are discussed in Chapter 4. 83 For the prophecy’s critical association with Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Percies see below, pp. 155–56. 84 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 109–11. 82

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f­unctioning as another elite language. We might understand something of the early readership of the Six Kings through its association with the Brut tradition. The Revised Prose Version of the Six Kings (composed in the early 1330s) was incorporated in the long version of the Anglo-Norman Brut (extending to 1333), and was translated with the whole into the Middle English Brut, c. 1370–1400.85 This version is known as the English Prose Translation.86 In the context of the Brut, the prophecy is framed as Merlin’s reply to Arthur concerning the last six kings to reign in England, an English counterpart to the last six kings of British rule following Arthur in Geoffrey’s Historia, and incorporates references to events from later in the reign of Edward II, including the rebellion of Thomas of Lancaster and the fall of the Despensers. Elsewhere in the Brut, elements of the prophecy are applied to historical events as a form of prophetic-historical commentary.87 The prophecy can be tentatively placed within the original reader-context understood by Lister M. Matheson for the Brut as a whole: an upper-class, lay audience. Matheson’s analysis is rooted not only in the ‘style, content and chivalric tone’ of the text, but also early evidence of its circulation: there are a number of possible allusions to the Brut in gifts to religious houses, and in the wills of various members of the aristocracy, including Guy Beauchamp, the earl of Warwick; Isabella, the mother of Edward III; and Sir Simon Burley, the tutor of Richard II.88 Julia Marvin has understood this readership more generally as a class of ‘social stakeholders’, with a vested interest in ‘social stability and a strong but advisable king’.89 The Brut-author has been understood to have had access to a well-stocked, probably monastic, library, and the Six Kings might very feasibly be found among the contents of such a library.90 Certainly, the most compelling hypothesis for the For the dating and development of the Brut manuscripts, see Lister M. Matheson, The Prose ‘Brut’: The Development of a Middle English Chronicle (Tempe, AZ, 1998). See also Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 577–78. The English Brut has been published by F. W. Brie, ed., The Brut or the Chronicles of England (London, 1906–08; EETS OS 131). The prophecy is printed in Brut, pp. 72–76. 86 This is the version of the prophecy analysed by Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 101–09. 87 In particular, see Brut, pp. 203–05, 243–47. The role of the prophecies in the conceptualisation of the Brut is discussed by Marvin, ‘Arthur Authorised’; Tamar Drukker, ‘Vision and History: Prophecy in the Middle English Prose Brut Chronicle’, Arthuriana 12(4) (2002): 25–49. 88 Matheson, Prose Brut, pp. 9–10. 89 Marvin, ‘Arthur Authorised’, pp. 87–88. See also Julia Marvin, ‘The Vitality of AngloNorman in Late Medieval England: The Case of the Prose Brut Chronicle’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain, pp. 303–19. 90 Marvin, ‘Arthur Authorised’, p. 84. 85

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composition of the prophecy, like the Brut, is its status as an ideologically invested production by an ecclesiastical author, for a politically engaged audience involved in secular affairs. He might be situated in a similar position to Pierre de Langtoft, for he appears to have known material in common with Langtoft, and perhaps even had access to a copy of his Chronique. Like Langtoft, he is indebted to the Prophetiae, a staple component of monastic libraries during this period. As Taylor long ago noted, the Six Kings rests on the widespread identification of King John as the lynx of Prophetiae, 105–08, in whose reign Normandy is lost.91 Both Edward II and Edward III are depicted in the Six Kings in line with figures that follow the lynx. Edward II appears as a goat that brings ‘graunt damage famine et mortalite des gentz et perte de terre’ (‘great harm, famine and death of people and division of land’, fol. 2r).92 This is a reworking of Prophetiae, 119–26, which tells of a goat from the camp of Venus (‘hircus Venerii Castri’), who breathes over the land and turns the soil rank, an application which may have seemed particularly fitting during the famine years of Edward’s reign. Edward III follows, presented as a boar modelled on the boar of commerce of Prophetiae, 128–30, whose reign is restorative. There was precedent for the association of Edward II with the goat. In a prophecy from the very beginning of his reign recorded in the Annales Londonienses, he is hailed as the goat of Merlin’s prophecy, who will be a second Alexander.93 The chronicler gives a truncated quotation from the reign of the goat in the Prophetiae, quoting lines 119–21 only, which prophesy the goat’s breathing across the surface of the whole island. This is identified as a prophecy of insular conquest in the fashion of Edward I, and Arthur before him. However, even at this early date, it may well have been a barbed comment, playing on a pejorative association, for in medieval Latin capra (she-goat) is also ‘harlot’.94 Indeed, the chronicler’s allusion Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 50–51. See above, p. 57. As an edition of the Original Prose Version has yet to be published, I take as my witness one of the earliest copies of the prophecy, in MS BL Harley 746, a late thirteenth-century Lincolnshire manuscript to which the prophecy was added c. 1325–50. I use my own transcription of the manuscript, in preference to that of Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 160–64, which contains some errors. The prophecy appears on fols 1v–3r. It has been crossed through, but with the exception of the top corners of the pages, which have been torn, is legible. See further, Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, p. 574. The early ownership of the manuscript is unknown, although at some point in its history it came into the possession of one John Warner, a chaplain of Sutton, Lincolnshire. Taylor, Political Prophecy, p. 160; H. L. D. Ward, ed., Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 2 vols (London, 1883–1910), I, p. 309; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 263. All contractions have been expanded in quotations, which are presented as edited transcriptions. 93 ‘Annales Londonienses de Tempore Edwardi Secundi’, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and Edward II, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols (London, 1882–83; RS 76), I, p. 151. 94 Fulton, ‘Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Uses of Prophecy’, p. 110. 91 92

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to Alexander is telling. Alexander’s sexuality was certainly the stuff of medieval speculation – as, it seems, was Edward’s. The goat of the Prophetiae belongs to an age where sexual incontinence is held in a direct causal relationship to the physical health of the kingdom. We read of the renewal of the camp of Venus (to which the goat belongs) and the unceasing afflictions of Cupid’s arrows (‘Renouabuntur castra Veneris, nec cessabunt sagittae Cupidinis uulnerare’), and finally, the rankness of the soil and ceaseless fornication of mankind (‘Omnis humus luxuriabit, et humanitas fornicari non desinet’). The Six Kings-author probably had in mind rumours concerning the nature of Edward’s relationship with Piers Gaveston and the king’s alleged homosexuality.95 There certainly appears to be some relationship between Gaveston and the sufferings of Edward’s reign in the mind of the Six Kings-author, who records Gaveston’s rise and fall as a defining event of this period: ‘E en le temps de cel chevre avaunt dit surdra un egle de cornwaile et avera pennes d’or et finera en Gavarn’ (‘And in the time of the aforesaid goat an eagle will rise up in Cornwall and will have feathers of gold, and will come to its end in Gavarn’, fol. 2r). ‘Gavarn’ is a version of a place name given in other manuscripts as ‘ganeres’, ‘gaveres’, and ‘gaversmire’, probably a reference to the site of Gaveston’s death, recorded by contemporary chroniclers as Gaverissweche or Caveresich.96 This is the final event of the reign of the goat. In comparison with his father the goat, the future Edward III is the subject of great expectations. Like the ‘aper comercii’ of Prophetiae, 128–30, who restores the nation to health after the reign of the goat – ‘Pectus eius cibus erit egentibus, et lingua eius sedabit sicientes’ (‘His breast shall be food for the needy and his tongue drink for the thirsty’) – of the boar Edward III we read: ‘sa poetrine estaunchement de soif a ceux qe soif averount’ (‘his breast will quench the thirst of those who thirst’, fol. 2r). This is the king of the Prophetiae from whose mouth flow rivers to staunch the thirst of the nation: ‘Ex ore ipsius procedent flumina, quae arentes hominum fauces rigabunt’ (‘Out of his mouth will issue rivers to moisten the parched throats of men’). However, the Six Kings-author was selective in his use of the Prophetiae. In the earlier text, the goat and the boar are separated by three generations of plague, famine, and hardship. The For discussion of public interest in Edward’s ‘sexualities’, see W. M. Ormrod, ‘The Sexualities of Edward II’, in The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (York, 2006), pp. 22–47. It has been suggested that commentators from this period were for the most part more concerned with Gaveston’s deputisation by the king than any sexual dimension to their relationship: see Pierre Chaplais, Piers Gaveston: Edward II’s Adoptive Brother (Oxford, 1994). However, the author of the Six Kings probably cannot be placed among them. 96 Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 575–76. Certainly, this is how the prophecy was interpreted in the Brut, see pp. 243–44. 95

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author of the Six Kings collapses this to one: unlike Geoffrey’s passage, there is no break in his king list. Readers of the Prophetiae and the Six Kings were aware of the relationship between the two texts. A clear statement of this perception is found in a copy of the Prophetiae in MS BL Cotton Nero A. iv, a collection of historical and prophetic texts compiled at Ludlow in the late fourteenth century, probably in an ecclesiastical environment, in the broader sphere of influence of the Mortimer earls of March.97 It includes a copy of the Prophetiae (fols 65r–76v), with a commentary relating the prophecies to deeds of British, Norman, and English kings to the reign of Edward I, and annotated illustrations for the most part associated with the commentary. The illustrations, however, continue beyond the commentary, and on fols 73r–74r, functioning with relative freedom from the text, there are a number of allusions to the Six Kings, associated with figures from earlier in the course of the Prophetiae (Plates 1–3).98 In these illustrations the connection between the two texts is made explicit. A fire-breathing goat is identified as ‘Edwardus’, Edward II, an overt association of the ‘hircus venerii castri’ of Prophetiae, 119–26 with the pestilential goat of the Six Kings. This is followed by a boar annotated: ‘Iste Rex veniet post Edwardus’, a pictorial gloss on the boar of commerce of Prophetiae, 128–30, conflated with the boar of the Six Kings: Edward III, who, as the annotation suggests, follows another Edward, Edward II. Next to the boar is an ass, figuring the ass of Prophetiae, 209, the annotation of which is partially obscured but can be re-constructed through the visible letters as ‘Rex Ricardus’. The sequence is consistent with early fifteenth-century uses of the Six Kings, in the years following the deposition of Richard II.99 At this point, however, any relationship between the glosses and the Six Kings becomes spurious, and the interest of the illustrator-glossator shifts towards a dispute between another boar, identified as ‘rex’, and a red dragon, ‘comes’. The latter was probably an allusion to the earls of March, identified with the red dragon of the Britons, in line with their Welsh ancestry, and the sequence is most intelligibly read in relation to the family’s various struggles with consecutive kings of England. We might wonder if the use of the boar has some connection For the most recent dating of the manuscript, see Chris Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c.1250–1450’, in Family and Dynasty in Late Medieval England: Proceedings of the 1997 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Richard Eales and Shaun Tyas (Donington, 2003), pp. 67–86 (p. 79). See also Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, pp. 297–98. 98 Another copy, probably a draft, in the same hand, with the same illustrations, is found in MS Lambeth Palace Library 527, fols 46r–59r. The Six Kings illustrations appear on fols 53v–58r. This version is probably a draft, or at least an earlier exploration of the idea developed in Cotton Nero A. iv. 99 Fulton, ‘Deposition of Richard II’, pp. 77–79; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, p. 13. 97

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Plate 1. The goat ‘Edwardus’. Illustration from Prophetiae Merlini, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol 73r.

Plate 2. The boar after ‘Edwardus’, and the ass ‘Ricardus’. Illustration from Prophetiae Merlini, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol 73v.

Plate 3. Conflict between the boar, ‘rex’, and the dragon, ‘comes’. Illustration from Prophetiae Merlini, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol 74r.

Plate 4. Conflict between the king and the lion, ‘comes’; and another king’s revenge. Illustration from Prophetiae Merlini, MS BL, Cotton Nero A. iv, fol 74v.

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to Henry IV’s association with this symbol. According to the Chronicle of Thomas of Otterburn, before his accession in 1399 Henry referred to himself as the boar of commerce of Prophetiae, 128–30.100 The intended effect of this, presumably, was to identify his predecessor, Richard II, with the ineffective goat; and to facilitate his own identification with his ancestor, Edward III. It is difficult to know how widespread this association was, but the Cotton Nero A. iv sequence may have been intended to undercut pro-Lancastrian prophetic applications of the Prophetiae. Possible pro-Mortimer readings of this material are discussed further in Chapter 4, but suffice it say that for its first generations of readers, like the Prophetiae, the Six Kings was understood as engaging with the interests of a political elite. The intended early readership of the Six Kings is most likely to have been in northern England. The author shows a particular interest in the northern border and the Galfridian rhetoric of the days of Edward I. Edward I appears in the prophecy as a dragon, whose body spans England, Scotland, and Wales: ‘un de ces pies en Wik et l’autre en Lond[on]. Si embracera trois habitacions et overa sa bouche de vers Gales’ (‘One of his feet in Berwick and the other in London. He will embrace three habitations and will open his mouth towards Wales’, fol. 1v). This is yet another English re-imagining of the British dragon of the Omen, and it is similarly territorially invested. With his three ‘habitacions’, the dragon possesses the three crowns of Edward’s papal letter, and unified territories of Langtoft’s prophecy. Certainly, the figure was interpreted in the Brut as pertaining to the Welsh and Scottish conquests of Edward’s reign.101 Nonetheless, the author of the Six Kings was far more interested in overlordship in Scotland than Wales. The primary threats to the stability of the dragon’s reign are ‘un poeple hors de Nordwest’, led by a ‘maulvis leverer’, a wicked hare or greyhound, who flees from Edward’s army, to the sea and exile (fol. 1v). The final ‘r’ in Harley 746 introduces a level of ambiguity: it may be intended to read ‘levere’, hare, or ‘leverer’, a term for hounds used for catching hares, generally applied to greyhounds. We might note that in the application of this prophecy to events of the reign of Edward I in the English Brut, this northern enemy is named as ‘an euel grehounde’, and is identified as John Balliol;102 although in the English Prose Translation the term is translated as a hare – a creature long associated with ill omen, that functions as a term of Scottish antipathy in English political prophecy.103 Either way, the career of the ‘levere(r)’ ends, like Balliol’s, in exile, and he is surely meant here.

Caroline D. Eckhardt, Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth: A Fifteenth-century English Commentary (Cambridge, 1982), p. 31. 101 Brut, p. 203. 102 Brut, p. 204. 103 Brut, p. 72. For the uses of hare in English political prophecy, see below, p. 126. 100

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The Scottish threat is at the very heart of the prophecy, in relation not only to Balliol but Bruce. The Scottish opposition of the reign of the dragon recurs in the allusion to a foreign army during the reign of the goat, introduced in the broader context of Edward’s 1307 journey to France (represented by the ‘flour de vie’, the flower of life, a play on the French fleur de lys) to negotiate his marriage to Isabella of France, daughter of Philip IV. This time brings suffering to the people of the goat’s land:104 Icelui chevre vendra hors de Car [Caernarfon – the birthplace of Edward II] et irra en paenie si quera flour de vie. En son temps morrount a doel et a graunt dolour un poeple de sa terre parquei ceux d’estranges terres serrount en bandez sur lui. (This goat will come out of Caernarfon and will go to heathen lands and will seek the flower of life. In his time one people of his land will die in pain and in great sorrow at the hands of people of foreign lands, who will be in bands against him.) (fol. 2r)

Edward II’s departure to France interrupted attempts to find Robert Bruce, who had retreated to the relative safety of the uplands of Galloway. Edward’s retirement came at a critical time, and in the English king’s absence, Bruce consolidated his support from the north of Scotland and the Western Isles, and launched attacks on Edward’s allies and garrisons in northern Scotland.105 The key themes of this sequence, which recur across the prophecy as a whole, accord with the anxieties of this period in northern England: a perception of a spreading Scottish threat during a time when Edward II was felt to be either incapable or unwilling to ‘relieve the miseries of the border’.106 It is in relation to this same scene of hostilities that we can best understand the account of a calamitous defeat of ‘les gentz’, a people or nation, who appear in the reign of the goat, in a central episode in the author’s broader treatment of Anglo-Scottish border affairs, the White Battle: E un bataille sera en chaump taille com escu sur bras de mer. E apres cel bataille si perderount les gentz en gros com poissouns. E a cel bataille morrount mout des blaunche testes si sera apelle la blaunche bataille.

For interpretation of this passage in these terms, see Brut, p. 243. McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, pp. 42–43. 106 May McKisack, The Fourteenth Century, 1307–1399 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 40–41. 104 105

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(And there will be a battle in a field shaped like a shield on an arm of the sea. And after this battle the people will be lost in great quantities like fish. And in this battle many of the white heads will die and so it will be called the white battle.) (fol. 2r)

Although Smallwood has argued that this is a highly generalised prophecy that could belong to any time or any place, the details of this encounter, and the interests of the passage as a whole, situate it firmly within the context of the Scottish Wars of Independence.107 In fact, the English Brut incorporates a direct reference to the White Battle as a name given by the Scots to an English defeat in 1319 at Myton, in Yorkshire, where, in an ill-fated attempt to intercept Robert Bruce’s army before it reached York, the English host were driven into the River Swale. The host that met the Scots included priests, monks, friars, and members of the secular clergy, hastily assembled by William Melton, the Bishop of York. It was from the death of these ecclesiastics, the Brut records, that the battle received its name, functioning as a term of anti-English Scottish abuse.108 Of course, it is possible that the allusion in the Brut was inspired by the prophecy – certainly, the application of material from the Six Kings to historical events is commonplace in the chronicle. Notably, the Scottish account of the battle in Barbour’s Bruce does not identify Myton as the White Battle, but ‘the chaptur of Mytone for thar / slayn sa mony prestis war’, and we have no reason to believe that the White Battle was actually a term used by the Scots.109 Regardless, both the battle and the prophecy belong to the same broader ­historical scene. The battle of Myton falls within what the historian Michael Brown has identified as the most sustained period of warfare in northern England between the Norman Conquest and the English Civil War: the years following Bannockburn.110 The original reference in the prophecy may actually have been to Bannockburn, where the English camped on a triangle of lowlying ground between marshland, the Forth, and the Bannock burn (a field in the form of a shield?), and many of the fleeing English soldiers drowned.111 Regardless of the precise referent, the prophecy of the White Battle tells us something about a certain cultural climate in northern England during the Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, p. 576. Brut, pp. 211–12, 244. See also Herbert Maxwell, ed. and transl., The Chronicles of Lanercost, 1272–1346 (Glasgow, 1913), p. 226. Hereafter, Lanercost. 109 John Barbour, The Bruce, ed. and transl. A. A. M. Duncan (Edinburgh, 1997), p. 647. Hereafter, Bruce. 110 Michael Brown, Bannockburn: The Scottish War and the British Isles, 1307–1323 (Edinburgh, 2008), p. 127. 111 Nicholson, Scotland, pp. 88–89. 107 108

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1310s. This period saw a decisive turn in English fortunes on the border, and the conflict coincided with the beginning of the Great Famine of 1314–21, which struck with particular severity in this region.112 For the northern counties, the reign of Edward II brought war, famine, death, and territorial instability – in the words of the prophecy, ‘graunt damage famine et mortalite des gentz et perte de terre’. The conclusion of the goat’s reign is, as Smallwood has observed, riddled with obscurities, and is certainly genuinely futurist.113 However, it contains one very interesting allusion directly pertaining to the Scottish threat: ‘un poeple graunt vendra de Northwest’ (‘A great people will come from the north-west’, fol. 2r), who – insofar as we can discern from this difficult passage – form a fearsome confederacy and are avenged on the enemies of the goat. The goat, we read in the material that follows, will live out the rest of his life in exile in ‘paenie’ (heathen lands – the author’s term for France). The locative identification of the hostile people, the north-west, is in common with the Scottish threat of the reign of the dragon, but in this case it may also read as a very specific reference to contemporary anxieties about Robert Bruce and his north-western power base. It is accepted that the greater part of Bruce’s military support in the period 1307–14, the years of Scottish recovery, were drawn from the Western Isles and the north of Scotland.114 Looking further west, his flight to Ireland in 1306, and the subsequent diplomatic manoeuvrings of the Bruces on both sides of the Irish Sea, long remained the stuff of Scottish mythologising and English anxieties.115 It is possible that the prophecy-author’s allusion to changing political sympathies of the hostile ‘gentz’ from the north-west, refers to the Robert Bruce’s homage to Edward I in the period 1302–04.116 Like many Scottish nobles involved in the Wars of Independence, he was an erstwhile ally of the English crown. The disasters and uncertainties of the reign of Edward II find their corrective in the prophesied reign of Edward III, the boar. Not only does the boar undo the damage of the reign of the goat, he subdues Wales and Scotland, winning back the three insular crowns of the dragon. During this period, he also builds a mighty empire spanning Europe, recaptures Jerusalem, and after his death is interred with the three kings at Cologne Cathedral, a site associated with the Holy Roman Brown, Bannockburn, pp. 46–47. Ian Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England, 1315–22’, Past & Present 59 (1973): 3–50; William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 1997). 113 Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, p. 576. 114 McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, p. 12. 115 McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, p. 1. 116 Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 141–43. 112

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Emperor. The full account of the boar’s career is damaged in Harley 746, but as it survives in fragmentary form we read: Cel sengler vendra hors de Winde[sor] [the birthplace of Edward III] et irra en anguissaunz ces dentz per quater terres et ferra hardiment ces q’il avera a faire jusques a Burgh de Jherusalem. Espanie tre[m]blera de poure de lui. Aragoun estrevera. [...] anguisera ces dentz sur les portes de Paris. (This boar will come out of Windsor and whet his tusks through four lands and he will do bravely that which he will do as far as the city of Jerusalem. Spain will tremble for fear of him. Aragon will sweat ... he will whet his tusks on the gates of Paris.) Celui sengler ferra russeaux coure de saunc et cervel et verte pres rouges. Cel sengler regainera quanquez ces auncestres unt avaunt perdu en totes terres. Si portera trois corounes avaunt q’il moerge. Si mettera une terre en graunt subieccioun [...] Cel sengler conquerra plus qe unqes nul de son saunc en iceste munde. Touz lui enclinerount et les terres tendra en bon poes en sa vie. Si murra en estranges si serra por sa noblesse enterre entre les trois rois. (This boar will make streams run with blood and brain, and green meadows red. This boar will regain all that his ancestors had lost before in all lands. And he will wear three crowns before he dies. And he will put one land in great subjection […] This boar will conquer more than ever any of his blood in this world. All will bow to him and he will hold the lands in good peace in his life. And he will die in a strange land and for his nobleness will be interred among the three kings.) (fols 2r–2v)

This material rests on a number of Galfridian sources: it draws on the Arthurian signifier, the boar of Cornwall, and in its allusion to the whetting of the boar’s teeth on Paris shows the influence of the prophecy of the boar descended from Conanus. This vision is in the vein of Langtoft’s verses in honour of Edward I, and like Langtoft, the Six Kings-author extends this Arthurian prowess from British to pan-European conquest, to the re-capture of Jerusalem. After Langtoft’s Chronique, this is one of the earliest English prophecies to associate a vision of imperial English kingship with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s King Arthur and his three insular crowns. The boar proved to have an exceptionally long-lived association with Edward  III, probably by virtue of his public Arthurian engagements, much

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like his grandfather.117 Yet, as Mark Ormrod has observed, contemporary associations of Edward with the boar were not necessarily the direct result of a royal propaganda offensive: Edward’s Arthurian associations were born of a movement generated around the king, as much as by him.118 Royal Arthuriana had a wide political utility among a clerical and political class invested in this image  of  the king, and the figure of the boar became one of the most used in later medieval English political prophecy. We might understand its initial ­popularity as the product of a perceived new age of insular and transinsular imperium associated with Edward’s conquests in Scotland and later, his cementation of direct royal influence in Ireland and the Welsh March through the strategic marriages of his children.119 To some contemporaries, Edward may well have appeared to be engaged in the building of a pan and trans-insular empire to rival Arthur’s. The association of the boar with Edward was deeply entrenched. In the various struggles for the English throne between Edward’s descendants, during the century which followed, the boar remained an important, authorising, point of royal identification, used by Lancastrians and Yorkists alike.120 The boar was also invoked in relation to Edward’s claim to the French throne, raised in 1340. In his poetic treatment of the French campaigns, beginning with an account of the landing of the English at Saint Vaast-la-Hougue in 1346, Laurence Minot made use of the Six Kings. In a prophecy attributed to Merlin, he wrote of a fearsome ‘bare’ who would cross the sea from England to France, ‘and in France he suld bigin/ To mak þam wrath þat er þerein’ (13–14).121 He extended this in his account of the siege of Calais, where reiterating a prophecy found in a ‘romaunce’ (doubtless an allusion to the Merlinian prophecies of the Brut), he envisioned Edward’s taking of Paris: ‘And in Paris þa high palays:/ Now had þe bare with mekill blis’ (166–67). A roughly contemporary reworking of this vision is found in the Latin Invective against France, composed in 1346, where the boar’s The uses of Arthuriana in the public spectacles of the reign of Edward III are discussed in Juliet Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context, 1270–1350 (Woodbridge, 1983); W. M. Ormrod, ‘For Arthur and St George: Edward II, Windsor Castle and the Order of the Garter’, in St George’s Chapel Windsor in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nigel Saul (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 13–34 (pp. 17–18, 23); Juliet Vale, ‘Image and Identity in the Prehistory of the Order of the Garter’, in St George’s Chapel, pp. 35–50 (pp. 39–40); W. M. Ormrod, Edward III (Stroud, 2005), p. 307. 118 Ormrod, ‘For Arthur and St George’, p. 23. 119 W. M. Ormrod, ‘Edward III and his Family’, Journal of British Studies 26 (1987): 398–422. 120 Victoria Flood, ‘Wynnere and Wastoure and the Influence of Political Prophecy’, Chaucer Review 49(4) (2015): 427–48 (pp. 444–48). 121 Joseph Hall, ed., The Poems of Laurence Minot (Oxford, 1914), pp. 21–27. 117

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conquest of Paris is presented as an extended treatment of the phrase in the Six Kings, ‘anguisera ces dentz sur les portes de Paris’: Dentibus aprinis infertur mors Parisinis; Sunt dentes tuti, mundi, fortes et acuti. Apro vivente, prudenter regna regente, Anglia dat lumen, dum Deus apri dat acumen. (Death is inflicted on Paris by the boar’s tusks; the tusks are sure, clean, strong, and sharp. By the living boar, ruling the kingdom wisely, England gives out light, while God gives sharpness [or cunning] to the boar.) 122

The boar’s activities are understood as part of a prophetically, and divinely, ratified imagining of English imperialism. Importantly, in all closely contemporary uses of this material, the boar was a fundamentally positive cipher, engaging with a very specific vision of English kingship, and a particular understanding of universal history in which the English king’s building of an insular and pan-European empire was an important chapter. The ambitions of this sequence may have even appeared close to realisation when at the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War, Edward was appointed by the Emperor Louis IV as ‘vicar of the Emperor in the field’, with extensive political authority over Germany and the Low Countries.123 However, despite its later jingoist utility, the Six Kings is a deeply pessimistic product of a period of pronounced anxiety. It does not conclude with the triumphs of the boar but two generations later, with a vision of Scottish resurgence with much in common with that of the reign of the goat. The boar is followed by an ass, who is deposed by a mole, who possesses various negative characteristics and who flees the island at the prophecy’s conclusion, retreating from enemies who strike from beyond the borders of England. The representative value of the mole doubtless stands in relation to its place in contemporary bestiaries as a

Thomas Wright, ed., Political Poems and Songs Relating to English History, 2 vols (London, 1859–61; RS 14), I, pp. 26–40 (p. 28). My translation. For another possible translation, see T. B. James and J. Simons, The Poems of Laurence Minot 1333–52 (Exeter, 1989), pp. 86–96 (p. 87). For the most recent discussion of the poem, see Joanna Bellis, ‘Propaganda or Parody? Latin Abuse Poetry from the Hundred Years War’, in Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages, ed. Victoria Flood and Aisling Byrne (Turnhout, 2017; forthcoming). See also Flood, ‘Wynnere and Wastoure’, pp. 441–42. 123 W. M. Ormrod, The Reign of Edward III (Stroud, 2000), p. 19; Benjamin Arnold, ‘England and Germany, 1050–1350’, in England and Her Neighbours: Essays in Honour of Pierre Chaplais, ed. Michael Jones and Malcolm Vale (London, 1989), pp. 43–52 (p. 50). 122

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figure of cowardice: in bestiaries the mole is said to flee the light.124 It remained an antipathetic cipher in English political prophecy: the term ‘moldwarp’ employed in the English Prose Translation was even lifted from a Lollard insult.125 In the reign of this king, the pan-insular dominion of the ages of Edward I and Edward III disappears forever. Under pressure from a coalition between a dragon from the north, a wolf from the west, and a lion from Ireland, the mole is forced from the island to the sea, where he drowns. As this passage is damaged in Harley 746, I quote also from the English Prose Translation. We read of the death of the mole: ‘[…] qar il sera noie en […] son semail devendra por touz jours en estranges terre’ (‘[…] for he will drown in […] his seed will arrive in a strange land for all days’) (fol. 3r); ‘for he shal bene drenchede in a flode of þe see, his seede shal bicome pure faderles in straunge lande for euermore’. This material comes very close to the vision of the exile of the Saxon seed that we find in Geoffrey’s reworked Omen of the Dragons.126 This is not simply a vision of the decline of one king but of a nation in exile, under pressure from threats on its borders. The prophecy concludes with the division of ‘terre d’engleterre’ in three between the dragon, wolf, and lion, and the relinquishing of the heirs of England of their heritage: ... serra la terre d’engleterre departie en trois entre le drago[un et] le lou et le leon si serra tost en apres cele temps terre de conq[ueste]. E si finerount les heires d’engleterre hors de heritage. (… the land of England will be divided into three between the dragon and the wolf and the lion, and soon after this time it will be the land of conquest. And so the heirs of England will make an end of their heritage.) (fol. 3r)

This forecasts a three-part division of ‘engleterre’ under forces from the north, the west, and Ireland. We might understand this as the breaking away of Wales and Scotland from English rule, and the establishment of three independent kingdoms: the separation of the three crowns of Brutus. However, on the literal level, the threefold division of ‘engleterre’ (we cannot say whether this genuinely means England, or whether it functions as an imperialist conceptualisation of the island as a whole) will be between three different interest groups, who may or may not

This correspondence is noted by Coote, although she does not observe this figure as one of exile. Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 108. 125 Fulton, ‘Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Uses of Prophecy’, p. 112. Any association of the prophecy with Lollard movements remains obscure. 126 See above, p. 40. 124

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be national. This presented a fruitful ambiguity, which sustained the political re-use of this passage into the fifteenth century. The alliance between the wolf, the lion, and the dragon has an important later reception history, discussed further in Chapter 4. The prophecy-author was, we have noted, an avid reader of the Prophetiae Merlini, and the dominant inspiration for this passage must have been the antiEnglish alliance of Prophetiae, 110–14. However, there is an important innovation here: Ireland has been added as a hostile locale. This is perhaps an extension of the integration of Ireland in Langtoft’s re-working of Prophetiae, 110–14 as an endorsement of the conquests of Edward I.127 It is also, however, directly reactive to the political conditions of this period, which were in many respects tied to the English crown’s assertions of power in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries: simultaneous opposition from Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Presentiment of an anti-English alliance appears in political poems from the reign of Edward I onwards, although we might also note its commonality with anxieties about Welsh rebellion contemporary with Geoffrey of Monmouth, noted in Chapter 1.128 However, the biggest worry of the early fourteenth century appears to have been the activities of the Bruces, and their potential consolidation of opponents to the English crown. The anti-English alliance of the Six Kings is almost certainly a reference to the Bruces’ activities in Ireland and overtures to Wales, for the author envisages a Scottish-led coalition. We might note with some interest the use of the dragon signifier in the Six Kings, associated not with the Welsh – a prophetic precedent we can trace back to the Omen of the Dragons – but the Scots. The dragon comes not from the west but the north. Certainly, the prophecy-author must have had the terms of the Omen in mind, but tellingly, from his perspective, the dominant anti-English force during this period, and potential leader of an anti-English coalition, was understood to be Scottish. We might tentatively place the composition of the prophecy contemporary with the Bruce invasion of Ireland, a time of particular anxiety in England about Scottish-led assaults from Wales and Ireland. During this period, the author of the Vita Edwardi II recorded a rumour then in circulation that the Bruces planned to go from Ireland to Wales to raise the Welsh in rebellion against the king.129 This was a high political concern: the English government were genuinely anxious about the spread of rebellion to Wales, and measures were taken to ensure the loyalty of prominent Welsh subjects, especially after See above, p. 73. Peter Coss, ed. and transl., Thomas Wright’s Political Songs of England: From the Reign of John to that of Edward II (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 162–63. 129 McNamee, Wars of the Bruces, p. 190; Duffy, Ireland in the Middle Ages, p. 136. 127 128

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September 1315, when Scottish ships raided Holyhead and a potential political crisis loomed.130 The prophecy-author was probably familiar not only with political concerns about Bruce activity, but Bruce engagements with prophecy. Given its wide circulation, he would probably have known Bruti Posteritas, which he would have understood, in relation to Prophetiae, 110–14, as a statement of contemporary Bruce ambitions in Scotland, Wales, and depending on his understanding of the term ‘Scoti’, Ireland also. Functionally, the application of this material in the Six Kings is very similar to the original invocation of Prophetiae, 110–14 by Geoffrey of Monmouth: an attempted reconstruction of anti-English prophecy. Therefore, as much as it expresses anxiety about Scottish political, and prophetic, strategies, the conclusion of the Six Kings is also a testament to a shared prophetic culture common to England and Scotland.

Als Y Yod and the Six Kings Tradition Early in the reign of Edward III, the despised mole came to be used as an expression of antipathy towards Scottish kings rather than English. This is a feature of the Middle English prophecy beginning ‘Als Y Yod on ay Monnday’, a composition in ballad form which probably dates to shortly after the English victory at Halidon Hill in 1333. The prophecy is an important, and hitherto un-noted, example of the uses of the Six Kings in application to Anglo-Scottish affairs during the early years of the reign of Edward III. Previous analysis of the relationship between the Six Kings and Als Y Yod has treated the latter as evidence of a possible Celtic source tradition, which influenced the Six Kings.131 This hypothesis is entirely spurious: both productions are firmly in keeping with English prophetic traditions of this period, and the Six Kings is certainly the earlier of the two. I suggest that Als Y Yod is actually a valuable marker of the reception and uses of the Six Kings in the cultivation of a distinctively Galfridian national paradigm by an author of prophecy writing in northern England. It is the earliest surviving English-language treatment of the Six Kings, pre-dating Minot by over a decade, and the English Prose Translation by nearly four. The prophecy is found only in MS BL Cotton Julius A. v (fols 180r–181v), compiled c. 1330–60.132 It incorporates place names from north-east England, and has been regarded as an anchor text for early fourteenth-century northern

Davies, Age of Conquest, p. 387. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 118. 132 DIMEV, no. 639-1. See also Ward, Catalogue of Romances I, pp. 299–300. 130 131

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Middle English.133 The narrator is situated between ‘Wylunden’ and ‘Walle’, generally understood as either Willington, outside Newcastle, and Wallsend, one mile distant from it; or Whittington, a village five miles east of Hexham, and Wall, one mile to the north. A reference to ‘Lanchestre ye parke syde’, which appears in the opening lines of the prophecy, is generally understood as an allusion to Lanchester in County Durham.134 The prophecy incorporates material which appears to have had a relatively wide regional purchase, and is an important marker of political mentalities in this region during this period. It can be contextualised within the same literary-political culture as other texts in Cotton Julius A. v: the Original Prose Version, the Chronique of Pierre de Langtoft, and other materials pertaining to the wars with Scotland.135 The folios containing Als Y Yod and the Six Kings were originally part of MS BL Royal 20. A. ii, a collection localised in northern England, containing Arthurian and historical material in Latin and insular French. The two works appear to be in the same hand, although were probably integrated in the collection on different occasions. The two read as part of a coherent prophetic tradition, with particular application to Anglo-Scottish affairs. The prophecy is an early text in the tradition associated with Thomas of Erceldoune, although he is not here named. It is framed as a dialogue between the narrator and a ‘litel man’ (a figure with some affinity to later Scottish ballad traditions),136 invoking a supernatural sphere of knowledge analogous to the fairy mistress legend later associated with Thomas. Although this prologue, alongside the author’s use of the ballad form, has been regarded as evidence of its popular origins, the prophecy is in fact engaged with high political affairs, and (as we find in the later Erceldoune tradition also) is tonally consistent with its principal source material, the Six Kings.137 The prophecy proper is concerned with a dispute Margaret Laing, ‘Anchor Texts and Literary Manuscripts in Early Middle English’, in Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Felicity Riddy (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 27–52 (p. 51); Margaret Laing, Catalogue of Sources for a Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English (Cambridge, 1993), p. 77. LAEME, no. 188. 134 Ingeborg Nixon, ed., Thomas of Erceldoune, 2 vols (Copenhagen, 1983), II, pp. 41–42. 135 Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, p. 574; Thiolier, Pierre de Langtoft, pp. 35–41. 136 Emily Lyle, Fairies and Folk: Approaches to the Scottish Ballad Tradition (Trier, 2007), pp. 36–43. 137 This is presumably what Coote refers to when she comments on its ‘linguistic arrangement’ as suggestive of a particular type of ‘folk wisdom’. Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 118. Across England, from the medieval to the early modern period, the ballad form was utilised by authors working in the orbit of powerful local dynasties, who composed ballads as a literary mode of high political commentary, and even encomium. For example, the ballads associated with Stanley earls of Derby. Discussed by Aisling Byrne and Victoria Flood, ‘The Romance of the Stanleys: Regional and National Imaginings in the Percy Folio’, Viator 46(1) (2015): 327–51. 133

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between two figures, a toupe (a mole, in Frenchified Middle English) and a bare (boar):138 ‘A toupe sal stande agayn a bare / he es ful bald him dare habide.’139 In the broader context of English political prophetic production during this period, we can only understand the boar as Edward III – and here we find a localised counterpart to the boar of Minot’s poems. We might regard the mole during this period as something of a free-floating signifier, associated with illegitimate rule, which naturally in England came to be associated with the Bruce monarchy. The inclusion of a cipher for a Scottish monarch in a prophecy from this period is notable – the Battle of Halidon Hill (which I take as the broader context for the text’s production) belongs to the minority of David II, and the Scottish force was led by the earl of Douglas. However, the king does appear to have been understood as present at the battle in some English accounts.140 At Halidon Hill, Edward fulfilled some of the expectations of the futurist account of his reign given in the Six Kings. The little man alludes to a battle which took place close to the River Tweed: ‘For twenti souzand mot yon say/ yat deyed tother day on yis half Twede.’141 Indeed, the whole text might be understood as a This identification is not without controversy. Working on the basis of the scribe’s writing system (his use of ‘ou’), Laing has suggested that toupe should be read as tup, meaning ram (a modern English regional usage, confined to northern English and Scottish dialects, possibly of earlier origin). Working on the basis of the scribe’s treatment of other French loan words, we would expect the French taupe to preserve its spelling in his Middle English. M. Laing, ‘Words Reread: Middle English Writing Systems and the Dictionary’, Linguistica e filologia 13 (2001): 87–129 (pp. 96–100). However, we might regard the scribe’s spelling of toupe as an anomalous treatment of a French loan word, for the inclusion of the boar and the mole places the text within a much clearer context of political prophecy active in the north of England during this period, than the boar and the ram: the world of the Six Kings. This correspondence was rejected by Laing, on the basis of a discursive gap between the concerns of Als Y Yod, which she understood to be a ballad on the Scottish wars, and the Six Kings, which she placed at a considerable conceptual distance. 139 The prophecy has been printed by Wright, with a modern English verse translation, in Pierre de Langtoft, pp. 452–67. The text has also been printed by A. Brandl and O. Zippel, ed., Mittelenglische Sprach und Literaturproben (Berlin, 1917), pp. 137–40; John Finlay, ed., Scottish Historical and Romantic Ballads, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1808), II, pp. 163–205; F. J. Child, ed., English and Scottish Ballads, 8 vols (Boston, 1857–59), I, pp. 273–76 (encounter with little man only). All transcriptions are problematic, so I quote here from my own. Line divisions follow the ballad form, although couplets run continuously in the manuscript. 140 For example, the Romance of the Battle of Halidon Hill concludes: ‘But y canne not telle off þe yen Going/ Off þe too kingges, were þei become, / & weþer þei wenten oute or home.’ Brut, pp. 287–89. 141 The manuscript is here damaged, so for the word ‘Twede’, we are reliant on the earlier transcriptions, for which see above, n. 139. 138

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retrospective prophecy of the battle. Certainly, as is discussed in Chapter 3, there is at least one extant Erceldoune prophecy concerned with the English victory at Halidon Hill: Thomas of Erceldoune’s Reply in Harley 2253.142 Als Y Yod shares its central question with this, and other texts in the English Erceldoune tradition: will the English be successful in the wars against the Scots? Wat sal worth of yis were     war And eke our folke hou sal yai fare Yat at were bi northern nou Sal yai haue any contre yare

The prophecy-author frames this question in relation to the fate of the ‘folke’. We might understand this as a vernacular counterpart to the use of ‘gentz’ in the Six Kings, a designation which is at once localist, and more broadly national: it pertains to both stability in this region (and indeed, the word ‘stabilite’ recurs across the prophecy), and the success of the English king in Scotland. Localist interests are approached in the context of high political actors and systems of representation, a strategy which again the text shares with the Six Kings. Halidon Hill was an important moment in the history of the northern English border. It represented a significant departure not only from the defeats of Edward II’s reign, but the unpopular 1328 Treaty of Northampton, orchestrated by Queen Isabella and her lover Roger Mortimer and rejected by Edward following his assumption of active rule in 1330.143 The treaty restored the border to the conditions of the reign of Alexander III, recognised the legitimacy of the Bruce kingship, and the so-called shameful peace it instigated was recorded with particular antipathy by northern English chroniclers. In his Scalacronica, Thomas Gray writes of the treaty as an act which disinherited a number of prominent northern lords, and cites it as one of the chief causes of the undoing of Isabella and Mortimer.144 The prophecy contains a figure suggestive of this. A leopard (figuring English royal authority, an allusion to the English royal arms) grants a lion (similarly found in Scottish royal heraldry) the freedom to ravage the land, while the boar is constrained by ‘foles’, and the mole emboldens his people: See below, pp. 123–30. Lanercost, pp. 261–62; Ranald Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots: The Formative Years of a Military Career, 1327–1335 (London, 1965), pp. 55–56; Ormrod, Reign of Edward III, pp. 14–17. 144 Thomas Gray, Scalacronica 1272–1363, ed. and transl. Andy King (Woodbridge, 2005), pp. 100–01. See further, McKisack, Fourteenth Century, pp. 98–99; Cynthia J. Neville, Violence, Custom and Law: The Anglo-Scottish Border Lands in the Later Middle Ages (Edinburgh, 1998), p. 27. 142 143

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So lange ye Lebard loues ye layke wit his onsped your sped ye spille And lates ye lion haue his raike wit werke in werdl als he wille ye bare es bonden hard in baite wit foles yat wil folies fille ye toupe in toune your werkes wayte to bald his folke he bides stille

game harm, purpose, kill move freely the world fashion foolishness embolden

One of the chief concerns of the author is the security of territorial possessions against Scottish threats. English overlordship in Scotland is understood as a safeguard of these interests. The concluding vision of the prophecy is the rule of the boar, who is named also as a ‘blessed brother’: ffra suth sal blessed brother comen and dele ye lande in twa wen domes es doand on his dede sal no mercy be biside na naman haue mercy for na mede na in hope yair heuedes hide And seen sal leaute falsed lede in rapes sone after yat tyde ffra twa to three ye land es liest bot nameli sal it fra ye twa ye lion yare sal fare to fex it ye lande til ye bare sal go

part judgement bribe heads loyalty, falsehood ropes

afflict

This passage is again reminiscent of the English Erceldoune tradition, which is similarly populated by personifications of a type with ‘leaute’ and ‘falsed’. It shares with these prophecies a sense of a world in disarray, which is here put to rights. This orderly new age is associated with the merciless justice of the ‘blessed brother’, presumably exercised against the Scots. Interestingly, there is potentially some recognition of Scottish territory here, for the author is concerned with the division of the land ‘in twa’: clarification of the border between England and Scotland. This appears to be understood, however, in relation to a tripartite territorial configuration, suggestive of English insular overlordship. The movement of the land from ‘twa to three’ may well be intended as a figure of the addition of Scotland to the insular dominions of the king of England (alongside England and Wales), and is potentially suggestive of the three crowns of Edward I, and Edward III after him. This was a functional and familiar piece of political rhetoric in prophecies from northern England, based on the reformulation of Prophetiae, 110–14 as a figure of

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English insular conquest. The prophecy continues: ‘An Ed the thred wyt hope and hande / ye baillife bee.’145 There are two possibilities here. Either we regard ‘Ed ye thred’ as Edward III, a direct revealing of the identity of the boar; or we understand it as an allusion to Edward Balliol, for ‘bailiffe’ could feasibly be a play on his name, who following Halidon Hill (temporarily) styled himself King of Scotland, under Edward III.146 Either possibility accords with the time frame I have suggested. Finally, we might note the possible appearance of another political actor in this passage. In relation to the territorial control of ‘Ed the thred’, we read: ‘A T biside an L ii fonde / chese yi selven sege [same man] and see.’ Given the date, and broader political context, I have suggested for the prophecy, this might be read as an allusion to Thomas of Lancaster, first cousin of Edward II, ‘viceroy of England’, and leader of the baronial opposition of Edward II’s reign.147 Thomas was executed, in ignominious fashion, at his estate in Pontefract in 1322 following a failed rebellion against the crown, and, held to have been engaged in an alliance with the Scottish king, was doubly branded a traitor. Although chroniclers were quick to acknowledge that he was a man with a mixed reputation, a cult quickly grew up following his death.148 A number of miracles were reported at his tomb in Pontefract: the restoration of sight to the blind, healing of the lame, and even resurrection of the dead.149 His tomb became a site of pilgrimage, and this is presumably the basis of the allusion to the seeking and finding of Thomas in the prophecy. Thomas’s post-mortem value appears to have been first and foremost political. Throughout the reign of Edward II, devotion to Thomas from the north of England to London functioned as a form of coded resistance to the regime, impossible to prosecute. The early years of the reign of Edward III saw an attempt to incorporate Thomas within the machinery of government: the young king appealed to the pope to canonise Thomas (although this was unsuccessful).150 ‘I’ is always written ‘ii’ in the text. Nicholson, Scotland, p. 129. 147 J. R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster, 1307–22 (London, 1970); Michael Prestwich, The Three Edwards: War and State in England, 1272–1377 (London, 2003), pp. 76–83. 148 John Edwards, ‘The Cult of ‘‘St’’ Thomas of Lancaster and its Iconography’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 64 (1992): 103–22; John Edwards, ‘The Cult of ‘‘St’’ Thomas of Lancaster and its Iconography: A Supplementary Note’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 67 (1995): 187–91; Danna Piroyansky, ‘Bloody Miracles of a Political Martyr: The Case of Thomas Earl of Lancaster’, Studies in Church History 41 (2005): 228–38; John T. McQuillen, ‘Who Was St Thomas of Lancaster? New Manuscript Evidence’, Fourteenth Century England 4 (2006): 1–25; Hugh Tait, ‘Pilgrim-signs and Thomas of Lancaster’, British Museum Quarterly 20 (1955–56): 39–47. 149 Polychronicon, VIII, pp. 312–15; Brut, pp. 228–31. 150 Edwards, ‘The Cult of ‘‘St’’ Thomas of Lancaster’, p. 107; Piroyansky, ‘Bloody Miracles’, p. 232. 145 146

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This was a highly symbolic act by Edward, signalling a clear division between past misrule and his assumption of political responsibility, and belongs to the period in which we can locate the composition of the prophecy. Notably, Thomas appears to have become a figure of political prophecy during the 1330s. An allusion to a rebellious bear found in the Original Prose Version of the Six Kings, which may well have been originally genuinely futurist, was interpreted by the Brut-author as a reference to Thomas’s activities against Edward II.151 Thomas is probably employed in Als Y Yod as an unofficial saint, endorsing an aggressive English royal policy in Scotland. This is a device which the prophecy-author may have lifted from the Chronique of Pierre de Langtoft: the divine ratification of the English king’s conquests by an insular saint. Langtoft appeals to John of Beverley, Thomas Becket, and St Cuthbert to support Edward I in his Scottish venture, and the three function as guarantors of his success.152 Like the Six King, Als Y Yod is in many respects a very English, and highly jingoist, text. However, also like the Six Kings, its author borrows not only from contemporary English literary-political strategy but Scottish also. It occupies a framework of meaning that would become commonplace in the later Erceldoune tradition, into which the text feeds: a vogue for secular apocalyptic prophetic writing with much in common with Bruti Posteritas. Although in its account of the boar’s prowess, the prophecy conforms to the restoration structure found in the Six Kings, the eschatological resonances which inform it are of a very different character. The author is not concerned, as in the Six Kings, with the journey of an imperial monarch across Europe to Jerusalem, but a secularised Last Judgement which takes place on the Anglo-Scottish border. The narrator is told by the little man of a great battle to occur ‘a time bifor the trinite’, that is, the Last Judgement. This is presented as the very occasion for the composition of the prophecy, and it almost certainly refers to Halidon Hill: rymitt reith als you may     write verses for ay skill ii tellit ye and warn em wel wyt outen nay a time bifor the trinite yare sal deye on ay day a folke on felde ful fa sal flee wa so flees sal duelle in care for yare may naman time tyde

Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 576–77; Brut, pp. 244–45. Pierre de Langtoft, II, pp. 284–85; Summerfield, ‘The Testimony of Writing’, p. 40.

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The implication is that the battle between the forces of the boar and the mole will be a last great (secular) judgement before the Day of Judgement. Halidon Hill is presented as the definitive moment not only in the history of the region but in a salvation history understood in decidedly localist terms. This conceptual framework is first found in relation to Anglo-Scottish affairs in Bruti Posteritas. This apocalyptic imagining has stronger claims to be an originally Scottish rather than English prophetic trope, for Bruti Posteritas is the earlier text and very plausibly inspired this passage. Rather than a direct manipulation and containment of this Scottish prophecy (as we find in the Six Kings), Als Y Yod suggests the influence of Scottish prophecy on a deep structural level.

Conclusion This chapter has offered a new analysis of a transitional period in the history of insular political prophecy. The texts discussed here suggest that the relationship between English and Scottish political prophetic production was far richer than has hitherto been fully appreciated. The wars with Scotland and the Arthurian and Galfridian rhetoric of the age of Edward I created a new prophetic vogue both in England (celebratory) and in Scotland (oppositional), which entered into dialogue during the early decades of the fourteenth century, fostered by a common stock of Galfridian allusions and a linguistic as well as cultural commonality. This created a new English tradition, which emerged with particular force in northern England, although its circulation was certainly far wider. The notion of the antiEnglish alliance, enshrined in Geoffrey’s Prophetiae, 110–14 (a simplification of a far less easily reducible Welsh concept) proved to be of considerable utility both to the Bruce faction and their prophets, and to English prophetic authors in their apprehension of threats to English sovereignty. Engagements with prophecy were not purely literary, but political also, and certainly in the case of the Bruces, appear to have genuinely motivated political behaviour, as a succinct articulation of a dominant political ideology. We must dispense with the understanding of prophecy as a popular, or in any sense broadly socially representational, discourse during this period. These texts spoke to the interests of polite elites, articulating very specific conceptualisations of the national past and future. Their chief concern is certainly the fate of a nation, but this was conceived in terms of territorial and political control. On both sides of the border, prophecy engaged with the interests of political elites, of those with some measure of existing political power. It was certainly not the domain of the disenfranchised.

chapter 3

‘Whan shal this be?’ The English Erceldoune Tradition, c. 1310s–90s

E

nglish prophetic texts from the Scottish Wars of Independence are a distinctive combination of jingoism and pessimism. This is a defining feature of the English prophecies ascribed to the Scottish border prophet Thomas of Erceldoune, also known as Thomas the Rhymer or Thomas Rhymer.1 The texts discussed in this chapter were composed in northern England between the 1310s and the 1380s or 1390s, although they draw on Scottish background traditions that potentially go back as early as 1286. This places the early compositions roughly contemporary with the Original Prose Version of the Six Kings, to which English Erceldoune prophecy stands in a direct relationship. Like the Six Kings, the English Erceldoune prophecies are visions of pan-­ insular high kingship. Also like the Six Kings, they are decidedly anxious about the balance of power on the Anglo-Scottish border, but they incorporate Scottish threats in a vision of cataclysm that far exceeds anything we find in the earlier prophecy. They situate English insular overlordship as the culmination of a long and bloody process, a history in which English defeats appear as often as English victories. In this respect, they represent something of the weariness, and uncertainty, of this period in the northern counties, where the English Erceldoune tradition began. Indeed, the question common to the early Erceldoune prophecies, from which this chapter takes its title, is: when will the Scottish wars end? In the answers given to this, we see a longing for regional stability as much as English For previous studies on the Erceldoune tradition, see James A. H. Murray, ed., The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (London, 1875; EETS OS 61); Alois Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune (Berlin, 1880); Josephine M. Burnham, ‘A Study of Thomas of Erceldoune’, Periodical of the Modern Language Association 23 (1908): 375– 420; Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 65–72; Rossell Hope Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, in A Manual of Writings in Middle English 1050–1550, ed. Albert E. Hartung, vol. 5 (New Haven, CT, 1975), pp. 1385–1536 (pp. 1524–28); Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune; Lyle, Fairies and Folk, pp. 5–60; Helen Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune: Romance as Prophecy’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, ed. Corinne Saunders (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 171–87.

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victory. These texts tell us something both of the misery of life on the northern border during the wars, and the terms through which the high stakes of insular sovereignty were articulated by authors working in this region, deeply immersed in a long tradition of Galfridian prophecy. Erceldoune prophecies have long been held to be representative of a type of gnomic folk wisdom with a popular political appeal, possibly even of oral origin. In recent scholarship, they have been located outside the intellectual mainstream of English political prophecy.2 Certainly, they are highly formulaic, but this is not sufficient evidence alone on which to argue for their origin among a social stratum below those surveyed in the previous chapters, or their extraliterary nature. The idea of these texts as popular seems to have come in part from a consideration of the language choice of their authors: the Erceldoune texts were composed in English rather than Latin or French.3 This stratification of languages is highly problematic when applied to this period. The first flourishing of the English Erceldoune prophecies belongs to the same century as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain-poet. English was a literary language, and they were conceived of as part of a literary-political tradition.4 As we shall see, they cannot be analysed in isolation from earlier and contemporary prophetic currents, including the Prophetiae and the Six Kings. Their authors were familiar with prophecies composed in Latin and French, alongside English. Furthermore, we must not underestimate their high political appeal. As I discuss in Chapter 4, Erceldoune prophecies saw high political application in both England and Wales during the fifteenth century. This facet of their reception history makes them a particularly important subject for detailed study: Erceldoune prophecies were a genuinely pan-insular literary-political phenomenon. Envisaging the desolation of the landscape and catastrophic battles, Erceldoune prophecies come the closest of all the works in the English secular prophetic tradition discussed so far, to the visions of divine condemnation and human suffering Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 100. Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 111. This idea of the stratification of insular languages is discussed in relation to the Six Kings in the previous chapter. We cannot see language shifts as necessarily indicative of broadening participation in political prophecy – the interests of the discourse remain the same, and fundamentally invested in the interests of a particular class.  4 For a comment on the status of Middle English as a literary, and even a prestige, language from the early fourteenth century onwards (if not earlier), and the interest of fourteenth-century English authors in their ‘canonical’ status, see Nicholas Watson, ‘The Politics of Middle English Writing’, in The Idea of the Vernacular: An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory 1280–1520, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, Nicholas Watson, Andrew Taylor, and Ruth Evans (Exeter, 1999), pp. 331–52 (esp. pp. 332–33, 345–47).  2  3

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of biblical and sibylline prophecy. Yet these are decidedly secular texts, interested not in faith but in territory. As a type of cataclysmic presentiment, the Erceldoune tradition is not unique in its lack of interest in a fully developed eschatological schema. It has much in common with the oldest prophecies of the Old Testament (for example, the first Isaiah, and elements of the book of Daniel): texts that map prophetic ciphers onto precise historical events and expectations, mixing historical retrospectives with assurances of a great, and enduring, national future. We might go so far as to say that in the English Erceldoune prophecies we encounter a kind of Old Testament nationalism, in which the culmination of history is not in the age to come but in the fullest realisation of territorial ownership and belonging.

Thomas of Erceldoune in Scotland The study of Erceldoune prophecy has long occupied an uncertain position between English and Scottish literary history. Although the genesis of the legends associated with Thomas were almost certainly Scottish, the earliest recorded prophecies are not. The names Thomas of Erceldoune and Thomas Rhymer (probably originally a surname, although it appears to have later assumed an epithetic quality) survive in two charters from the late thirteenth century (referring to two generations of Thomases), relating to Melrose Abbey and the village of Erceldoune, modern Earlston, in Berwickshire.5 The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography records this provenance for the historical person ‘Thomas of Erceldoune […] supposed author of poetry and prophecies’.6 The earliest known prophecies attributed to Thomas belong to the fourteenth century, and the use of his name must be understood as a form of legendary authorisation, analogous to the uses of the name Merlin. Understandably, Scottish sources for the early prophecies ascribed to Thomas have long been conjectured. The foremost proponent of this was James A. H. Murray, the nineteenth-century editor of the late fourteenth-century Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune (the modern title given to the work by Murray).7 As Helen Cooper has observed, acquainted with traditions of Thomas and his prophecies still active in southern Scotland, Murray brought a level of familiarity to material that has struck generations of English critics with Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. ix–xi; Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, pp. 328–29; Cyril Edwards, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune (called Thomas the Rhymer)’, ODNB [last accessed 10 March 2016]; Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, p. 176.  6 Edwards, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’.  7 Murray, Romance and Prophecies.  5

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its o ­ bscurity.8 Scholars of the Erceldoune tradition remain indebted to him. However, there are some big problems with Murray’s central thesis. For Murray, the stock prophecy associated with Thomas, the return of a long prophesied deliverer, was derived from a current of British Arthuriana assimilated into lowland Scottish prophetic culture while there was still a sizeable level of British influence in the region.9 This position has been (tentatively) entertained by more recent scholars, but it is highly problematic.10 Although a number of place-names in southern Scotland appear to have been associated with Arthur from as early as the beginning of the twelfth century, there is no obviously prophetic aspect to this.11 Notably, in a much later folkloric context, Thomas himself was identified as a hero returning from the dead to the Eildon Hills, an important site in his own legend, associated also with Arthur.12 This idea later appears to have seen broad Scottish transmission: Thomas’s return from the dead as a prophesied hero, leading the Gaels to victory in battle, is well-attested in Gaelic literature from the Highlands from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13 However, there is no medieval record of this idea. Importantly, the earliest surviving Scottish Erceldoune materials contain no Arthurian element, and where we find it in the English, it owes more to the boar of Windsor than any residual British motif. It has also been suggested by scholars that Erceldoune prophecy in Scotland has some connection to a continuous tradition of Gaelic prophecy, with a heavily messianic aspect.14 However, the earliest evidence of the integration of Thomas’s name in Scottish Gaelic prophetic culture is from the mid-seventeenth century, in literature rallying support for the Stewart kings.15 This late date is not surprising, given that Thomas is not a highland but a lowland figure, associated with the area around the Eildon Hills in the Scottish borders. Although we cannot categorically rule out some elements of Gaelic influence, this material has no strong medieval Gaelic analogues, and legends of Thomas in Scotland most probably began among Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, p. 172. Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. xxvii–xxviii. 10 MacInnes, ‘Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition’, p. 20. Coote and Thornton have understood this theme to be ‘Celtic’, a problematic designation – see ‘Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon’, pp. 127–28. 11 Padel, ‘Nature of Arthur’, pp. 25–26. 12 Lyle, Fairies and Folk, pp. 21–22. 13 MacInnes, ‘Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition’, pp. 19–20. 14 MacInnes, ‘Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition’, p. 20. See also Michael Newton, ‘Prophecy and Cultural Conflict in Gaelic Tradition’, Scottish Studies 35 (2007–10): 144–73 (pp. 162–63). Newton gives this as one of a number of possible hypotheses concerning the Gaelic reception of Erceldoune prophecy. 15 Newton, ‘Prophecy and Cultural Conflict in Gaelic Tradition’, p. 146. See also, John MacInnes, ‘The Gaelic Literary Tradition’, in Dùthchas nan Gàidheal, pp. 163–81 (p. 169).  8  9

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the Scots-speaking communities of the lowlands, the same geographical locale among which Emily Lyle has traced the later ballads concerning his adventures.16 Certainly, the earliest Scottish references to Thomas, found in the chronicles, come from the lowlands.17 Although no complete Scottish prophetic texts associated with Thomas exist from the early period, there are avenues through which we can attempt to reconstruct his place in fourteenth-century Scottish legendary and historical culture. There appear to be two strands to this: an origin tale concerning the supernatural nature of Thomas’s prophetic abilities, preserved in English and later Scottish sources but with strong claims to a lowland Scottish origin; and more sober accounts of the types of vaticination associated with him in Scottish chronicles, again from the lowlands. The origin tale is first recorded in the northern English Romance and Prophecies, but there is a strong likelihood that it was based on Scottish material. It tells of Thomas’s meeting, and sexual encounter, with a fairy, on Huntley Banks (the precise location of which remains uncertain, although ‘Huntley’ is a common element in place names around Melrose).18 The fairy warns Thomas that if he lies with her she will lose her beauty. He breaks this prohibition and his fairy mistress undergoes a monstrous change (recognised as a variant of the loathly lady motif, although this may be a late addition to the legend).19 The two journey to the Otherworld, during which time the fairy regains her beauty. Thomas dwells there for what he believes to be three days but is in fact three years. The fairy then returns Thomas to Huntley Banks prior to hell’s tithe on the fairy realm, and as a parting gift gives him a true tongue and a series of prophecies about the wars. The setting of the fairy-narrative suggests an acquaintance on the part of the English author with material circulating in lowland Scotland, where the tale is set: the Eildon Hills close to Melrose. As Ingeborg Nixon notes in her edition of the text, names like Huntley Banks, and the Eildon tree (under which Thomas meets his fairy mistress), were unlikely to have been of any general significance in England.20 A Scottish ballad detailing Thomas’s fairy encounter, first recorded from an oral source in 1800, is closely related to the Romance and Prophecies (although it omits the fairy’s transformation), and Lyle has hypothesised that both are derived from a now lost medieval Scottish ballad.21 Certainly, as Lyle See above, n. 1, for Lyle. Newton, ‘Prophecy and Cultural Conflict’, p. 146. 18 Lyle, Fairies and Folk, pp. 14–15. 19 Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, p. 177; William Price Albrecht, The Loathly Lady in ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, with a Text of the Poem Printed in 1652 (Albuquerque, NM, 1954). For the possibility of this as a late addition, see Lyle, Fairies and Folk, pp. 55–60. 20 Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 47–48. 21 Lyle, Fairies and Folk, pp. 29–36. 16 17

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has demonstrated, the ballad resolves a number of obscurities in the romance, and as Cooper notes, unlike contemporary romances on similar subjects, the Romance and Prophecies is not written in tetrameter couplets or tail-rhyme but the ­quatrains of the conventional ballad stanza.22 There is an additional aspect to this material in the Romance and Prophecies that can tell us something about Thomas’s status in Scotland: an association with literary activity. Thomas asks for a token from his fairy mistress a request which directly prompts her prophecies (I quote from the earliest manuscript to contain the text, MS Lincoln Cathedral 91 – the Lincoln Thornton manuscript, compiled c. 1440s): ‘Gyff me a tokenynge, lady gaye, That j may saye j spake with the.’ ‘To harpe or carpe, whare-so þou gose, Thomas, þou sal hafe þe chose sothely.’ And he saide, ‘Larpynge kepe j none; ffor tonge es chefe of mynstralsye.’ ‘If þou will spelle, or tales telle, Thomas, þou sall neuer lesynge lye.’

sing/recite choice care not

tell lies (311–18)23

Thomas is given a choice between (true and truthful) literary and musical ability, opting for the former. Although Lyle has rightly observed that this motif has a number of analogues in Irish and Welsh poetic culture, we cannot so much understand its origin in this instance as Celtic but as pan-insular.24 Thomas’s association with tale telling was an important component of his reputation in England from as early as the 1330s. He is mentioned in a number of fourteenth-century English texts as a historical Scottish poet. The much-cited testimonies of Robert Mannyng (writing c. 1338) and the author of the Middle English Sir Tristrem in the Auchinleck manuscript (c. 1340), claim Thomas as an authority for the Tristrem tale.25 Although we have no reason to suspect the existence of a lost Tristrem, and Thomas of Erceldoune may well have been conflated with the author of one version of the tale, Thomas of Britain, his association with tale telling is Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, p. 173. I quote from Murray’s edition rather than Nixon’s, as this remains the more readily accessible for readers. 24 Lyle, Fairies and Folk, pp. 27–29. See also, Michael Newton, ‘Bha mi ’s a’ chnoc: Creativity in the Scottish Gaelic Tradition’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 18–19 (1998–99): 312–38 (pp. 335–37). 25 Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. xx–xxi. 22 23

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­ ndeniable. As Cooper suggests, we might think of Sir Tristrem as the type of u rhymed Middle English text that Thomas ‘might have written’.26 This sits interestingly with Lyle’s idea that Thomas might in fact be the oldest Scots poet whose name is known to us, if not his works.27 The fairy-mistress narrative probably belongs to a different cultural stratum to the earliest chronicles recording Thomas’s prophecies, where Thomas appears as a political rather than a supernatural figure. These provide our principal sources for the reconstruction of the earliest Scottish traditions relating to his prophecies, and, like the fairy narrative, were drawn on by the anonymous English authors discussed in this chapter. In his account of the events of the year 1335, Andrew of Wyntoun (c. 1350–1423) refers to the Battle of Culblean in relation to an undisclosed prophecy ascribed to ‘Thomas off Ersyldowne’: Off this fycht qwhilum spak Thomas Of Ersyldowne, that sayd in derne, Thare suld mete stalwartly stark and sterne.28

obscurely (lit. darkly) fierce, violent

Although Andrew does not repeat a particular prophecy, he implies that it was both accurate and pessimistic, for although the battle was commonly regarded as a turn in Scottish fortunes for the better, the battle was ‘stark and sterne’. Thomas’s prophetic authority was invoked in Scotland in similar terms into the sixteenth century: his name appears in retrospectives of the 1547 Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, a catastrophic Scottish defeat.29 Andrew of Wyntoun wrote in relation to a long Scottish historical tradition, now lost apart from a few distinctive markers, regarding Thomas as the prophet of the Scottish Wars of Independence. An association with Alexander III, and prophecies of his death, was almost certainly an early element of Thomas’s Scottish legend. Although the fullest articulation of this is found in a relatively late Scottish source, it makes sense of a number of earlier allusions, including those found in English sources (discussed below). In the entry for 1286 in the Scotichronicon, Thomas’s prophetic ability is traced back to the very beginning of the crisis of Scottish kingship. On the eve of the death of Alexander III, ‘Thomas de Ersildon’ expounds to the earl of Dunbar a prophecy of a great storm in Scotland, unprecedented in its ferocity.30 The meaning of this storm was both figurative and literal: Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, pp. 174–76. Lyle, Fairies and Folk, p. 7. 28 Andrew of Wyntoun, The Original Cronykil of Scotland, ed. David Laing, 1872, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1879), II, pp. 423–7. 29 Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, p. 336. 30 Scotichronicon, V, pp. 428–29. This reference might be indebted to the historical 26 27

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Alexander III died when his horse went over a cliff during a storm, and upon his death Scotland was plunged into turmoil.31 The reported prophecy shares its catastrophising with visions of national decline circulating in relation to Alexander’s death. Another good example, which may well have seen earlier use, is a verse drawn on by Andrew of Wyntoun elsewhere in his Chronicle: Sen Alexander our king wes deid, That Scotland left in luf and le Away wes sons of aill and breid, Off wyne and wax, of gamyn and gle.32

In Scottish historical retrospectives, the death of Alexander signified the beginning of unprecedented Scottish calamity, an event around which prophecies, and the names of prophets, might accrue.33 The legendary 1286 prophecy saw a number of re-workings into the early modern period, and formed a staple of Scottish narratives concerning Thomas.34 His name was also drawn into far more positive frameworks of meaning, looking not to the beginning of the Wars of Independence but to their end. This positive tradition associating Thomas with prophecies of Scottish victory and an end to the wars is found in an important fifteenth-century source. Thomas makes a cameo appearance in the Life of William Wallace by Harry the Minstrel. He is located at the Faile, a Cluniac priory in Ayrshire, to which he is a frequent visitor (an interesting reminder of the association between ecclesiastical milieux and prophecy). He is an important figure in the local community: people visit him to appeal for information pertaining to the outcome of ‘many diuerss cace’. It is unclear whether this refers to prophecies of more quotidian events as well as more overtly political ones, but again Thomas is understood as possessing knowledge of the end of the wars: ‘In rewlle of wer, quhethir thai tynt [lose] or wan.’ This episode appears in the broader context of William Wallace’s apparent death in prison after capture by the English. After hearing this news, Thomas tells the minister of the priory of the hero’s survival under the care of a woman of Newton, association of the village of Erceldoune with the Scottish earls of March, for which see Murray, Romance and Prophecies, p. xi. 31 Prestwich, Edward I, p. 358; Barrow, Robert Bruce, pp. 3–4. 32 Wyntoun, Chronicle, II, p. 266; cited also in Wilson, Lost Literature of Medieval England, pp. 205–06. 33 Murray takes this, in association with the charters bearing Thomas’s name, as evidence that the man on whom legends of the prophet were based was still alive in 1286. Romance and Prophecies, p. xv. This remains conjectural. 34 Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. xiv–xv.

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and soon Wallace’s survival is confirmed, after which Thomas makes a prophecy concerning the fate of Scotland before Wallace’s death: Than thomas said: ‘forsuth, or he decess, Mony thousand in feild sall mak thar end. Off this regioune he shall the sothroun send; And scotland thriss he shall bryng to the pess: So gud off hand agayne sall neuir be kend.’35

from, English thrice Mighty in battle, known

Thomas forecasts the banishing of the English (southron, a term used consistently for the English across the text) and the bringing of Scotland to peace. Erceldoune prophecy may also have seen more specifically factionalist use. Thomas’s name appears to have had a particular association with the ambitions of the Bruces. John Barbour’s Bruce (composed c. 1375–76) preserves a prophecy of Thomas relating to Robert I’s accession. As new spreads of Robert Bruce’s murder of John Comyn, the Bishop of St Andrews recollects a prophecy pertaining to Bruce: I hop Thomas prophecy Off Hersildoune sall veryfyd be In him [Robert Bruce], for swa Our Lord help me I haiff gret hop he sall be king And haiff this land all in leding (II. 86–90)36

This prophecy has an important function in line with Barbour’s conceptualisation of his work: he wrote under the patronage of the Stewarts, for whom Robert Bruce represented a model Scottish royal hero fighting for national freedom against the English.37 It may, however, as the most recent editor of the poem has argued, preserve a prophecy of a type with those drawn on by the Bruce faction from as early as 1307, the vision of Scottish independence articulated in Bruti Posteritas.38 There may be something in the association of Thomas with a Bruce victory. The late fourteenth-century Romance and Prophecies incorporates a prophecy with a claim to a direct Scottish source. We read of the decline of the great dynasties of

Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. xv–xvi. Bruce, p. 83. 37 Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England II, c. 1307 to the Early Sixteenth Century (London, 1996), pp. 81–83; Goldstein, Matter of Scotland, pp. 141–42. 38 Bruce, p. 83 n. See above, pp. 84–85. 35 36

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Scotland, with the exception of the Bruces. Again, I quote from the earliest manuscript version of the text containing this material, the Lincoln Thornton: Thomas, herkyne what j the saye: Whene a tree rote es dede, The ledes fadis þane & wytis a-waye; fade, wither & froyte it beris nane þane, whyte ne rede. Of þe baylliolfe blos so sall it falle: Balliol, blossom It sall be lyke a rotyne tree; The comyns, & þe Barlays alle, Barclays The Russells, & þe ffresells free, Rosses, noble Frasers All sall þay fade, and wyte a-waye: pass away Na ferly if þat froyte than dye. marvel And mekill bale sall after spraye, sorrow, branching/blossoming Whare joye & blysse was wont [to bee] (325–36)

The same formulation appears in the later fifteenth-century MS BL Cotton Vitellius E. x copy of the text, and in the MS CUL Ff. 5. 48 witness, also from this period, although the names are garbled or omitted entirely. It is also found in the sixteenth-century MS BL Sloane 2578 version, again with some names missing. However, in all versions it functions as a prophecy of the crisis of Scottish kingship following the fall of John Balliol, and the decline of various important Scottish families involved in the contested succession. It leaves only the Bruces, who are not named – rather we find an allusion to a time of sorrow. Yet their presence is implicit, for the prophecy then progresses to an account of Bannockburn as a battle fought between the ‘Britons’, the author’s chosen term for the English, and the ‘Bruces’, applied consistently across the prophecy as a synonym for Scots. The English author certainly understood this sequence to be associated with a Bruce accession, although he omitted its most pertinent element: the accession itself. Interestingly, the passage which follows – an account of Halidon Hill – contains (in the Thornton only) an erroneous prophecy of a Bruce victory, which features the single Gaelic loanword of any of the early Erceldoune prophecies: ‘spraye’, from the Gaelic ‘spréidh’ meaning booty or plunder, often in the form of cattle.39 We read: ‘þe Bruyse blode sall wyne þe spraye’ (354). The word appears

Both Murray and Nixon translate the term as ‘prey or bounty’. Murray, Romance and Prophecies, p. lxxvi; Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 46–47.

39

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in Older Scots but is otherwise (I believe) unattested in Middle English.40 It is possible, if we understand the Thornton to preserve original material here, rather than a corruption (which is by no means assured!), that the Romance-author was ­familiar with a Scottish prophecy associated with the Bruces, in circulation in the lowlands. Interestingly, it has been suggested that later Gaelic uses of Erceldoune prophecy may have been influenced by its interpenetration with legends of Bruce that saw circulation in the Gaelic world.41 Although it remains uncertain whether this was the stuff of early fourteenthcentury political application or historical retrospective later in the century, the Bruce connection is nonetheless tantalising. Thomas’s prophecies enjoyed a long association with the Bruce line, and we find an allusion to the Bruces in a reworking of earlier Erceldoune material incorporated in the 1603 Whole Prophesie of Scotland. The Whole Prophesie is generally understood to reflect prophecies in genuine Scottish circulation, although its Edinburgh printer’s mark was probably fake. It is thought to have been printed in London, very soon after the death of Elizabeth I and the lifting on the English ban on the printing of political prophecy instigated during the Tudor period.42 The reference to the Bruce line appears in a sequence celebrating the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. We read of the son of a French wife, who: shall rule all Bretaine to the sey, that of the Bruces blood shall come As neere as the nint degree. (242–44)43

The prophecy is actually one generation out (James was the tenth degree from Bruce), and it was probably composed in 1542, in anticipation of the birth of a child to Mary of Guise, the French wife of James V (the child was a daughter, Mary Queen of Scots). Its source material is older still. It is a reworking of an earlier Tudor derivative from the Romance and Prophecies, printed as the Note that ‘spray’ in line 335, above, most certainly does not carry the same meaning. MacInnes, ‘Gaelic Poetry and Historical Tradition’, p. 31. We might note, however, that no early Gaelic prophecies concerning Bruce survive. See John MacInnes, ‘The Gaelic Perception of the Lowlands’, in Dùthchas nan Gàidheal, pp. 34–47 (p. 45). 42 Helen Cooper, ‘Literary Reformations of the Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Culture, ed. Andrew Galloway (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 261–78 (pp. 261–62); Karen R. Moranski, ‘The Son Who Rules “All Bretaine to the Sey”: The Whole Prophesie and the Union of Crowns’, in Prophet Margins, pp. 167–84, 214–17 (p. 183). 43 Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. 48–51. 40 41

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Prophesies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng, in a passage celebrating Henry Tudor’s victory at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.44 There we read of the landing at Milford Haven of: A banneshed buron that is boren Off Brutes blode shalbe; Throughe the helpe of an egle anon He shall broke Bretten to the see. (141–44)45

This is a reference to Henry’s successful campaign, aided by the Stanley earls of Derby, whose family crest was an eagle.46 Henry’s celebrated British blood refers to his Welsh ancestry, an important component of very early English Tudor prophecy.47 In the substitution of British by Bruce, James is inserted into a framework concerned with British restoration, a paradigmatic example of the ex eventu prophecies of unification that accompanied the union of crowns in 1603. Karen Moranski has understood much of the material in the Whole Prophesie, indebted to English models, as occupying an ambiguous position, drawing on statements of English imperialism to express Scottish nationalism.48 However, we might align it also with historical Scottish interest in Prophetiae, 110–14, a figure of insular unification drawn on in Scottish national address from the early fourteenth century onwards, in Bruti Posteritas, a prophecy used by Bruce partisans from as early as 1307.49 The association of this type of material with the Bruces may well actually draw on a long Scottish precedent. Interestingly, there is another source which suggests the association of Thomas with prophecies of Scottish restoration after the Bruti Posteritas model: the northern-border prophecy When Rome is Removyd.50 Notably, a number Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, pp. 180–82; Cooper, ‘Literary Reformations of the Middle Ages’, pp. 261–62. In the eighteenth century, the prophecy was retrospectively associated with an earlier figure, John Duke of Albany, for which see Moranski, ‘The Son Who Rules “All Bretaine to the Sey”’, p. 178. 45 Jansen, Political Prophecy and Protest, pp. 69–90. See also, Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. 52–61. 46 Flood and Byrne, ‘Romance of the Stanleys’, pp. 335–37. 47 See below, p. 142. 48 Moranski, ‘The Son Who Rules “All Bretaine to the Sey”’, pp. 183–84. 49 See above, p. 84–85. 50 Printed in Reinhard Haferkorn, ed., When Rome is Removed into England: Eine Politische Prophezeiung des 14. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1932); J. Rawson Lumby, ed., Bernardus de Cura Rei Famuliaris with Some Early Scottish Prophecies (London, 1870; EETS OS 42), pp. 32–34; Rossell Hope Robbins, ed., Historical Poems of the XIV and XV Centuries 44

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of witnesses attribute the prophecy to Thomas.51 Material from the prophecy was similarly reworked in the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, although there it is ascribed to Bede. It survives in a number of different versions from across England, Scotland, and Wales, from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, but is understood to be indebted to a Scottish original, composed c. 1375–80. The earliest version of the A-text survives only in an English witness (integrating an account of the English conquest of Scotland), in MS CUL Kk. I. v.52 It contains a formula alluding to a date in the 1380s, possibly 1382, generally understood to be genuinely futurist.53 At its core is an alliance between the Scots and the French, followed by an alliance between the Welsh and the Scots and the expulsion of the English from Britain. This is a very loose vernacular variation on Regnum Scotorum and Bruti Posteritas. Of particular interest is its treatment of the Cambro-Scottish alliance, which draws on the heroes of Prophetiae, 110–14, Caduladrus and Conanus: Tatcalders [Cadwalader] sall call on Carioun [Conan] the noyus, dangerous one And than sall worthe up Wallys and wrethe othir landis,  rise up, provoke And erth on tyll Albany, if thai may wyne.  incite Herme wnto alienys, anever thai sall wakyne! The Bruttis blude sall thame wakyne and bryttne wyth brandis of stell: slay, blades Ther sall no bastarde blode abyde in that lande. (23–28)54

This vision is grounded in the tradition of Scottish oppositional discourse which followed from Edward’s papal letter in 1301. The description of the English as ‘bastarde blode’ may well be an allusion to Scottish arguments for Arthur’s (New York, 1959), pp. 118–20; James M. Dean, ed., Medieval English Political Writings (Kalamazoo, MI, 1996), pp. 13–15. 51 Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 314. 52 The national status of CUL Kk. I. v itself remains uncertain. Alongside material of Scottish origin, it also contains anti-Lancastrian English material, including a Yorkist variant of an English alliterative version of the Prophecies of Thomas Becket, forecasting the triumph of the house of York. MS CUL Kk. I. v, fols 27v–31v; cf. MS Bodl. Hatton 56, fols 45r–46v. 53 Haferkorn, When Rome is Removed, p. 129; Robbins, Historical Poems, p. 315; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 148, 75 n. Coote understands this date to be retrospective, and suggests it functions as a comment on the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, but there is no obvious connection here. 54 Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, pp. 13–15 (my glosses).

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i­llegitimacy,  and refutation of his historical right to high kingship.55 ‘Bruttis blude’, on the other hand, is an essentially non-English quality, probably meaning British (the Welsh element of a Cambro-Scottish alliance, as in Bruti Posteritas), although it is also possible that the line originally read ‘Bruce’s blood’. This is a presentation of two genealogically distinct peoples, the legitimacy of whose claims is a quality that is found in their blood itself. It is a triumphal celebration of Scottish genealogy, history, and prophecy: a statement of a decidedly nationalist ideology. The prophecy itself, like the post-1301 wave of Scottish prophecy on which it builds, is an activity in national consciousness-raising. To some commentators, in both England and Scotland, it was fitting to associate this with Thomas. In a Scottish context, Thomas appears as a national, and partisan (Bruce), prophet, concerned with the fate of Scotland, its principal political actors, and the conclusion of the wars, and is implicated in processes of national identity construction. Yet, already we can see that this is a literary history which crosses borders, and our fullest understanding of its development depends on an acquaintance with both Scottish and English sources.

Thomas de Essedoune’s Reply One of the earliest English witnesses of an Erceldoune prophecy is Thomas de Essedoune’s Reply. It is found in MS BL Harley 2253 (compiled c. 1340) in the hand of the Harley scribe, which is preserved in documents from the Ludlow area between 1314 and 1346, and MS BL Royal 12. C. xii, and MS BL Harley 273.56 Earlier scholarship tied the scribe to important figures in the deposition of Edward II: Roger Mortimer and Adam Orleton, Bishop of Worcester. However, these are now understood to be remote possibilities, and the scribe has been more safely located in the orbit of the Talbot Family of Ludlow, and the Ludlows of Stokesay, through whom, we have noted, he may have come into possession of Fouke le

See above, p. 70. The prophecy belongs to the folios which are understood to have been compiled c. 1340 (fols 49–140). See Susanna Fein, ‘Introduction’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript, pp. 1–19 (p. 8). For earlier conjectures concerning the dating of the manuscript, see N. R. Ker, ed., Facsimile of BM MS Harley 2253 (London, 1965), pp. ix–xxiii; Robbins, Historical Poems, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv; Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, pp. 328–29. For the most recent discussion of the scribe, see Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’. For Revard’s earlier work, see Carter Revard, ‘Richard Hurd and MS Harley 2253’, Notes and Queries NS 26 (1979): 199–202; Carter Revard, ‘Three More Holographs in the Hand of the Scribe of MS Harley 2253 in Shrewsbury’, Notes and Queries NS 28 (1981): 199–200; Carter Revard, ‘The Scribe of MS Harley 2253’, Notes and Queries NS 29 (1982): 62–63.

55 56

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Fitz Waryn.57 Although we cannot associate him with the movers and shakers of high politics, he was certainly politically informed and engaged. Carter Revard has understood him to be a secular cleric, working in the mobile context of ‘bastard feudalism, that tied clergy, gentry, burgesses, and barons into a network reflected in the political poems of the Harley and Royal manuscripts’.58 Although often omitted from discussions of the manuscript’s political contents, we must count the Reply among its political works, aligning it with the political prophecies found in the Royal manuscript, which forecast the conquests of a future king of England.59 The text has been understood as the partial translation of a northern English exemplum into a south-west Midlands dialect, retaining some original northern linguistic features.60 The prophecy is accompanied by a French incipit: ‘La countesse de Donbar demanda a Thomas de Essedoune quant la guere descoce prendreit fyn e yl la respoundy e dyt’ (‘The Countess of Dunbar asked Thomas of Erceldoune when the Scots war should come to an end, and he replied and said’). The response reads: When man as mad a kyng of a capped man; When mon is levere othermones thyng then is owen; prefers When Loudyon ys forest, ant forest ys felde: give birth When hares kendles o the herston; When wyt and wille werres togedere When mon makes stables of kyrkes, and steles castles   wyth styes; ladders When Rokesbourh nys no burgh ant market is at Forweleye; When the alde is gan ant the newe is come that don notht; When Bambourne is donged wyth dede men; manured When men ledes men in ropes to buyen and to sellen; When a quarter of whaty whete is chaunged for a colt of ten markes; When prude pikes and pees is leyd in prisoun; rides When a Scot ne may hym hude ase hare in forme that the Englysshe    ne shal hym fynde; Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, p. 23. See also above, p. 60. Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, p. 23. 59 The prophecy receives no attention in Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, pp. 74–77; and finds only a brief discussion in John Scattergood, ‘Authority and Resistance: The Political Verses’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript, pp. 163–202 (pp. 177–78). For a brief discussion of the Royal prophecies, see Revard, ‘Scribe and Provenance’, p. 71; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 94–98. 60 Frances McSparran, ‘The Language of the English Poems’, in Studies in the Harley Manuscript, pp. 391–426 (p. 398). 57 58

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When rytht ant wrong ascenteth to-gedere; When laddes weddeth lovedis; When Scottes flen so faste that for faute of ship hy drouneth hem  selve: Whenne shal this be? Nouther in thine tyme ne in myne. Ah comen and gon with-inne twenty wynter ant on.61

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The Reply traces a series of conditions for the central question of the English Erceldoune prophecies: when will the wars end? It functions as a retrospective of the conflict up to the 1330s, cast as pernicious marvels and quasi-apocalyptic tokens. It is concerned with threats to English occupied territories in the lowlands: ‘Loudyon’ reads most clearly as a reference to Loudoun Hill, in Lothian, the site of a Bruce victory in 1307.62 Other anxieties expressed are the death of the nobility (and so the marriage of gentlewomen to ‘lads’), and the general decline of morality and charity. These evils are initially rooted in the reign of Edward II, understood to be the capped man of the prophecy’s beginning: a king wearing a fool’s hat, a vision of a rex inutilis.63 It also incorporates a direct allusion to the rising price of grain – ‘When a quarter of whaty whete is chaunged for a colt of ten markes’ (11) – which we might best understand in the broader context of the Great Famine, the effects of which, Ian Kershaw has observed, were felt into the 1320s, with particular severity on the Anglo-Scottish border.64 The presentation of this miserable situation is structured in relation to allusions to the Battle of Bannockburn and the Battle of Halidon Hill. The prophecy’s reference to Bannockburn, ‘When Bambourne is donged wyth dede men’ (9), was for a long time taken as the only surely datable event within the text.65 This formed a key argument of nineteenth-century scholarship, which regarded the prophecy as propaganda intended to inspire the English and dispirit the Scots on the eve of Bannockburn.66 This was based on the misdating of Harley 2253 to 1320. A modern reassessment of the date of the manuscript (c. 1340) suggests that the prophecy belongs to the years following the English victory at Halidon Hill in 1333. There The text of the prophecy is taken from the transcription in Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, p. 11 (my glosses). 62 Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, p. 20. Alternatively, it might be read as ‘London’, although this reading seems counterintuitive. 63 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, p. 100; Victoria Flood, ‘Imperfect Apocalypse: Thomas of Erceldoune’s Reply to the Countess of Dunbar in British Library, MS Harley 2253’, Marginalia 2010: 11–27. 64 Kershaw, ‘The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England’. 65 Ker, Facsimile of BM MS Harley 2253, pp. xxi–xiii; Robbins, Historical Poems, p. xxxii. 66 Murray, Romance and Prophecies, p. xix; Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune, pp. 15–16; Brandl and Zippel, Mittelenglische Sprach-und Literaturproben, pp. 133–34. 61

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is a direct allusion to this battle, which concluded with the Scottish host chased into the sea.67 We read: ‘When a Scot ne may hym hude ase hare in forme that the Englysshe ne shal hym fynde;/ [...] When Scottes flen so faste that for faute of ship hy drouneth hem-selve’ (13, 16). This depiction of the fleeing and drowned Scots presents a variation on a jubilant English theme. In the roughly contemporary Romance of the Battle of Halidon Hill, we read of the Scots: ‘þe Englische men pursuyed hem so,/ Tille þe fflode was alle a-Goo’.68 In the context of this historical retrospective, the prophecy traces a movement from the disorders of the reign of Edward II to victory in Scotland under Edward III. This prophetic perception may have been conditioned by an acquaintance with the Six Kings, where (at least in some versions) the hare similarly is used to represent Scottish opposition: the ‘maulvis leuere’ (depending on our reading), who figures John Balliol.69 We might regard the Reply as a part of the northern English reception history of the Six Kings, representative of an emotional, and political, investment in the heroism of Edward III, held in association with memories of the failures of Edward II’s northern border policy – although the sentiment was surely commonplace enough. Structurally the organisation of the prophecy – a historical retrospective spanning the period between Bannockburn and Halidon Hill – conforms to a broader English understanding of Halidon Hill as a corrective to defeat at Bannockburn, and a check to Scottish pride. For example, in Laurence Minot’s poetic account of Bannockburn, written after the English victory at Halidon Hill, we read: Skottes out of Berwik and of Abirdene, At þe Bannok burn war ȝe to kene; eager Þare slogh ȝe many sakles, als it was sene, innocent And now has king Edward wroken it, I wene, avenged, know It es wrokin, I wene, wele wurth the while; done War ȝit with the Skottes for þai er ful of gile. beware (1–6)70

In this re-framing of Anglo-Scottish history, Bannockburn was contextualised as part of a bigger narrative of English victory (although Minot adds the caveat that Englishmen must continue to be wary of the wily Scots). This is the same process of historical re-imagining we have noted elsewhere in the English p ­ rophetic Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, p. 136. Brut, p. 287. 69 See above, p. 93. 70 Hall, Poems of Laurence Minot, pp. 4–6. 67 68

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t­radition. We see the integration of a past event in a new historical context that changes its very nature – it becomes, to return to Žižek’s useful phrase, ‘What it always was’. Victory at Halidon Hill is written into the defeat at Bannockburn. This is, of course, one of the privileges of writing ex eventu prophecy, and yet unlike Minot’s poem, the Reply is more concerned with violent marvels than military victories. The history of the borders is still in the process of becoming. Importantly, although Edward III’s victory at Halidon Hill is implicit in the prophecy, the king himself remains absent. In this respect we must recognise the tone of the text, if not its final allusion, as firmly pessimistic. Certainly, it comes closer to the sufferings of biblical and sibylline apocalypticism than anything previously found in the English prophetic tradition. We might note that the change to the landscape, of forest to field and field to forest, has an important precedent in the levelling of mountains and raising up of valleys of biblical and sibylline prophecy.71 It also bears a possible debt to that influential apocalyptic sequence Fifteen Signs before Doomsday; and notably, tokens from the Reply were integrated with material from the Signs in the mid-century debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure.72 In later Gaelic prophecies, Thomas is ascribed sequences borrowing directly from the Signs.73 This pessimism stands in an important relationship to the prophecy’s oblique conclusion. The final answer to the Countess of Dunbar’s question (how and when the Scottish wars will end) reads: ‘Whenne shal this be? Nouther in thine tyme ne in myne./ Ah comen and gon with-inne twenty wynter ant on’ (17–18). This twenty-one-year period has proved a source of much scholarly speculation.74 However, given the loose chronology common to political prophecies, more concerned with key events and the possibility of pattern-forming than strict historical record, the prophecy’s resolution is almost certainly formulaic. We might understand it as an authorizing marker, lifted from a biblical prophetic model. This type of conclusion echoes Matthew 24.34, asserting the validity and immediate historical pertinence of the prophecy, ‘I say to you, that this generation shall not pass, till all these things be done.’ The generational limit in Matthew refers to the See Isaias 40.4; re-worked in the sibylline prophecy in Augustine, City of God, ed. G. R. Evans and transl. Henry Bettenson (London, 2003), p. 789. 72 I discuss this combining in ‘Wynnere and Wastoure’, p. 439. For the development of the Fifteen Signs, see above, pp. 83–84. 73 Lyle, Fairies and Folk, p. 18. 74 Critical conjecture about this varies. Murray and Brandl understood the prophecy as written in anticipation of the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Murray, Romance and Prophecies, p. xix; Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune, p. 16. Robbins regarded the prophecy as intended for fulfilment in the years 1286 or 1306. Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 1525. 71

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first stages of apocalyptic desolation rather than to conclusive eschatological fulfilment. It is itself testament to the protracted nature of the apocalyptic worldview, as it is given in the so-called Little Apocalypse of Matthew: And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that ye be not troubled. For these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be pestilences, and famines, and earthquakes in places: Now all these are the beginnings of sorrows. (Matthew 24.6–8)

Within the quasi-apocalyptic schema of the Reply, Halidon Hill is an apocalyptic symptom rather than a definitive conclusion. The events to which it refers represent the beginning of a process, but its ending remains unclear. The phrase that defers the resolution to an age beyond ‘thine tyme’ and ‘myne’, reads as an address not simply to the countess but the first audience of the prophecy. The Reply-author was probably indebted to the pessimistic tone of Thomas’s prophecies in the early Scottish tradition also, reflected in the Scottish chronicles. I am referring to the vision of the storm across Scotland preserved in Bower’s Scotichronicon. The addressee of the Harley prophecy, the countess of Dunbar, suggests a modification of the Scottish legend involving the earl of Dunbar. This would mean that this legend was in circulation in England as early as 1340. During this period, the reference to the countess potentially also suggests another more contemporary frame of reference. During the 1330s Dunbar was an infamous Bruce-faction centre of resistance.75 The substitution of the earl by the countess might allude to the role played by an equally infamous countess of Dunbar, known as Black Agnes (d. 1369), during the late 1330s. In the absence of the earl in January 1338, Agnes played an instrumental role in the castle’s defence, holding out against an English siege.76 If Agnes were in mind, this would push the composition of the Reply in the form found in Harley 2253 very close to the period of the compilation of the manuscript. We might regard the prophecy, then, as highly topical. Interestingly, Agnes is a notable point of accretion to the Erceldoune legend. She appears as an antagonist of Thomas in the Cotton and Cambridge versions of the Romance and Prophecies, where Thomas tells how Agnes ‘[...] gyven me Nicholson, Edward III and the Scots, p. 225. Fiona Watson, ‘Dunbar, Patrick, eighth earl of Dunbar or of March, and earl of Moray (1285–1369)’, ODNB < http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8206/8200> [last accessed 10 March 2016]

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þe warre,/ And put me in hir prison depe’ Cambridge (661–62). This is followed in both, by a vitriolic prophecy of Agnes’s death in a ditch, a variation on which (featuring the death of an unnamed male descendant) is found in the Sloane. I quote from the Cambridge: Off blak Agnes cum neuer gode: Wher for, thomas, she may not the; ffor al hir welth and hir worldly gode, In london cloysed shal she be. þer preuisse neuer gode of hir blode; In a dyke þen shall she dye; Houndis of hir shall haue þer fode, Magrat of all hir kyng of le

imprisoned comes

(Cambridge, 665–72)

The final line reads more clearly in the Cotton: ‘mawgre of al hyr kyn & she’ (672) – ‘In spite of all her family and herself’. Antipathy towards Agnes is found elsewhere in English jingoist verse: Andrew of Wyntoun records a song sung by English soldiers at the siege of Dunbar Castle, referring to her as ‘The Scottis wenche with her ploddeil [?quarrel]’.77 It continues: ‘For cum I airly, cum I lait,/ I fynd ay Annes at þe ȝait’. The identification of the Countess of Dunbar as the recipient of the Harley Reply, a prophecy envisaging the defeat of the Scots at Halidon Hill, potentially draws on this same anti-Scottish tradition. Transplanted to Dunbar in the 1330s, Thomas became a contemporary prophet of Agnes’s downfall, and with her, the Bruce faction. And yet in this new historical framework, Thomas is a prophet not of the 1280s but the 1330s, opening up a vision of continued suffering that was English as much as it was Scottish. However entrenched its combination of jingoism and pessimism, the Reply is a work invested in the actions of the kings of England, and it might be understood as a broadly anti-Scottish piece. It saw rapid circulation beyond the border, across England. Its influence in the Midlands alone appears to have been relatively far-reaching, beyond the single copy preserved in Harley 2253. We have already noted that a number of its figures are reworked in the opening to the mid-century debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure, and it has even been suggested that its semi-alliterative lines, depicting various evils of the age, influenced Langland in the form of Reason’s sermon in the Piers Plowman B-text.78 The Wilson, Lost Literature of Medieval England, p. 213. Elizabeth Salter, ‘Piers Plowman and “The Simonie”’, Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen und Literaturen 203 (1966): 241–54 (pp. 253–54).

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Reply is an important case study in the dissemination across England of material composed on the Anglo-Scottish border with a broadly national onus. Like the Six Kings, its political imaginings appealed to an audience beyond the region of its production.

The Arundel Reply A variant version of the Reply is found in MS BL Arundel 57 (c. 1340).79 The manuscript was probably produced at the Benedictine House of St Augustine’s in Canterbury (it also contains the autograph copy of Ayenbyte of Inwyt), but like the Harley Reply, the prophecy preserves northern dialectal elements.80 It is integrated as part of a sequence of prophecies concerned with the matter of English imperium in Scotland and continental Europe. Other than the Reply, these prophecies are in Latin and insular French, and include the Original Prose Version of the Six Kings.81 The prophecies run sequentially from fol. 4v to fol. 10v in the large margins of a fragment of a glossed version of Aristotle’s De Anima. As we find across prophetic manuscripts from this period, no real distinction appears to have been made between prophecies written in Latin and those written in English or French. Like the Harley, the Arundel Reply is prefaced with a French incipit, in this case identifying it as Thomas’s reply to Alexander III, a variation on the deathprophecy of the Scottish chronicles. It is situated within a Scottish context, giving the words of Thomas the ‘Escot’ about ‘rey Edward’. This frames a statement of the English right to Scotland. The English Erceldoune tradition veers between unmitigated pessimism and – the other side of this coin – unbridled chauvinism, which is precisely what we find here. In the Arundel Reply, the king of England makes a personal appearance, claiming direct superiority over Scotland. The greater part of the tokens from the Harley prophecy, drawn on, here as there, as figures of the devastation of Scotland, are preceded by the appearance of a ‘barn’, the King Edward of the incipit, who will rule after the death of Alexander, who is by implication to be the last Scottish king of Scotland: To-nyght is boren a barn in Kaernervam, That ssal wold the out ydlis ylcan. The kyng Alesandre acsede, Hwan sall that be? The menstral zede: Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, pp. 307–08. LAEME, no. 291. 81 Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, p. 574. 79 80

child rule, all the outer islands asked minstrel, said

the english erceldoune tradition Hwan Banockesbourne is y-det myd         mannis bonis; Hwan hares kendleth in hertth-stanes; Hwan laddes weuddeth levedes; Hwan me ledeth men to selle wytth rapis; Hwan Rokysburth is no burth; Hwan men gyven an folu of twenti pound   for an seme of hwete.82

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strewn with men’s bones give birth ropes Roxburgh, town ?foal, measure

The Arundel Reply probably represents an earlier version than the Harley one. The royal ‘barn’ born in Caernarfon can only be Edward II – Edward III was born in Windsor. We might note also that the fool king, one of the omens of the Harley version, is absent; as is the allusion to the Battle of Halidon Hill. The upper limit for the date of the text’s composition would be the Battle of Bannockburn, to which the author refers in the fifth line of the prophecy. Although we think of this as a period of disillusionment on the northern border, a vision in place in the Six Kings, the prophecy suggests a continued belief in English success in Scotland. Like the Harley, the Arundel Reply is fundamentally insular in its interests, and traces a series of conditions that lay out the road (however costly) to the English conquest of Scotland. In its allusion to Edward’s birthplace, Caernarfon, the text also recalls Edward I’s conquest of Wales and the pan-insular ambitions of this period. These ambitions were associated with Edward II, the first English Prince of Wales, who was understood by some contemporary commentators to be in possession of a ‘prophetic destiny’.83 This has been understood most commonly in relation to crusading prophecies such as Adam Davy’s Five Dreams about Edward II, which invest expectations for a new crusade in the king.84 We might think also of the Holy Oil of St Thomas, a prophetic legend which first appears as a ­literary-political text in Royal 12. c. xii, but with its roots in Edward II’s reign.85 Dean, Middle English Political Writings, p. 12. My glosses. J. R. S. Phillips, ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, in England in the Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. W. M. Ormrod (Woodbridge, 1986), pp. 189–201; Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, pp. 18–19. 84 The prophecy, possibly of Franciscan authorship, is thought to have been composed in London, c. 1307–08, conceptualised as a direct address to Edward. See Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 84–91; John Scattergood, ‘Adam Davy’s Dreams and Edward II’, in Reading the Past: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Dublin, 1996), pp. 50–60; Phillips, ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, pp. 192–94. All depart from Taylor’s argument for a later date, for which, see Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 92–98. 85 For an overview of manuscripts containing the prophecy, see T. A. Sandquist, ‘The Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Bertie 82 83

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The early development of the prophecy remains obscure, but we know from a reference in a papal letter of 1319, that Edward II, possibly at the instigation of an English Dominican (identified by J. R. S. Phillips as Nicholas of Wisbech), sought papal permission for anointment from an ampoule of holy oil in the shape of an eagle that had come into his possession.86 The ampoule had an illustrious history: it was allegedly given to Thomas of Canterbury, while in exile in France, by the Virgin Mary, who also provided him with a prophecy that the English king anointed with it was to conquer Europe and lead a new crusade. This episode in English history has long perplexed historians, who have understood it as a desperate search for a miracle by a king facing a political crisis. However, there was a pre-existing ideological framework in which this kind of royal engagement made perfect sense: the power of the English kings had long been associated with prophecy. While this movement provides a loose context for the Arundel Reply, the Reply is not, as has been previously argued, a crusading vision. This reading rests on the mistranslation of its second line, ‘That ssal wold the out ydlis ylcan’ as ‘who shall destroy the idols’.87 In fact, ‘ydlis’ must be understood, in line with the usage recorded in the MED, as islands, and the verb ‘wold’ (‘welden’) does not mean to destroy, but to rule or conquer.88 We can translate it more precisely as ‘who will rule all the outer islands’. This is presumably a reference to Ireland, Orkney, and the Western Isles, which in medieval English historical imaginings marked the furthest western and northern reaches of insular rule (here understood as both pan and trans-insular), to which Iceland and Scandinavia were sometimes added for good measure. We might recall Arthur’s conquest of Ireland and Iceland, followed by the spontaneous submission of Gunuasius, ‘rex Orcadum’, in Historia IX; material integrated in Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronique, along with the rest of the Historia – an important document in the history of northern English political prophecy. The Arthurian empire of this tradition was in many respects a northwards-looking one: Arthur’s dominion extends into Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and Michael R. Powicke (Toronto, 1969), pp. 330–44 (pp. 331–32, n. 4). For comment on the Royal version, see p. 334. 86 Phillips, ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, pp. 196–201. The origins of the legend itself may well be German, and appears to have come to England through Nicholas of Wisbech’s association with the dukes of Brabant. It has been suggested that it was devised as a counterpart to the French legend of the sainte ampoule, and certainly, it would have offered particularly utility in English imperial visions from 1340 onwards. See Walter Ullmann, ‘Thomas Becket’s Miraculous Oil’, Journal of Theological Studies NS 8 (1957): 129–33 (p. 129). 87 Coote and Thornton, ‘Merlin, Erceldoune, Nixon’, p. 120. 88 This is how the term is also translated by Dean in his edition of the prophecy. Middle English Political Writings, p. 12.

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Scandinavia, and at his court at Caerleon he receives client kings from Gotland, Norway, and Denmark.89 We might wonder to what extent this vision, as it was evoked in the Arundel Reply, was framed as an answer to Bruce ambitions in the Irish Sea World. In the Bruce, Barbour records an old prophecy in circulation in the Hebrides concerning Robert Bruce’s conquest of the Western Isles, contemporary with Edward Bruce’s invasion of Ireland: That he that suld ger schippis sua Betwix thai seis with saillis ga Suld wyne the Ilis sua till hand That nane with strenth suld him withstand. (That whoever should have ships go between those seas with sails would so win the Isles for himself that no one could withstand him by force.) (XV. 293–96)90

The origin of the prophecy itself remains obscure, although it has been suggested that it is a variation on a traditional tale concerning the Norwegian king Magnús Óláfsson’s conquest of Kintyre in the late eleventh century.91 Regardless, the prophecy is a vision of trans-insular Scottish conquest, and we might wonder if this association was known to writers in northern England, who might borrow from Bruce partisan materials. If such imaginings possessed contemporary Scottish appeal (and in the broader context of Bruce engagements with political prophecy, this seems feasible), we might understand the Arundel Reply as a substitution of a Scottish referent with an English one: a contestation of a Scottish political discourse through engagement with an Arthurian imagining which articulates a similar, although Anglo-centric, ambition. There is a precedent for this type of anti-Bruce production, envisaging the English subjugation of Scotland and Ireland, from this period, in another prophecy in Arundel 57: a sequence similarly associated with Edward II, ascribed to Gildas and the Eagle, and termed by Phillips, the Verses of Gildas Concerning the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Hermit.92 The Verses are a collection of well-known prophecies concerning the international campaigns of the king of England, which also circulated separately, generally identified by their opening lines: Tolle caput

91 92 89 90

Historia, IX, lines 212–24, 344–47; Pierre de Langtoft, I, pp. 160–61, 170–71. Bruce, pp. 564–65. Duncan’s translation. Duffy, ‘Bruce Brothers’, p. 71, n. 54. MS BL Arundel 57, fols 4v–5r, with commentary on fols 5r–8v. See also Phillips, ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, pp. 194–95.

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martis, Anglia transmittet, and Gallorum levitas. Read as a whole, these envisage an English king’s conquest of Scotland and Ireland, a campaign across Europe, during which time he will also conquer France, and the restoration of Jerusalem to Christian rule. The king is then crowned Emperor of the World by the pope (a feature of Last World Emperor prophecy, which we have noted was highly topical during this period), and the prophecy concludes with the king’s reformation of the church, the restoration of the apostolic life to the clergy, and the destruction of the papal office.93 The first component prophecy, which begins the imperial journey, is the most important for my present purposes. Its hero is identified as the familiar Sextus (whose earlier royal uses we have noted in Chapter 1), who conquers Scotland and Ireland. We might note, as in the Arundel Reply, that this high king is born in Wales: Cambria quem gignet que laure logria cinget. Ormes dispersos iunget vbique sibi. Alban accensis truncabit robora terrae. In lapides muros ensibus usa prius Sextus hybernensis milleno milite cui tum hostibus expulsis castra relicca petet. (And Wales brings forth a laurel who will encircle England. Enemies scattered, he will unite everywhere to himself. Scotland on fire, he will strip the branches of the oaks [or powers] of the land. First using swords on the stone walls of Ireland, then expelling a thousand enemy knights, Sextus will attack the remaining fortresses.) (fol. 4v, my transcription and translation)

The ‘barn’ of the Arundel Reply is a royal hero after the fashion of this particular manifestation of Sextus, representative of a principle of insular, and indeed transinsular, conquest. This application may well have rested not only on contemporary ambitions in Scotland, but the prophetic appeal of an English king born in Wales, who here acquires a mantle of authorising Britishness. We must not underestimate the prophetic capital presented by the ‘barn’ of Caernarfon. The commentary that accompanies the Verses of Gildas suggests that the figure of Sextus was used in this period to envisage the containment of the Bruce threat in Scotland and Ireland. Indeed, the Bruces’ cultivation of interests on both sides of the Irish Sea appears to have fostered the perception of a natural unity between the two in English political mentalities, as hostile locales. The commentary gives the prophecy’s date of realisation as 1320, and Phillips has suggested that it was

For discussion of this final vision, see Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, p. 177.

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composed c. 1318–19.94 It stands contemporary with Bruce activities in Ireland, and this is a meaning close to the surface of the text in the commentary, which identifies Robert Bruce as the king’s chief antagonist in Scotland. The prophecy forecasts the suppression of the Bruce rebellion, by an English king who claims some manner of British heritage (he comes out of Wales), and claims Scotland and Ireland as his own. This is a direct answer to Scottish prophetic strategy during this period (discussed in Chapter 2), substituting the British force of Bruti Posteritas with an English king; and an answer also to the self-casting of the Bruces in relation to their western power base. Interestingly, Gildas and the Eagle, to whom the sequence is ascribed, are two of the authorities with whom Bruti Posteritas is associated: the eagle is alluded to in the text itself, and the version given in Bower’s Scotichronicon ascribes the whole to Gildas – this may reflect an earlier Scottish convention.95 A similar appropriation of Scottish prophetic authorities is at work in the Arundel Reply (as we have noted also in the Harley). The Scottish prophet assures Alexander that he is to be succeeded by Edward II, occluding the Bruce kingship (which, we must remember, during this period was not recognised by the English crown). This would have been a particularly poignant juxtaposition if we can understand Scottish Erceldoune prophecy as held in an early association with the Bruce cause. Although the date of this connection in Scotland remains uncertain, we can see that in England, Thomas was employed as a Scottish prophet of the Bruce downfall. However, the Reply functioned not simply as a neutralisation of Scottish ambitions but a legitimisation of English. Again, we can see in the operation of prophecy the exemplification of Žižek’s idea of intervention in a historical scene: Scottish territory is, even before Alexander’s death, always-already English. It is written into the events of the reign of Alexander himself, who – the author anticipates – is to be the last Scottish monarch.

The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune This strand of chauvinism finds its fullest realisation in the late fourteenth-­century Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune.96 The text gives the earliest surviving account of Thomas’s encounter with his fairy mistress, followed by a sequence of prophecies pertaining to the Wars of Independence, concluding with the conquest of Scotland by a king of England, identified as a Briton, who also undertakes a successful crusade. At 700 lines in its fullest version, this is the Phillips, ‘Edward II and the Prophets’, p. 195. Scotichronicon, II, pp. 58–59. 96 For studies of the prophecy, see above n. 1. 94 95

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longest text in the early Erceldoune tradition, and one of the most influential and far-reaching in its broader geographical and historical appeal. Material from the Romance and Prophecies was reworked in both English Tudor and Scottish Stuart partisan prophecy; and the text was known in Wales by the mid-fifteenth century at the very latest, where it was associated with the Yorkist cause.97 The Romance and Prophecies, and its later derivatives, are some of the most significant texts for our understanding of the pan-insular movement of prophetic material across national and political borders, from the Middle Ages into the early modern period. Yet, for all its later significance, the conditions of the original text have remained surprisingly little discussed in modern scholarship. This is in large part because no copy of the text now survives contemporary with its period of composition. It is preserved in five manuscripts dated from the mid-fifteenth to the sixteenth centuries, which preserve a number of variant readings, making the reconstruction of a definitive original version an impossible undertaking.98 The basis for our understanding of the relationship between the versions remains the research of the late nineteenth-century German philologist, Alois Brandl, who situated each copy as at least one exemplum removed from a hypothetical ur-text.99 Although Brandl’s stemma (Figure 1) has been interrogated by more recent scholars, no alternative has as yet been raised.100 It does have the virtue of opening up a space through which we can conceptualise a significant number of lost intermediary versions of the prophecy, in a process of transmission which spanned over two centuries, and a large geographical area. Brandl posited a source x from which Lincoln 91 (produced c. 1440s), and indirectly, Sloane 2578, including only the prophecies (c. 1556), and CUL Ff.5.48 (c. 1475) were derived. We might note also, a 1652 printed edition, probably based on material compiled in the late sixteenth century, closely resembling the Sloane version, but including the romance as well as the prophecies.101 Brandl’s source x in turn is based on a hypothetical source o, to which BL Cotton Vitellius E. x (c. 1470) and MS BL Lansdowne 762 (c.  1520s–30s) are related, via a lost y variant:

See above, pp. 120–21; below, p. 142. For discussion of the manuscripts, see Murray, Romance and Prophecies, pp. lvi–lxi; Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune, pp. 1–11; Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 3–18.  99 Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune, p. 6. 100 Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 5–8. 101 Albrecht, ‘The Loathly Lady in Thomas of Erceldoune’, pp. 72–111; Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, pp. 182–83.  97  98

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T= MS Lincoln Cathedral 91 (Lincoln Thornton) S= MS BL Sloane 2578 C = MS CUL Ff. 5. 48 V = MS BL Cotton Vitellius E. x L = MS BL Lansdowne 762 Figure 1. Alois Brandl’s Stemma of the Surviving Manuscripts of the Romance and Prophecies of Themas of Erceldoune.

All three of the fifteenth-century witnesses possess northern English dialectical features. We would expect this of the earliest manuscript, the Lincoln Thornton, copied by Robert Thornton (also the scribe of MS BL Additional 31042, the London Thornton manuscript), which was produced in the North Riding of Yorkshire; but a northern substratum is also found in the Cotton manuscript, where we see a partial dialectal translation into a southern English dialect; and in the Cambridge, which is in a north-east Cheshire or north-west Derbyshire dialect.102 The text also draws on proverbial material which also appears in other texts from northwest England.103 The question of its original production is, however, a vexed one. The most recent editor of the text, Ingeborg Nixon, has suggested that we might understand the variations in the manuscript texts as the product of a process of oral transmission, of numerous mis-hearings and failures of memory.104 This is a very difficult thesis to either prove or disprove, but certainly, while the prophecy does make use of elements which may have had a significant existence in oral culture (such as the fairy-mistress narrative), much of its material belongs to a long literary tradition circulating during the fourteenth century not only in English but in Latin and French also. Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 9–18. For a brief overview of recent scholarship on the Cambridge manuscript, see James Wade, ‘Ungallant Knights’, in Heroes and Anti-Heroes in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 201–18 (pp. 211–12). 103 Burnham, ‘A Study of Thomas of Erceldoune’, p. 397; Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, p. 23. 104 Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 5–8. 102

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This context is partially obscured in the manuscript situations in which the prophecy survives, which into the sixteenth century is increasingly English (although with some Latin materials), and appears to represent an element of popular oppositional strategy.105 The three fifteenth-century manuscripts may offer a little more illumination in regard to the conditions of the text’s earlier circulation, in particular the Thornton manuscript. The Thornton, which contains the earliest copy of the text, is the manuscript which we can locate in its broader social and historical context with the greatest certainty, and suggests the type of environment through which the text might have circulated during the mid-fifteenth century.106 Robert Thornton has been described as a man of the ‘middling gentry’, or ‘middling strata’, whose literary interests have been understood in relation to broadening literary participation during this period.107 Although the full extent of Yorkshire literary culture during this period awaits further study, Thornton is thought to have had access to the libraries of educated clergy and laymen, and possibly even, through his association with the Pikeryngs of Oswaldkirk, to material in other gentry households, at religious houses, or even aristocratic libraries (although the latter possibility remains highly speculative).108 Thornton’s interest in Erceldoune material may well have been for its romance associations rather than its prophetic ones. Notably, we do not find any other prophetic works in the Lincoln Thornton manuscript or the London Thornton manuscript, with the exception of the prophetic allusions in Wynnere and Wastoure, in the London manuscript. As I have written elsewhere, however, contemporary with Thornton, the vision of the imperial prowess of the kings of England remained a topical issue.109 We must locate Thornton, and his access to the prophecy, within a sphere of learned speculation and political information. See further David R. Parker, The Commonplace Book in Tudor London: An Examination of BL MSS Egerton 1995, Harley 2252, Lansdowne 762, and Oxford Balliol College MS 354 (Oxford, 1998); Sharon Jansen Jaech, ‘British MS Sloane 2578 and Popular Unrest in England, 1554–56’, Manuscripta 29 (1985): 30–41. 106 George R. Keiser, ‘Lincoln Cathedral MS 91: Life and Milieu of the Scribe’, Studies in Bibliography 32 (1979): 158–79; George R. Keiser, ‘More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton’, Studies in Bibliography 36 (1983): 111–19; Michael Johnston, ‘A New Document Relating to the Life of Robert Thornton’, The Library 8(3) (2007): 304–13; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 184–85. See also D. S. Brewer and A. E. B. Owen, eds, The Thornton Manuscript: Lincoln Cathedral 91 (London, 1975); J. Thompson, Robert Thornton and the London Thornton Manuscript: British Library MS Additional 31042 (Cambridge, 1987); Susanna Fein and Michael Johnston, ed., Robert Thornton and his Books: Essays on the Lincoln and London Thornton Manuscripts (York, 2014). 107 Keiser, ‘Lincoln Cathedral MS 91’, p. 158; Johnston, ‘A New Document Relating to the Life of Robert Thornton’, p. 312. 108 Kesier, ‘More Light on the Life and Milieu of Robert Thornton’, pp. 114–18. 109 Flood, ‘Wynnere and Wastoure’, pp. 444–48. 105

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The Romance and Prophecies was the work of a politically informed author, engaged in Anglo-Scottish affairs, and aware (as we shall see presently) of both the terms of Scottish opposition and English royal encomium, with origins in Latin and French prophecies in circulation from the early fourteenth century onwards. The prophecy was once thought to be a work of the reign of Henry IV, intended to endorse Henry’s accession and the deposition of Richard II.110 In one respect, this represents a relatively plausible hypothesis: the early years of Henry’s reign saw the enthusiastic dissemination of Galfridian prophecy as partisan statements of support.111 However, there is no compelling reason to date the text as late as 1399, and there is no reference to the misrule and fall of Richard II, as we would expect in a prophecy intended to authorise the Lancastrian accession. The latest recognisable historical reference in the prophecy is to the Battle of Otterburn in 1388. Furthermore, despite the prophetic associations surrounding Henry IV, there is no evidence connecting him to Erceldoune material; while into the fifteenth century, the hero of the Erceldoune tradition was associated with the dead Richard.112 As I discuss below, the text presents a number of important intersections with prophecies in circulation during the late fourteenth century, associated with Richard, whose association, and personal engagements, with political prophecy have in recent years attracted increasing scholarly attention.113 In terms of both his use of Thomas’s name and the structural predicates of the text, the author of the Romance and Prophecies is considerably indebted to the earlier English Erceldoune tradition. These various debts have been well-noted, but we might broadly characterise these texts (including Als Y Yod) as sharing a certain pessimistic vision of cataclysm, juxtaposed with a more optimistic vision of the conquest of Scotland by a king of England.114 The Romance and Prophecies poses the question which is near-universal across the Erceldoune tradition, both English and Scottish: when will the Scottish wars end? In the case of the Romance and Prophecies, this is asked by Thomas of his fairy mistress:

Brandl, Thomas of Erceldoune, pp. 30–31; Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 1526. 111 For an overview of political prophecies in circulation in the early years of the reign of Henry IV, see Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 6–8; Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, p. 82. 112 See below, pp. 165–66. 113 Cf. Michael Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, in Richard II: The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James Gillespie (Oxford, 1999), pp. 187-204 (pp. 201–04); Fulton, ‘Political Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, pp. 69-72. 114 Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’; Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, pp. 33–36. 110

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Telle me of this gentill blode Wha sall thrife, and wha sall thee: prosper Wha sall be kynge, wha sall be none, And wha sall weld this northe countre? rule (Thornton, 343–46)

This exchange reads as a back story for the answer Thomas gives to Alexander, or the earl or countess of Dunbar, in the English prophecies and Scottish chronicle tradition. The final answer is, of course, a king of England, but interestingly, this question is initially interpreted by the fairy mistress as an invitation to discuss not the English claim to Scotland but the crisis of kingship, and an account of the fall of the various Scottish factions, excepting the Bruces, follows. As I have suggested above, this passage may be related to a Scottish source in English circulation. Like the Replies, the prophecy is a vision of the period following the death of Alexander, as we would expect from the early Scottish prophecies ascribed to Thomas. The Romance and Prophecies also bears a potential debt to When Rome is Removyd, which, we have noted, probably entered circulation in northern England during the 1380s, and belongs to the same period.115 The A-text draws an opposition between ‘Bruttis blud’ and ‘bastarde blode’, and the presentation of these two genealogically distinct peoples is the closest analogue for the use of the formulaic ‘Bruts blood’, which recurs across the Romance and Prophecies. This has a very different meaning to the Scottish prophecy, for in the Romance and Prophecies it functions in opposition to ‘Brusse blood’, Bruce’s blood. For example, in the sequence recounting the battle of Halidon Hill we read how (I quote from the Cambridge: the Sloane is in agreement with this; the Cotton and Lansdowne omit this material; and the Thornton presents a significant variant, discussed above): the brucys bode shalle vndur fall, the bretens blode shall wyn the spray; C. thowsand men þere shal be slayn Off scottysshe men þat nyght and day. (353–56)

Although there is some confusion in the location of the battle (the Cambridge reads ‘ledyn hill’, while the Thornton and Sloane give Eildon Hill, the location of the romance), all make a very clear equation of British with English, as an oppositional counterpart to the Scottish Bruce. We might note in this quotation the use of the Gaelic loanword found also in the Thornton passage: ‘spraye’. It is See above, p. 22.

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possible that this particular sequence represents a direct reworking, and rewriting, of Scottish ­material. When Rome is Removyd also may have provided the inspiration for the curious identification of the English hero-king as he appears in the third fytte: the bastard. The rationale behind this naming remains obscure, as it sits uncomfortably with the claim for territorial legitimacy framed by the text – as in the English prophetic tradition as a whole. It is possible that the use of the term functions as an active reclaiming of the pejorative terminology of Scottish anti-English material. The obscurity of his name aside, the bastard operates in relation to, and combines, a number of very clear pre-existing English prophetic tropes. He appears in the broader context of genuinely futurist prophecies of battles at ‘spynkarde cloughe’, between Edinburgh (or ‘Sembery’) and Pentland, between Seton and the sea and at Gladismore.116 This is described as a period of great suffering which precedes the arrival of the bastard, who wins the last battle of the wars, the Battle of Sandyford, an English victory understood to be a battle for the unification of Britain, and ends his career in the ‘Holy Land’. The passage describing his arrival is damaged in the earliest witness, the Thornton. However, it is preserved in the Cambridge, Cotton, Sloane, and Lansdowne manuscripts: Cotton Cambridge ...of þe forest A bastarde shal cum fro a forest, In south yngland born sal be Not in ynglond borne shall he be; ... for best And he shalle wyne þe gre for þe best, And al ledes bretayns sal be Alle men leder of bretan shal he be. ... sal he ryde, And with pride to ynglond ride, est & west with myche tene Est and west as... layde ... ment with myche pryde And holde a parlement w… þat neuyr non sych be for was sene. Where neuer non before was sayd .... es he sal dyng down Alle false lawes he [shalle laye douune], þat wer begun in hys cuntre þat ar begune in þat cuntre; o wirke he sal be bown Truly to wyrke, I shal be boune: trewly thomas as I tell þe. And alle leder of bretans shal he be. (609–20)(609–20)

Gladismore was plausibly based on an original reference to ‘Gladeleye’, a place near to Duplin Moor, in a reference to the Battle of Duplin Moor, which appears in the Prophecies of John of Bridlington (discussed further below). Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, p. 35.

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Lansdowne Sloane A basterd shall come out of the west, a basted shall comme owte of a fforeste, in sothe england borne shalbe – And there he shall wyne the gre; he shall wynne þe gre for þe beste, He shall bothe Est and west, And all the lond breton shall be. & all þe land after bretens shalbe. he shall in to Englond ryde, then he shall into England ryde, Est and west in hys tyme; easte weste, as we heare sayne. And holde a parlament of moche  pryde, That neuer no parlament byfore   was seyne. And fals lawes he shall ley doune, all false lawes he shall laye downe, that ar goyng in that countre; þat are begonne in þat contre; And treu workes he shall begyn, trewthe to do, he shalbe bone, And bothe londes bretton shalbe. & all þe land, after, bretons shalbe. (609–20)(609–20)

Alongside these we must place a previously un-noted fragment of the bastard’s return, found in the mid-fifteenth-century NLW, Peniarth MS 26, compiled in Oswestry in the northern Welsh March: A bastar schall come owte of the west In sowth England borne shall be He schall wyne the gre for the best And then thys lande schall Briten be (p. 117, my transcription)

The weight of the manuscript evidence suggests that the bastard originally emerged from a forest. The change from forest to west appears to have first been used on the Welsh border, probably in relation to the early Yorkist cause during the 1450s and 1460s when much was made of the Welsh ancestry of the Yorkist claimants to the throne.117 This western re-orientation was drawn on by another Anglo-Welsh political faction in the later fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries: partisans of the Tudors. This saw transmission across the Anglo-Welsh border. The Lansdowne scribe surely had Henry Tudor in mind, for the Prophesies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng also appear in Lansdowne 762, featuring a reference to Henry VII as a western deliverer in the fashion of the bastard: This is discussed at length in Chapter 4.

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Therr shall entre at mylford haven vpon a horse of tree a banyshed barone that is borne of bruts blode shalbe. (fol. 78r)118

The matter of the bastard’s provenance in the earliest versions remains uncertain. The Cambridge gives his place of birth outside England, while the Cotton and Sloane locate his birth in south England. His association with a locale beyond England in the Cambridge may suggest a variant tradition, perhaps drawing on the return of the hero from overseas, a staple of the English prophetic tradition as early as Geoffrey of Monmouth. Certainly, the precedents of Conanus and Cadualadrus were in mind. In fact, the vision of the bastard’s return is one of the most influential re-workings of Prophetiae, 110–14 of the later Middle Ages. The restoration of the name of the ‘land’ – or in the Cotton the ‘ledes’ (people) – to Britain (/Britons) is a direct echo of the restoration of the island to Brutus’s name in Prophetiae, 114. Conquest is envisaged as homecoming. This allusion must be understood in the long historical context of the application of this figure to the English conquest of Scotland, which began with Langtoft: ‘Ore sunt les insulanes trestuz assemblez, / Et Albanye rejoynte à les regaltez’/   Des quels li rays Eduuard est seygnur clamez’. (‘Now are the islanders all joined together, and Albany reunited to the royalties   of which king Edward is proclaimed lord’).119

Conquest is unification, and as we find across the English tradition in relation to Scotland, the two kingdoms are understood as rightfully one, always the true property of the king of England. However, in the Scottish prophetic tradition, Prophetiae, 110–14 continued to be used as an oppositional standard, of a type with which the Romance and Prophecies-author appears to have been familiar. Indeed, it has even been suggested by Ingeborg Nixon that the phrasing of the Cambridge variant, ‘And alle leder of bretans shal he be’ (620), echoes the prophecy of Robert Bruce’s victory over the English, recorded in Barbour’s Bruce, ‘I haiff gret hop he sall be king / And haiff this land all in leding’ (89–90).120 The composition of the Bruce, like When Rome is Removyd, stands roughly contemporary with the Romance and Prophecies, and yet again we might understand the uses of this figure by an English author as both a statement of a coherent English ideology, and a reaction MS BL Lansdowne 762, fols 75r–88r. Also, see above, pp. 120–21. See above, p. 72. 120 Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, p. 35. See above, p. 118. 118 119

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to a related Scottish oppositional discourse. The bastard’s pan-insular rule stands in relation to a long English prophetic tradition, and an equally long Scottish one. Following his appearance, the bastard reforms laws and calls a parliament. All copies then proceed, after a fashion, to give an account of the Battle of Sandyford starting with a very specific identification of its location in line with geographical markers (Nixon has tentatively suggested an association with a location in the Flodden Hills).121 Sandyford is identified explicitly as the site of a ‘last battle’ in the Cambridge, Cotton, and Sloane versions (631) – the only manuscripts to extend this far (the Lansdowne breaks off prior to this event, and the Thornton is damaged here). This is followed by the death of the bastard in the ‘holy land’, another example of late medieval English Last World Emperor prophecy, in the Sloane and Cotton versions, while the Cambridge version places his death prior to Sandyford. I consider the placing of this material in the Cambridge variant to be anomalous, for in the other witnesses, as across subsequent English Erceldoune prophecies, the battle for insular sovereignty conventionally precedes the journey to Jerusalem. However, the Cambridge does provide the most complete statement of the international career of the bastard: þe bastard shal get hym power strong, And alle his foes he shall doune dyng; Off alle the v kyngus landis, þer shal non bad[word] home bryng. þe bastard shal die in þe holy land. (Cambridge, 637–41)

strike down

The career and death of the bastard shows the influence of English crusading ambitions to a greater degree than any previous prophecy in the Erceldoune tradition. It is the earliest Erceldoune text to extend the prophesied king’s achievements past the restoration of English rule in Scotland to the conquest of Europe and a successful crusade, as found in Langtoft’s vision of Edward, who after conquering Wales, Scotland, and Ireland finds that: Desore n’y ad ke fere for purver ses alez Sur li ray de Fraunce, conquere ses heritez, Et pus porter la croyce où Jhesu Cryst fu nez. (Henceforward there is nothing to do but provide his expedition against the king of France, to conquer his inheritances, and then bear the cross where Jesus Christ was born.)122 Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, p. 78. See above, p. 74.

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The dominant influence on the Romance and Prophecies-author was probably a later descendant of Langtoft’s prophetic depiction of Edward I: the boar of the Six Kings, who similarly subjugates the Welsh and Scots, and conquers as far as the ‘Burgh de Jherusalem’.123 The ‘v kyngus landis’ across which the bastard’s reputation spreads might be a refashioned allusion to the ‘quater terres’ on which the boar of Windsor whets his tusks, prior to Jerusalem, the fifth land of his conquests. The bastard and the boar are treated as synonymous in their later reception history. The Cock in the North, an early fifteenth-century prophecy drawing on material from the Romance and Prophecies, takes as its hero ‘þe said bore’ who ‘at sandyford that degre (won)’ – an allusion to the bastard’s victory.124 This figure similarly ends his career in ‘Surrey’, generally translated as Palestine. In the Romance and Prophecies, the apocalyptic narrative latent in the earlier Erceldoune tradition achieves its fullest realisation. This particular development in the Erceldoune tradition probably owes something to a prolific, high political interest in crusading prophecy during this period: Richard II’s engagement with the legend of the Holy Oil of St Thomas. Contemporary chroniclers record that towards the end of his reign, Richard rediscovered the eagle ampoule containing the Holy Oil. Allegedly, he even requested that the Archbishop of Canterbury hold a second coronation for him, so that he might be anointed with it. The chronicler Thomas Walsingham records that this request was refused, and Henry IV was later anointed with the oil – although it has been suggested that this may be a later anti-Ricardian fabrication. Other chronicle accounts agree, however, that the oil was among the English regalia that Richard took with him on his ill-fated Irish campaign in 1399.125 We might understand Richard’s engagement with the legend as less a rediscovery than a foregrounding of prophetic material which was in continued circulation. From the reign of Edward III, there is an account of the legend in the Eulogium historiarum (completed c. 1366), pertaining to a crusading king of England who once anointed with the oil would restore Normandy and Aquitaine to English rule, subjugate the lands of the pagans, and build churches in Babylon.126 See above, p. 97. See below, pp. 165–66. 125 Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, p. 204; Michael Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399 (Stroud, 1999), pp. 140–41; Sandquist, ‘Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, pp. 336–44; Ullmann, ‘Thomas Becket’s Miraculous Oil’. For speculation concerning later royal uses of the oil, see J. W. McKenna, ‘The Coronation Oil of the Yorkist Kings’, English Historical Review 82 (1967): 102–04. 126 Eulogium, I, pp. 406–07. For a discussion of the composition of the Eulogium and its later continuations, see G. B. Stow, ‘The Continuation of the Eulogium Historiarum: Some Revisionist Perspectives’, English Historical Review 119 (2004): 667–81 (p. 668). 123 124

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Richard’s prophetic interests have been placed in the context of the circulation of other crusading prophecies of this type, where British and Irish conquest precedes a journey to Palestine. Michael Bennett has suggested that prophetic material of a type with the Verses of Gildas may have even influenced Richard’s Irish ambitions.127 Sextus-prophecies certainly circulated during the late fourteenth century. Alongside Tolle caput martis (a component text in the Verses of Gildas), which appears in a number of manuscripts from this period, the second half of the century also saw the circulation of Ter tria lustra, a composition of the reign of Edward III, and the two are often found in the same manuscripts.128 In Ter tria lustra, Sextus conquers the world, before restoring apostolic poverty and renewing the church. The prophecy articulates far-reaching ambitions for state-led religious reform, and must be aligned with a late fourteenth-century interest in crusading materials, associated with a vogue for political Joachimism in England, drawing on continental influences.129 As I have written elsewhere, this Joachite current entered into a close relationship with the English Galfridian tradition.130 Although, as Coote has noted, the prophecy contains no reference to Sextus’s more localised conquests, these were surely in mind.131 The epithet Sextus could not fail also to evoke English ambitions in Ireland. In Geoffrey of Monmouth’s original statement of the theme in Prophetiae, 99–105, before he renews the places of the saints, Sextus overthrows the walls of Ireland. The prophecy was integrated in the Eulogium historiarum, where it is glossed extensively, including a note on Sextus’s rule of Ireland.132 This Ricardian prophetic imagining would have offered particular utility to a prophetic author on the northern English border, where the conquests of Ireland and Scotland had a long association. We have seen as early as the prophecies of Pierre de Langtoft how the projected imperial career of the king of England, rich in eschatological resonances, could be used to endorse British and Irish overlordship. There is one telling indication that the Romance and Prophecies­-author may have had this material in mind. In his first encounter with his prophetic fairy mistress, Thomas mistakes her for the Virgin Mary: ‘He sayd, “ȝone es marye moste of myghte, / þat bare þat childe þat dyede for mee”’ (75–76, Thornton). Functionally, the fairy plays the same role as the Virgin in the Holy Oil narratives: both authorise Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, pp. 202–03. Relevant manuscripts are included in Coote’s catalogue, in Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 242, 249, 250, 260, 262, 272, 278. 129 Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism, pp. 187–88. 130 Victoria Flood, ‘Political Joachimism and the English Franciscans: The Rumour of Richard II’s Return’, in Britain and Italy: Cultural Exchanges in the Late Middle Ages, ed. Helen Fulton and Michele Campopiano (York, forthcoming). 131 Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 74–75. 132 Eulogium, I, pp. 417–19. 127 128

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a particular type of prophetic vision. The prophecies of the fairy to Thomas of Erceldoune are analogous to the prophecies given by the Virgin Mary to another Thomas, in that both concern a crusading king of England and his conquests across Europe to Jerusalem. The association between the fairy and the Virgin was long-lived: in the later Prophesies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng the fairy is directly substituted by the Virgin.133 This movement was potentially more than a squeamish sanitisation of the prophecy’s secular supernatural source: it is based on clear structural parallels to Holy Oil narratives and the cultural function of the Virgin Mary as the divine guarantor of English crusading prophecies. Interestingly, the Prophecy of the Holy Oil continued to circulate alongside Erceldoune material during the sixteenth century: a version of the Latin text appears on fols 6v–7r of Lansdowne 762. We might regard Thomas of Erceldoune and his fairy mistress as the secular counterparts of Becket and the Virgin.134 Certainly, this political-literary background would explain why the fullest application of the crusading motif is found at this particular moment in the development of the Erceldoune tradition. We might align the final monument of the early Erceldoune tradition with a contemporary context of courtly and even international diplomatic address. In 1395, Philippe de Mézières, a diplomat and man of letters at the French court, negotiating Richard II’s French marriage and peace between the two countries, composed a letter to Richard hailing him as king of all Britain, and the potential leader of a crusade to conquer Jerusalem.135 Like a good diplomat, Phillippe appears to have known his audience, as – however, imaginatively conceived – did the author of the Romance and Prophecies. We might also compare the prophecy-author with the Cheshire author of the Ricardian portion of the Dieulacres Chronicle (MS Gray’s Inn Library 9), who writing in the early fifteenth century, recalled prophecies associated with Richard’s nativity.136 The Dieulacres prophecies are taken directly from m ­ aterial Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy, pp. 69–90, see further Cooper, ‘Thomas of Erceldoune’, p. 185. 134 A connection between the two prophecies is also noted by Brandl, although he understands it in relation to Lancastrian propagandist uses of the Holy Oil. Thomas of Erceldoune, pp. 22, 31. 135 Philippe de Mézières, Letter to Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace between England and France, ed. and transl. G. W. Copeland (Liverpool, 1975), pp. 101–02; transl. pp. 28–29. This must be understood in the broader European context of a movement in the period 1395–97 to elect Richard Holy Roman Emperor, as the popularity of his brother-in-law, the emperor-elect Wenceslas, waned. Bennett, Richard II and the Revolution of 1399, pp. 10, 94, 125; Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, p. 197. 136 Gray’s Inn Library, MS 9, fol. 142v. For discussion of the chronicle and its component parts, see M. V. Clarke and V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Deposition of Richard II’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 14(1) (1930): 125–81 (pp. 126–31). See also Alfred Horwood, 133

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conventionally ascribed to John of Bridlington, composed in the period c. 1362– 64.137 An originally anonymous series of prophecies, initially associated with ‘Robert the scribe’ of Bridlington Priory in north Yorkshire, and later ascribed to John Thwenge, the sainted John of Bridlington, the Prophecies of John of Bridlington detail events of the reign of Edward III with some limited futurist material, accompanied by a commentary ascribed to John Ergome, a fourteenthcentury canon of Bridlington associated with the powerful Bohun family, and often held to be the author of the prophecies.138 The sequence was immensely popular throughout the later Middle Ages, and appears to have been applied to Richard II in particular – unsurprisingly, given its application to his father and grandfather. In the Dieulacres prophecies, Richard is identified by ciphers associated with Edward III and the Black Prince. He is a bull of a triple nature – of English, British, and French, descent. This is an allusion to the heritage of Edward III, a king with a French mother, a father born in Caernarfon, and himself born in Windsor. This meaning is made explicit in the commentary which accompanies it in Bridlington. Richard is also identified as the ‘gallus’, the cock, identified as another British hero, the greatest in the world. This is a play on the conventional word for Frenchman used in Latin political prophecies produced in England, ‘gallus’. It frames a claim to the French throne, and was originally associated with Edward III, and Edward of Woodstock after him, as we read in the Bridlington commentary. Walsingham records the application of these particular prophecies to Richard II in 1399, by false flatterers at the English court.139 Interestingly, these prophecies are concerned not only with the far-reaching territorial claims of the English king, but also bestow upon him an authorising Britishness, a claim which (however spuriously) in its recollection of Edward II’s Welsh birthplace, acquires Catalogue of the Ancient Manuscripts Belonging to the Honourable Society of Gray’s Inn (London, 1869), pp. 7–9. 137 Correspondence noted also by Taylor, Political Prophecy, p. 57; Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 1523. 138 Printed in Wright, Political Poems and Songs, I, pp. 123–215; Michael Curley, ‘The Prophecy of John of Bridlington: An Edition’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1973). For discussion of authorship, see also Sister Helen M. Peck, ‘The Prophecy of St John of Bridlington’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1930); Paul Meyvaert, ‘John Erghome and the Vaticinium Roberti Bridlington’, Speculum 41 (1966): 656–64; Michael J. Curley, ‘The Cloak of Anonymity and the Prophecy of John of Bridlington’, Modern Philology 77 (1980): 361–69; A. G. Rigg, ‘John of Bridlington’s Prophecy: A New Look’, Speculum 63 (1988): 596–613; Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 51–58; Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 118–19, 121–28. For the passages drawn on by the Dieulacres chronicler, see Wright, Political Poems and Songs, I, pp. 192–94; 203–04. 139 John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, ed. and transl., The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham II: 1394–1422 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 124–25.

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a genealogical foundation. This is the same British interest as that of the author of the Romance and Prophecies. The Romance and Prophecies belong to a broader, national movement, keyed in to the terms of a high political discourse, which acquired a particular angle in application to the affairs of the northern border. As we find across the English Erceldoune tradition, the prophecy functions as a form of imaginary (to borrow David Matthews’s term) ‘writing to the king’.140 Its application to Scottish affairs in particular, might be understood in relation to perceptions of Richard’s military success in 1385, when he marched on Scotland following Robert II’s welcoming of a French expeditionary group. Although marred by distrust between the king and his uncle, John of Gaunt, and ultimately inconclusive, the expedition has been understood as marking the king’s independence as a military leader.141 The undertaking possessed a certain cultural capital. Victory in Scotland was not only of tactical importance, but in the life of an English king was of great symbolic value. In the context of contemporary political prophecy, this early success would have seemed the first step on the road to Jerusalem. The prophecy-author’s engagement with this particular aspect of royal selfcasting challenges a number of general trends observed by historians in relation to political mentalities on the northern English border towards the end of Richard’s reign. It is often argued that the final decades of the fourteenth century saw a rejection of the king’s authority on the northern border, superseded by a network of local loyalties to regional magnates. This was in many respects a consequence of the wars with Scotland, which allowed the northern nobility to array armies in defence of the border, and on occasion negotiate privately with Scotland.142 By the late fourteenth century, the patronage of such magnates was incredibly important for lesser families, and institutions, in the region. Foremost among them, we must count the Percy family.143 In the period 1390–96, the Percies dominated the offices Matthews, Writing to the King.. Anthony Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility (London, 1973), p. 97; Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, pp. 66–67. 142 J. A. Tuck, ‘The Emergence of a Northern Nobility, 1250–1400’, Northern History 22 (1986): 1–17 (pp. 13–17); J. A. Tuck, ‘Richard II and the Border Magnates’, Northern History 3 (1968): 27–53. 143 For the most recent discussion of the Percies, and their influence in their northern heartlands, see Alexander Rose, Kings in the North: The House of Percy in British History (London, 2003). See further J. M. W. Bean, The Estates of the Percy Family 1416–1537 (Oxford, 1958), pp. 3–11; Chris Given-Wilson, The English Nobility in the Late Middle Ages: The Fourteenth-century Political Community (London, 1987), pp. 132–35. Percy domination of the border by the late fourteenth century is discussed by J. A. Tuck, ‘Northumbrian Society in the Fourteenth Century’, Northern History 6 (1971): 22–39 (pp. 38–39). See also n. 141. 140 141

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of the wardens of the marches of England against Scotland, important strategic positions engaged in defence against Scotland, and truce keeping.144 Henry Percy, the first earl of Northumberland, was warden of the east march, and Henry Percy le filz, also known as Hotspur, was warden of the west. Percy support for Richard’s deposition in 1399 is generally understood to have been prompted by the king’s attempts to undermine their power in this region during the late 1390s through the redistribution of these offices.145 Royal and magnate power did not always sit together comfortably on the northern border during this period. Yet the Romance and Prophecies, a fundamentally pro-Ricardian text, suggests an alternative perception of this situation. There are two brief references to the Percies. The most extensive is the final historical allusion of the text, to the Battle of Otterburn: Sloane Cotton betwixt a well & a weare, betwys a wethy & a water a withwell & a slyke stone, a well & a haly stane þer shall ij cheftens mete in fere, þer sal two chyftans met in fere the on shall doughtles be slayne. þe doglas þer shal be sl.. the brusse blud shall with him fle, A tarslet shal in halde be tane chyftans a way with hym & leade him to a worthi towne; & lede hym to an hold of stane And close him in a castell lyght, & close hym in a castel h… theare to be with greate renowme. (477–84)(477–84) Lansdowne Cambridge By twyx a wey of water be twene a wycked way & a watur A well, & a grey stone, a parke and a stony way then; there cheuanteynes shall mete on fere, ther shal a cheften mete in fere, And that o dowghty ther shall be slayne. A ful dutey þer shal be slayn That other cheuanteyne shall there be tayne, the todur cheftan shal be tane, For the history of the office, see R. R. Reid, ‘The Office of the Warden of the Marches: Its Origin and Early History’, English Historical Review 32 (1917): 479–96; R. L. Storey, ‘The Wardens of the Marches of England towards Scotland, 1377–1489’, English Historical Review 72 (1957): 593–615. For recent discussion of this office in the reign of Richard II, see Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, pp. 65–95. 145 See Tuck, Richard II and the English Nobility, pp. 201–02; Tuck, ‘Richard II and the Border Magnates’, pp. 48–50. 144

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And proude blode withe hyme shall fle, A pesans of blode hyme shal slee; And lede hyme tyll a worthe towne, And lede hym away in won, And close hym vp in a castell hye And cloyse hym in a castell hee (477–84)(477–84)

This is Ho1spur’s encounter with James, Second Earl of Douglas (whose name is lost in all but the Cotton version). The feud between the Percies and the Douglases dominated border politics during the late 1370s and 1380s, and although a national conflict, Otterburn has been regarded by historians as possessing the character of a feud between two powerful families: the campaign came close to an act of private warfare.146 Broadly speaking, the battle was a Scottish victory, although casualties were high on both sides. In Scotland, Otterburn was said to have been won by a dead man, Douglas.147 Meanwhile, some chroniclers in England regarded it as an English victory, the day won by Hotspur.148 Although it remains unknown under whose sword Douglas fell, it was long understood in England to have been Hotspur’s.149 This is probably the implication in the Cambridge text, where we read of ‘the todur cheftan’ (Hotspur): ‘A pesans of blode hyme shal slee’ (482). In keeping with the terminology of the other (certainly greater) battles of the prophecy, Douglas’s force is even identified in the Sloane version as ‘the brusse blod’ (481). Hotspur is, by this logic, a representative not just of the company at Otterburn, but of the English altogether, and, in the terms of the prophecy, the Britons. In the Cotton version, he is given a specific heroic signifier, an animal cipher in the Galfridian fashion. We read of his capture: ‘A tarslet sal in halde be tane’ (481). ‘Tarslet’ was used to mean a male bird of prey, in reference to a number of species, but most often the eagle.150 It appears in the context of another Tuck, ‘Richard II and the Border Magnates’, p. 32; Neville, Violence, Custom and Law, pp. 65–66. For discussion of the Douglases, see Michael Brown, The Black Douglases: War and Lordship in Late Medieval Scotland, 1300–1455 (East Linton, 1998). 147 This allusion features in a mid-sixteenth-century Scottish ballad on the battle printed by Child, English and Scottish Ballads, VII, pp. 20–25. Discussed also by Brown, Black Douglases, p. 76. 148 John Taylor, Wendy R. Childs, and Leslie Watkiss, eds and transl., The St Albans Chronicle: The Chronica maiora of Thomas Walsingham I: 1376–1394 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 856–57. 149 Rose, Kings in the North, p. 338. 150 Birds of prey appear as symbols for historical figures across the Romance and Prophecies. From line 444, we read of a relationship between a ‘goshawke’ and a raven. The goshawk is thought to be David II, although the identification of the raven remains unclear. For discussion of these interpretations, see Murray, Romance and Prophecies, p. lxxviii; Nixon, Thomas of Erceldoune, II, p. 71. 146

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historical Scottish campaign, earlier in the second fytte, and it is presumably this prior use of the word (common to all witnesses) that inspired its application to Hotspur in the Cotton version. This account is relatively consistent across extant versions, and I quote from the Thornton, noting slight variations from other manuscripts: A tercelet, of the same lande, To bretane sall take þe redy waye, And take tercelettis grete and graye, [in Sloane only: gay] With hym owte of his awene contree; Thay sall wende on an ryche arraye, And come agayne by land and see. He sall stroye the northe contree, Mare and less hym by-forne; Ladyes sall saye, allas! & walowaye! That euer þat Royalle blode [in Sloane: baly of blode; in Cotton: balyolues blod] was borne. (391–400)

Murray suggested that this passage, which follows the ex eventu prophecy of the English defeat at Bannockburn, is an account of Edward Balliol’s campaign in Scotland, along with other lords dispossessed after Bannockburn, including, importantly, Henry Percy (grandfather of the first earl of Northumberland). The hosts of the ‘dispossessed’ surprised the Scottish army at Duplin Moor and continued to Perth, events which appear to be recalled in the allusion to a town on the ‘water of Taye’ (Perth) which follows in line 410. This is certainly a historical fit with the passage and its position in the text, and as Murray notes, the reading we find in Cotton, ‘balyolues blod’, corrupted in Sloane as ‘baly’, was probably the original one intended.151 Balliol’s blood brings great suffering to the ‘northe contree’, a phrase the author of the prophecy consistently uses to mean Scotland and the border. It is presumably by virtue of the association of this with a historical member of the Percy family that the version of the text preserved in the Cotton manuscript reapplies this term to Hotspur. The implication in the use of the cipher is quite clear: a ‘tarslet’ is a border magnate, who has the capacity to plunge Scotland into the deepest suffering, of a type with the lamentations of the oldest examples of the Erceldoune tradition. These two brief allusions in the Romance and Prophecies suggest a perception of the regional importance of the Percies, and their power to act against Murray, Thomas of Erceldoune, p. lxxvii.

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the Scots, but by no means does this perception override loyalties towards the king. The prophecy is fundamentally conservative in its original socio-political context. However, the Otterburn episode may well have been understood in the mid-fifteenth century as encoding some manner of oppositional potential. In the Thornton version, the Otterburn episode is cut from the manuscript, alongside the Percy family motto, ‘Esperaunce ma comforte’, partially preserved in the opening of the Alliterative Morte Arthure.152 An effort appears to have been made to expunge possible associations with the family from the manuscript. The excising hand may have even been Thornton himself, for the excisor chose not to remove the entire work. It is tempting to place this act in the period following Richard of York’s appointment as protector of the realm, when – by extension of their feud with prominent supporters of York, the Neville earls of Westmorland – the Percies stood in opposition to the incipient Yorkist regime.153 The possible association of Thornton with the Percy–Neville rivalry has seen some scholarly attention. George Keiser has noted Thornton’s dismissal from his position as a tax collector in the North Riding of Yorkshire between the commissions of June 1453 and May 1454. The fine rolls record that this discharge was a result of the discovery of certain ‘sinister information’ concerning the commissioners. Keiser tentatively suggests that a suspicion or anticipation of involvement by Thornton in Percy disturbances in the north-east lay behind this.154 As Michael Johnston has observed, we can by no means infer from this that Thornton was a close associate of the Percies, although certainly we can place him at an intersection between Percy and Neville power in the North Riding.155 Literary material relating to the Percies, at least during this period, may well have carried seditious connotations that they did not in the late fourteenth century. Interestingly, however, if Thornton was aware of material relating to the Percies in the Romance and Prophecies, this was recognisable as possessing a dynastic meaning during the mid-fifteenth century. This may have something to do with prophetic engagements among the Percies during the next century, explored in Chapter 4.

Johnston, ‘A New Document’, p. 309, 28 n. For historical context, see R. L. Storey, The End of the House of Lancaster (London, 1967), pp. 124–49; Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘Local Rivalries and National Politics: The Percies, the Nevilles and the Dukes of Exeter, 1452–1455’, Speculum 48 (1968): 589–632; Peter Booth, ‘Men Behaving Badly? The West March towards Scotland and the Percy-Neville Feud’, in Fifteenth Century III: Authority and Subversion, ed. Linda Clark (Woodbridge, 2003), pp. 95–116; Rose, Kings in the North, pp. 400–09. 154 Keiser, ‘Lincoln Cathedral MS 91’, pp. 163–64. 155 Johnston, ‘A New Document’, pp. 309–10. 152 153

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Conclusion The early English Erceldoune prophecies provide a case study in the movement of political prophetic materials across borders, both regional and national. These texts were produced by authors exhibiting a deep investment in the personal presence of the king of England on the Anglo-Scottish border – the same investment that defined the political prophetic interests of this region from Pierre de Langtoft onwards. This was marked by a pronounced engagement with Scottish political prophecy, from which English authors both borrowed freely, and actively sought to neutralise. From this perspective, the English Erceldoune tradition emerges as a self-conscious counter-tradition to oppositional literary-political movements in Scotland. The national scope of their vision facilitated the transmission of Erceldoune prophecies across England, as part of a genuinely national discourse. In particular, the Romance and Prophecies is a deeply significant text for our understanding of the development of the figure of the prophesied king of England: it is one of the earliest, and fullest, English-language representations of the prophesied high king of the Galfridian tradition as a crusader. However, we must not under-estimate the importance of this material for the construction of specifically regional identities in the north of England, and of localised conceptualisations of English identity also. The northern border occupied a strategically instrumental place in the Galfridian vision of the insular future of English political prophecy during the fourteenth century: it was a position of both defensive and offensive military importance. As we turn to the next chapter in the story of English prophecy, we see that this privileged geo-political position came to inspire new prophetic compositions, which placed visions of regional lordship above insular unity, and set about deconstructing old models of pan-insular sovereignty. This is the subject of my final chapter.

chapter 4

‘A dede man shall make bytwene hem acorde’: Cock in the North and Ceiliog y North, c. 1405–85 Sometime he angers me With telling me of the moldwarp and the ant, Of the dreamer Merlin and his prophecies, And of a dragon and a finless fish, A clip-wing’d griffin and a moulten raven, A couching lion and a ramping cat, And such a deal of skimble-skamble stuff As puts me from my faith. (William Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV, 3.1, 146–53)

William Shakespeare’s portrait of the prophetically enthused Welshman, Owen Glendower, whose ciphered musings are denounced by his pragmatic Northumbrian ally, Henry ‘Hotspur’ Percy, is perhaps one of the most famous, and most quoted, early modern depictions of medieval political prophecy.1 Its reference to the moldwarp, lion, and dragon borrows from the Prophecy of the Six Kings and the division of ‘Angleterre’ between three allies. As we find in Shakespeare’s play, this prophecy has long been associated with the Tripartite Indenture, which historically, belongs not to 1403 (where Shakespeare placed it), but 1405, and allied Owain not with Hotspur, but his father, the first earl of Northumberland. The Indenture, an agreement between Owain, Northumberland, and Sir Edmund Mortimer, uncle to the young earl of March (who was understood by many to be Richard II’s heir), reads as a blueprint for an enlarged independent Wales and a vast Percy lordship stretching from Norfolk to the Scottish border, with the remainder under the governance of Mortimer. Its ambition appears to have been  1

This pervasive perception is discussed by Fulton, ‘Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Uses of Prophecy’; Fulton, ‘Owain Glyndŵr and the Prophetic Tradition’. For discussion of Shakespeare’s Owen, see Rees Davies, ‘Shakespeare’s Glendower and Owain Glyn Dŵr’, The Historian 66 (2000): 22–25; David J. Baker, ‘Glyn Dwr, Glendouer, Glendourdy and Glendower’, in Shakespeare and Wales: From the Marches to the Assembly, ed. Willy Maley and Philip Schwyzer (Farnham, 2010), pp. 43–58.

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for the creation of three autonomous dominions, understood as part of a confederated kingdom.2 It is unique among medieval political agreements in its incorporation of an allusion to the ‘Propheta’ (almost certainly Merlin), who foretold the division of ‘Britanniae Majoris’ between three allies. This reads as a reference to Galfridian political prophecies derived from the vision of the anti-English alliance of Prophetiae Merlini, 110–14, which found its most compelling later medieval reworking in the final sequence of the Six Kings.3 From the Chronicles of Hall and Holinshed onwards, the anti-English alliance of the Six Kings has been associated with Owain, and has been understood to be the stuff of genuine Welsh prophetic belief.4 The image of the credulous Welshman rhapsodising about the moldwarp and the dragon has endured for centuries.5 However, the prophecy belongs to a tradition that is not Welsh but English. We can detect a Welsh prophetic perspective in the Indenture, in the identification of the Welsh border in line with the ash trees of Meigion, a national boundary marker with a place in Welsh political prophecy. The authorship of the Indenture is generally understood to be Welsh, and this is certainly the context in which we must place this particular allusion.6 The division of the island is also The earliest copy of the Indenture is MS BL Sloane 1776, known as the Giles Chronicle. This is printed and translated in Casebook, pp. 112–15, with notes on pp. 341–42. Although there has been uncertainty among scholars regarding the authenticity of the document, it is now accepted as genuine, and has been dated to February 1405. Associations of the Indenture with the activities of Hotspur in 1403 are understood to be spurious, although it may well have built on an earlier arrangement between Hotspur and Owain, contemporary with the Battle of Shrewsbury, of which no record now survives. See discussion by Michael Livingstone, ‘An Amazing Claim: The Tripartite Indenture’, in Casebook, pp. 489–95. For earlier discussion of the Indenture, see E. F. Jacob, Fifteenth Century, 1399–1485 (Oxford, 1993), p. 57; R. R. Davies, The Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr (Oxford, 1995), pp. 166–69; Glanmor Williams, Owain Glyndŵr (Cardiff, 1993), pp. 56–57.  3 This reference has been most commonly understood as a direct allusion to the Six Kings. For a comprehensive statement to this effect, see James A. Doig, ‘The Prophecy of “the Six Kings to Follow John” and Owain Glyn Dŵr’, Studia Celtica 29 (1995): 257–67 (pp. 260–61). It has been suggested, however, that it may actually have been operating as a more generalised reference to Galfridian prophecy. See Fulton, ‘Owain Glyndŵr and the Prophetic Tradition’, pp. 479–80.  4 This is a feature of both English and Welsh historiography, e.g. Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, pp. 168–69; Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 1519; V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (New York, 1971), pp. 117–19; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 16–18.  5 The long-lived historiographical tendency to associate Owain with English political prophecies is set out by Fulton, ‘Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Uses of Prophecy’.  6 Casebook, p. 342. As Livingstone notes, the allusion to the ash trees suggests a considerable Welsh involvement in the wording of the Indenture. It may well be the work of Gruffudd  2

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in some sense concordant with Welsh historical and prophetic frameworks of meaning (the ultimate source of this material as it appears in the English tradition). R. R. Davies has suggested it offers some parity with Teir Ynys Prydein, the three kingdoms of the island of Britain given in the Welsh triads, although, as he notes, these are not an exact fit with the territorial interests of the Indenture.7 The most immediate framework of understanding for the vision of the ‘Propheta’, however, is the English Merlinian tradition. Its incorporation in a (very feasibly) Welsh-authored document may well have functioned as a piece of Anglo-Welsh diplomacy – for certainly, Galfridian material offered a nodal point between the Welsh prophetic tradition and the English. It would have possessed particular pertinence in relation to the prophetic traditions of northern England, and, I suggest, probably owes its inclusion to the prophetic interests of the Percies, for during the early years of the fifteenth century, they were associated with precisely this type of prophecy. This chapter explores the context and reception of a vastly influential political prophecy of the early fifteenth century, associated with the Percies, which, I suggest, shares its vision with the Tripartite Indenture: Cock in the North.8 A combining of material from the final sequence of the Six Kings, the Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune, and the Latin prophecies ascribed to John of Bridlington, the prophecy is the work of a Latinate author working in the English vernacular. Although it survives only in late manuscript witnesses, a number of mid-fifteenth-century texts have northern English dialectal features. Given its particular sources, and what we know of their circulation, it may well have been composed in, or in proximity to, a monastic or ecclesiastical environment. The prophecy’s Percy-ite connection has been observed in the only full-length study of it, by Alois Brandl in 1909.9 Although Brandl’s research has been little commented upon by subsequent scholars, it remains an important watershed in the study of political prophecy. Brandl located the prophecy in the broader context of Percy propaganda preceding the Battle of Shrewsbury, the disastrous culmination of the 1402–03 Percy rebellion. An allusion in the text to Northumberland’s Welsh Yonge, who was involved with Owain’s negotiations with France, and was probably the author of the Confederation between Wales and France. See Livingstone, ‘An Amazing Claim’, pp. 491–93, 494. For the Welsh prophetic associations of this locale, see also Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, p. 169.  7 Davies, Revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, pp. 168–69. See also Bromwich, Trioedd, p. 254.  8 For printed versions of the text, see Alois Brandl, ed., ‘The Cock in the North: Poetische Weissagung auf Percy Hotspur (gest. 1403)’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 47 (1909): 1160–89; Robbins, Historical Poems, pp. 115–17, 309–12.  9 Brandl, ‘Cock in the North’, pp. 1178–80.

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alliance has been noted by Rossell Hope Robbins, who similarly understood the text (which he regarded as composite) to include material pertaining to the Percy rebellion.10 However, the fuller implications of this argument for the prophecy’s dating and its political context have gone largely unnoticed by subsequent critics. This chapter offers a revision to Brandl’s position and a new thesis: the prophecy is a product of the period of the Indenture, with which it shares a very particular vision of the shape of insular rule. The Cock in the North-author’s conceptualisation of the relationship between the crown and a dissenting aristocratic faction presented an important precedent for the English oppositional uses of political prophecy, and was drawn on to this end during the Wars of the Roses, when it was used by Yorkist partisans against the Lancastrian regime, and later by Lancastrians against the Yorkists. It is a statement of opposition to a government perceived to be illegitimate, and so hostile is it to the status quo in England that it has been understood (erroneously) to be of Scottish origin.11 Notably, it did see some later use in Scotland. In the early seventeenth century, it was incorporated as the final part of a composite prophecy of Merlin in the Whole Prophesie of Scotland.12 It is from this, that the prophecy derives one of the names by which it is better known in literary discussion: the First Scottish Prophecy.13 However, the prophecy’s most significant medieval cross-border history was not Scottish but Welsh. Cock in the North was in Welsh circulation by the mid-fifteenth century at the latest, and was translated into Welsh. This reception history has been little noted, but it can tell us a great deal about the relationship between English and Welsh prophecies and Welsh political expectations in the century following the defeat of Owain Glyn Dŵr. A discussion of the conditions of the prophecy’s Welsh uses forms the second part of this chapter. The movement of this material into Wales represents an important phase in the development of the Erceldoune tradition, as fully pan-insular. Interestingly, by the mid-fifteenth century, the prophecy was understood by some in England to Robbins, Historical Poems, p. 310. Taylor, Political Prophecy, pp. 75–76. 12 For discussion of the Whole Prophesie, see above, p. 120. Interestingly, there is one mid-fifteenth-century variant of the prophecy, preserved in CUL Kk. I. v, with strong correspondences to the version included in the Whole Prophesie, and which contains an interpolation which is certainly either of Scottish origin or incorporating Scottish material. It re-works the prophecy as an account of the Wars of Independence after the fashion of the Erceldoune tradition, incorporating allusions to a number of battles located across lowland and central Scotland, including Dumbarton and the Isle of Aran. The interpolated passages appear on fol. 27r. The prophecy is printed by Lumby, Bernardus de Cura Rei Famuliaris, pp. 18–22. 13 This is the title given to the prophecy in the DIMEV, no. 6434. 10 11

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be of Welsh origin. In a copy of the prophecy in MS Gonville and Caius College Cambridge 249/277, John Herryson, a Cambridge doctor of medicine (who gives his name in the explicit of the prophecy) attributed the origin of the prophecy, among other authorities, to ‘þe cowper off westwalys’.14 The material surveyed here suggests the Welsh uses of the text stand at the very foundations of its later applications in England, for it was in Wales that Cock in the North found its most persuasive re-applications to Richard Duke of York during the 1450s, and Henry Tudor during the 1480s.

Cock in the North and the Percies The major obstacle in the study of political prophecies from the anti-Lancastrian rebellion of the early fifteenth century is that the seditious content that makes them so significant for literary-historical study also ensured their suppression. In the early years of the fifteenth century, not one but two pieces of legislation were introduced against the production and dissemination of political prophecy. The first law was passed in 1402, aimed at the uses of prophecy in Wales to stir up rebellion; and another in 1406, associated with the dissemination of ‘false prophecy’ by the Lollards, although Lollard uses of political prophecy remain obscure, and this legislative wording probably conflates two largely unrelated oppositional modes.15 No copies of Cock in the North survive prior to the midfifteenth century (the earliest copies of the text are itemised in Table 1). The earliest witness of the prophecy is found in MS BL Cotton Roll II. 23, a collection of trial materials associated with Jack Cade’s Revolt of 1450, containing a number of prophecies forwarding the royal claim of the duke of York.16 It is from this witness that the text is quoted throughout this chapter. Mid-fifteenth-century copies survive only as used by Yorkist partisans, and we cannot be sure of the extent of alterations and modifications. The attempt to understand its original circumstances of composition and early uses is in this respect an engagement with a hypothetical lost text. Yet there are enough direct allusions to the Percies Fols 227v–228v. M. R. James, A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius College, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1907–14), I, pp. 300–05. For a brief account of Herryson’s career, see Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, p. 101, n 42. 15 Taylor, Political Prophecy, p. 105. For the association of prophecy with heresy in the 1406 act, see Simon Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’, in Political Culture in Later Medieval England, ed. Michael J. Braddick (Manchester, 2006), pp. 154–82 (p. 170). 16 For discussion of the manuscript, see M. M. O’ Sullivan, ‘The Treatment of Political Themes in Late Medieval English Verse, with Special Reference to British Museum, Cotton Roll, II. 23’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1972). 14

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Table 1: Early Manuscripts of Cock in the North (produced c. 1450s–70s) Manuscript Region of production, and political affiliation of scribe (if known) Aberystwyth National Library of Wales, Peniarth MS 26 Oswestry. Yorkist. NLW, Peniarth MS 50 (English and Welsh translation) Glamorgan. Yorkist. Cambridge Cambridge University Library MS Kk.I.5 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge MS 249/277 Dublin Trinity College, Dublin MS 516

Northern English border. Yorkist. Cambridge. Yorkist. Yorkshire and London. Yorkist.

London British Library, Cotton Rolls II.23 London. Early Yorkist, associated with Jack Cade’s Revolt. BL, Cotton Vespasian MS E. vii (Latin translation) Percy-ite collection, belonging to period of Percy-York alliance. BL, Harley MS 1717 Yorkshire. No other political materials in manuscript. Oxford Bodleian, Lyell MS 35

London. Yorkist.

and their anti-Lancastrian activities in the mid-century versions to make this a very strong hypothesis indeed. One important mid-fifteenth century witness suggests an association of the prophecy with the Percy family: MS BL Cotton Vespasian E. vii, which incorporates a Latin translation of Cock in the North. The coat of arms of Henry Fourth Earl of Northumberland appear on fol. 70r, and if the fourth earl is understood to be the original patron of the collection, it must have been compiled c. 1469, after the family’s restoration by Edward IV – although it has been suggested that it may have been compiled earlier in the decade, later coming into the earl’s possession.17 Although Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, pp. 320-24; J. Planta, A Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Cottonian Library (London, 1802), p. 480. The manuscript is also noted briefly in A. S. G. Edwards, ‘Books Owned by Medieval Members of the Percy Family’, in Tributes to Kathleen L. Scott, English Medieval Manuscripts, ed. Marlene Villalobis Hennesy (London, 2009), pp. 73–82 (p. 81); Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 261–62; Lerner, Powers of Prophecy, p. 101; Curley, ‘Edition of the Prophecies of John of Bridlington’, pp. 387–88; Brandl, ‘Cock in the North’, p. 1164; Alison Allan, ‘Political Propaganda Employed by the House of York in England in the Mid-Fifteenth Century, 1450–1471’

17

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much of the collection’s contents pertain to the ascendency of the house of York, it also strongly reflects the historical territorial interests of the Percies, and includes a number of prophecies concerned with Scottish affairs. Another, although admittedly a more tenuous connection, is a copy in a Lancashire or Yorkshire dialect, written in a fifteenth-century hand in MS BL Harley 1717.18 An inscription from the same period on fol. 252r reads ‘sancti Johannis Beverlaci’, and the manuscript appears to have been in the possession of the church of St John of Beverley. This locates it in a region with important historical connections to the family: we might note the Percy tomb, erected at Beverley Minster in the fourteenth century.19 Prophecies associated with the Percies were known in Yorkshire well into the sixteenth century: during the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1537, a number of allusions from Cock in the North were explicitly associated with Thomas Percy (one of the leaders of the rebellion) and were drawn on as statements of ­opposition to the English crown.20 The prophecy takes its modern name from its opening lines, which detail the preparation of a cock for battle, and a union between a dragon and a lion as bold as Arthur himself: When the cocke in the North hath bilde his nest And busketh his bridds and beddnys hem to fle prepares/arranges, bids þen shall fortune his ffrend the gat vp cast And right shall haue his fre entre Thene shall the mone rise in the northwest In a clowde of blake as þe bill of a crowe Then shall þe lion louse the boldest and þe best yat in brytayne was born syne arthers day And a dredefull dragon shall drawe hym from his denne The [sic] helpe the lion with all his myght21 (unpublished PhD thesis, Swansea University, 1981), pp. 215–17; Sutton and VisserFuchs, Richard III’s Books, p. 206. 18 MS BL Harley 1717, fols 249v–250r. Ward, Catalogue of Romances, I, p. 312. For linguistic analysis of the prophecy, see LALME, LP no. 466 (this gives Lancashire). 19 P. J. P. Goldberg, ‘The Percy Tomb in Beverley Minster’, Yorkshire Archaeological Journal 56 (1984): 65–74. 20 Jansen, Political Protest and Prophecy, pp. 99-100; Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, p. 475; A. G. Dickens, ‘The Tudor-Percy Emblem in Royal MS 18. D. ii’, Archaeological Journal 112 (1956 for 1955): 95–99 (p. 98). During this period, allusions from the prophecy appear to have been associated with both the Percies and the Lumleys, members of which families took an active role in the Pilgrimage of Grace. For an overview of the uses of oppositional prophecy during this period, see also Dodds, ‘Political Prophecies in the Reign of Henry VIII’; Fox, ‘Prophecies and Politics in the Reign of Henry VIII’. 21 All quotations from the prophecy are taken from my own transcription of Cotton Roll, II. 23.

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The author then outlines alliances between familiar prophetic heroes and villains, including the bastard, the eagle, and the moldwarp; and others less immediately recognisable – an antelope, bridled horse, mermaid, and ‘fulbert’ (pole cat). The lion is injured in a fray, presumably between these various figures, but does not perish. Various battles follow, and then a dead man invades ‘Troy Untrue’ and there brings a people identified as the Saxons under his governance. The dead man’s career ends with his entry into Palestine (‘Surrey’) and winning of the Holy Cross, an allusion to a successful crusade, after which he is buried in the Vale of Jehoshaphat. Before the dead man’s departure, the lion ascends to rule over an unspecified territory, presumably granted to him by the dead man, heralding a new age of political and cosmic order: The sonne and the mone shall shyne full bright That mony a day full derk hath ben And kepe þer cowrses by dayes and by nyght Wt myrthes mo than any man can mene þe lion and þe lionasse shall regne in pese.

The prophecy features two important Percy symbols: the moon and the lion. The lion appears on the arms of the first earl of Northumberland, and was used by the family from as early as 1300.22 The moon is also a family symbol: the first earl’s soubriquet was ‘the crescent’, which achieves a prominent place in later family legends, associated with a remote, and highly fanciful, crusading history.23 It is invoked as a familiar cipher for the Percies in a number of texts from the early fifteenth century.24 The moon was used to figure members of this family in a prophetic context as late as 1572, where it appears as such in a prophecy quoted against the duke of Norfolk in his trial of that year.25 The specific situation of the moon in Cock in the North suggests its conflation with a Percy seal, first preserved in a document of 1363, the time of the first earl’s father, which integrates a lion’s gamb issuing from clouds: in the prophecy, the moon (although not the lion) rises W. H. D. Longstaffe, ‘The Old Heraldry of the Percies’, Archaeologia Aeliana NS 4 (1860): 157–228 (pp. 166–67, 173). Longstaffe’s article remains the most comprehensive account of Percy symbolism to date. See also S. M. Collins, ‘The Blue Lion of Percy’, Archaeologia Aeliana 4th series, 20 (1946): 113–18. 23 Longstaffe, ‘The Old Heraldry of the Percies’, pp. 179–82. 24 Longstaffe, ‘The Old Heraldry of the Percies’, pp. 173–74. Adam Usk refers to the moon in a prophecy associated with the death of Hotspur at the Battle of Shrewsbury. Chris Given-Wilson, ed. and transl., Chronicle of Adam Usk, 1377–1421 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 170–71. A number of other identifications are noted by Caroline Eckhardt, ‘Another Historical Allusion in Mum and the Sothsegger’, Notes and Queries 27(6) (1980): 495–97. 25 Taylor, Political Prophecy, p. 114. 22

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from a ‘clowde of blake as ys bill of a crowe’. The association of the family with the uses of political prophecy appears to have been relatively prolific. The early ­fifteenth-century West Midlands complaint poem Mum and the Soothsegger refers to the contemporary circulation of books containing ‘mervailles that Merlyn dide devyse’ (1724), and describes the dire consequences of the consultation of these materials, understood as treason: ‘Thus thay muse on the mase on mone and on sterres / Til heedes been hewe of and hoppe on the grene’ (1731–32).26 As Caroline Eckhardt has noted, in his concern with treasonable political prophecy, the author draws on a recognisable Percy cipher: the moon. The Percy family were clearly understood to be among the main offenders in regard to the seditious use of prophecy, and Eckhardt suggests that the poem was composed c. 1406, post-dating Hotspur’s defeat at Shrewsbury in 1403.27 This date also falls roughly contemporary with the Tripartite Indenture, and, I have suggested, the composition of Cock in the North. It is possible that the Mum-author may have even had Cock in the North specifically in mind. The alliance between the lion and the dragon can most intelligibly (as Brandl and Robbins observed) be understood as an allusion to the alliance between the Percies and Owain Glyn Dŵr.28 This application also suggests a continued association in England of the red dragon of the Omen with the Welsh. Yet it is from an intersection with the later English tradition, specifically the Six Kings, that the dragon of Cock in the North probably derived its primary meaning. The union between the lion and the dragon presents a reworking of that between the lion, dragon, and wolf in the Six Kings, who conquer and divide ‘Angleterre’ – the same Galfridian theme that was revisited in the Tripartite Indenture. The Six Kings entered renewed circulation in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century as the English Couplet Version. The date of composition of this remains uncertain, and the sole manuscript copy is preserved in MS BL Cotton Galba E. ix, which has been tentatively dated c. 1390–1420.29 It has been suggested that the prophecy was produced in the early fifteenth century, as a statement of support for the Percy

‘Mum and the Soothsegger’, in Richard the Redeless and Mum and the Soothsegger, ed. James M. Dean (Kalamazoo, MI, 2000), pp. 23-48. The reference to Merlin is discussed by Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, p. 32; Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, pp. 74–75. 27 Eckhardt, ‘Another Historical Allusion in Mum and the Sothsegger’, pp. 496–97. 28 See above, n. 9 and 10. 29 For brief discussion of the date of the English Couplet Version, see Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 572, 579–81. The prophecy is printed in Hall, Poems of Laurence Minot, pp. 97–105. For a catalogue of the contents of MS BL Cotton Galba E. ix, see pp. vii–viii. For critical contention regarding date of the various hands in the manuscript, see Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 580–81. 26

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rebellion.30 Interestingly, it is in a northern Middle English dialect, which would place it in the right region for such an association – although the prophecy had long been popular in northern England, so this is hardly corroborating evidence.31 Given its formal closeness to the English Prose Translation, and uncertainty regarding the date of composition, Smallwood has argued that we cannot assume the English Couplet Version was necessarily composed as an anti-Lancastrian document.32 Nonetheless, this material certainly came to fuel oppositional strategies. In the mid-fifteenth century, it was reworked as the First Revised Couplet Version, which was in turn re-worked as the Second Revised Couplet Version, both of which appear in Yorkist manuscripts from England and the Welsh border as stock antiLancastrian prophecies.33 Correspondences with Cock in the North suggest that this association might well date to the early fifteenth century. We might note, however, that in the application of material from the Six Kings by the Cock in the North-author, there is no reflection of the Mortimer element of the Indenture: the prophecy is interested in two allies, not three. This is surprising, given that the third party in the Six Kings is the wolf, a familiar symbol in Mortimer heraldry.34 This omission might reflect the elision of Mortimer interests during the negotiations surrounding the Indenture, now thought by historians to be the case: significantly, it made no provision for the great Mortimer estates of the March, which were to come under Welsh control. Certainly, the major players appear to have been Owain and the earl of Northumberland.35 The structuring ambition of Cock in the North, however, is not an acknowledgement of a Welsh state alongside the new Percy territories, but the lion’s receipt of his right. Its interests are not a precise reflection of the Indenture as a whole, but its s­ pecifically Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, p. 118. No linguistic profile is given in the LALME, although it is identified as northern Middle English, in a late fourteenth-century hand. 32 Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 580–87. 33 For a list of these manuscripts, see Smallwood, ‘Prophecy of the Six Kings’, pp. 572–73. Among these, MS Bodl. Hatton 56 [First Revised Couplet Version] and MS NLW Peniarth 26 [Second Revised Couplet Version] are collections of Yorkist political prophecy. For a more general statement concerning the Yorkist utility of the Six Kings, in this case the Latin version, see 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. Charles Ross (Stroud, 1979), pp. 171–92 (pp. 184–85). The Second Revised Couplet Version of Peniarth 26 has been edited by Doig, ‘The Prophecy of the “Six Kings to Follow John”’, pp. 265–67. 34 S. T. Aveling, ed., Heraldry, Ancient and Modern: Including Boutell’s Heraldry by Charles Boutell (London, 1890), p. 306. This badge was later adopted by Edward IV. 35 It remains controversial whether Northumberland or Owain was the dominant party here. See Williams, Owain Glyndŵr, pp. 56–57; Jacob, Fifteenth Century, p. 57; Livingstone, ‘An Amazing Claim’, p. 494. 30 31

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Percy-ite dimension. The dragon appears in the prophecy, accordingly, as a means to this end. He receives only a single mention. Aside from Percy-ite interests, during this period there was a certain natural association of Henry IV with the final king of the Six Kings, in whose reign this scene of insular division was to take place. The mole is, of course, the deposer of the ass, and the two were identified by contemporary prophetic commentators as Henry IV and Richard II.36 This must be understood in the context of the long-standing and prominent conceptualisation of the Six Kings prior to 1399, as an accurate prophetic king list, correctly revealing the destinies of the kings of England from Henry III to Edward III. The ‘moldwarp’ (mole) makes an appearance as one of the antipathetic ciphers of Cock in the North, as part of a company opposed to the lion and the dragon: A libard shall be gendred of a natiffe kynd With þe sterre of bedlem shall ryse in the southe The molle and the mermayden mevith in mynd Criste that is our creature hath cursid hem by mouthe The Egill and the antelope shall boldly a bide A bridellid hors and a bere with bronds so bright

born come to mind

swords

As is discussed below, this list came to function as a stock anti-heroic roll call in later insular political prophetic traditions. The allusion to the mole is a direct reworking of a phrase in the English Couplet Version: ‘Weried with Goddes mowth mai ȝe warand,/ A swith grete wretche þe moldwarp sal be’ (214–15). The author uses another particularly interesting turn of phrase in the presentation of this list: ‘mevith in mynd’ is an idiomatic way of writing ‘comes to mind’. The author reveals his list of ciphers as representative. In this broader framework of meaning, we might understand the dead man, who arrives to aid the lion and the dragon, as another important figure in prophetic imaginations during this period: Richard II.37 He shares with the boar of Windsor and bastard of the Romance and Prophecies the, by this period conventional, career of a prophesied English king: he unifies England and Scotland (he is called the victor of Sandyford), builds a European empire, and undertakes a successful crusade. In all surviving versions of the prophecy, he is identified as the boar: See above, p. 91 n. 99. In addition, see Simon Walker, ‘Remembering Richard: History and Memory in Lancastrian England’, in Political Culture in Later Medieval England, pp. 183–97 (pp. 189–90). 37 For discussion of this association in later Yorkist uses of the prophecy, see Strohm, Politique, pp. 176–77. 36

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In Surrey shall be shewid a wonderfull syght In the cite of Babilon to bryng hem on bere xv dayes jorney from Jerusalem The holy crossse shall be þe said bore shall wynne ye beme At sandyford that degre [won]

Palestine bier

cross victory

The association between the figure of the Ricardian bastard and the boar of Windsor, implicit in the Romance and Prophecies, is made overt in the character of the dead man. The Percy’s geo-political provenance in large part accounts for the use of this material. Erceldoune prophecy was not simply English but a northern English discursive mode. The dead man was a post-mortem re-fashioning of the Ricardian conqueror of Scotland. Born from a long-lived northern border tradition of prophecy exhibiting a considerable investment in the person of the king, Cock in the North is not only a prophecy oppositional to Henry IV but one related to a historical pro-Ricardian strand. It is based on material which was associated with the king during his lifetime. The returning ‘dede man’ offers an important point of intersection with rumours of Richard’s return, which functioned as an anti-Lancastrian oppositional standard during the early years of the fifteenth century.38 The earliest rumours appear to have circulated among Franciscan friars at Norfolk, in late 1401 or early 1402, and came to a head in June 1402, when a group of friars from Leicester were arrested on the charge of conspiring to meet the returned Richard outside Oxford.39 A dialogue between a master of theology from Leicester, understood to be the chief instigator of the June gathering, and Henry IV, survives in the continuation of the Eulogium historiarum.40 The master maintains that he did not say that Richard lived, rather that if he were alive, then he was the rightful L. D. Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles (Paris, 1975), pp. 191–97; Peter McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition, and the Legend of Richard II’s Survival in the Reigns of Henry IV and Henry V’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 76 (1994): 93–117; Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition and Popular Protest in the Reign of Henry IV’; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, pp. 106–08. Similar rumours circulated earlier in the century, concerning the survival of Edward II, and there are a number of other earlier, and continental, examples of the theme, mostly in relation to violent depositions. See Michael Evans, The Death of Kings: Royal Deaths in Medieval England (London, 2007), pp. 147–73. 39 For a succinct account of Franciscan engagements with Richard’s return as described in the English chronicles, see Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles, pp. 191-93. See also, D. W. Whitfield, ‘Conflicts of Personality and Principle: The Political and Religious Crisis in the English Franciscan Province, 1400–1409’, Franciscan Studies 17 (1957): 321–45. 40 Eulogium, III, pp. 389–94. 38

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king; and if he were dead, then Henry was responsible. This episode encapsulates the ambivalent position occupied by the dissenting friars in this matter: both the possibility of Richard’s survival and his murder at the hands of Henry are entertained. Richard is at once dead and alive, and what matters is not which of these possibilities is true, but rather what both, posited simultaneously, allow the speaker to articulate: a challenge to the legitimacy of Henry’s rule. As Simon Walker has observed, these rumours grew up in the ‘fertile ground of prophetic speculation’,41 and I have suggested elsewhere that the Franciscan rumour may well have operated in relation to a rich tradition of Joachite prophecies of a royal reformer and crusader, in clerical circulation in England during this period, and with a particular association with the Franciscan order.42 Certainly, this accords with expectations which were associated with Richard during his lifetime.43 The Percies appear to have drawn on a similar manifestation of the rumour. Thomas Walsingham records that in 1403 members of Hotspur’s faction let it be known throughout the Shrewsbury area that Richard was alive and at Chester Castle, and that the Percies opposed Henry IV in Richard’s name.44 The same event finds more detailed treatment in the second part of the Dieulacres Chronicle. The chronicler writes of Hotspur’s manipulation of a rumour of Richard’s return in Cheshire as part of the same campaign to muster troops for the Percy cause in July 1403.45 Hotspur maintained that Richard would return in the Delamere forest, with an army marshalled by the earl of Northumberland. The chronicler tells how crowds flocked to Hotspur in the expectation of seeing the king. Although he notes their disillusionment (perhaps also a comment on the continued absence of Northumberland’s army, which also failed to materialise), he quotes a prophecy, presumably then in circulation in Cheshire (for it bears little relation to Percy-ite material), concerning the renewal of the ‘hircus venerii castri’ of Prophetiae, 119. Interestingly, this same allusion appears as an annotation heading the prophecies of Richard’s nativity incorporated in the chronicle, in Gray’s Inn 9 (fol. 142v). It Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition, and Popular Protest’, p. 161. Flood, ‘Political Joachimism and the English Franciscans’. The most important resource on Joachim of Fiore and his reception history remains Reeves, Influence of Prophey; Reeves, ‘Development of Apocalyptic Thought’; Reeves, ‘Joachimist Influences on the Idea of a Last World Emperor’; Marjorie Reeves and Morton Bloomfield, ‘The Penetration of Joachism into Northern Europe’, Speculum 29 (1954): 772–93. For English engagements with prophecies of ecclesiastical reform in the Joachite tradition, see Kerby-Fulton, Reformist Apocalypticism. 43 See above, pp. 147–48. 44 St Albans Chronicle II, pp. 362–63; Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles, p. 195. 45 Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition of Richard II’, pp. 177–78. See also Duls, Richard II in the Early Chronicles, p. 196; McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition, and the Legend of Richard II’s Survival’, p. 104. 41 42

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almost certainly represents the active reclaiming of pejorative prophetic material applied to the king, as a positive cipher of prophetic expectation, operating on the local level in the early years of the fifteenth century.46 It was this local culture of expectation with which Hotspur engaged. He knew his audience – given Richard’s favours towards, and dependence upon, the men of Cheshire during his reign, we would expect the hold of the return rumour to be particularly strong here.47 Indeed, at least one prophecy pertaining to the Percy rebellion appears to have still been known in Cheshire during the early sixteenth century.48 However, for all its local appeal, this engagement with the rumour also conforms to a distinctively northern English prophetic tradition. The exiled king’s return to a forest offers an interesting parallel to the return of the bastard in the Romance and Prophecies, the earliest witnesses of which all prophesy his arrival through a forest.49 The inspiration for this particular shape of the rumour, I suggest, lies in the prophetic traditions of the northern English border. Like the Franciscans, Percy partisans used prophecies previously associated with Richard, although drawn from a different strand of the English tradition, in this case the Galfridian. The Cock in the North-author invokes Richard’s return as a piece of functional political symbolism manipulated by a writer working on the behalf of a political elite. He utilises the same fruitful ambiguity as the friars in their engagements with the return rumour: Richard is dead, and yet not dead, and indeed the return of Similarly, a prophecy of the white king, identified as most noble and powerful, concludes the Dieulacres prophecies associated with Richard’s nativity. This was actually circulating during the early fifteenth century as a pejorative cipher for Richard, for which see Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, p. 76. This figure is taken from the Prophecies of Merlin Silvester, for which see above, p. 37, n. 75. 47 P. McNiven, ‘The Men of Cheshire and the Rebellion of 1403’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1980 for 1979): 1–29. See further R. R. Davies, ‘Richard II and the Palatinate of Chester, 1397–99’, in The Reign of Richard II: Essays in Honour of May McKisack, ed. F. R. H. Du Boulay and Caroline M. Barron (London, 1971), pp. 256–79; Bennett, ‘Richard II and the Wider Realm’, pp. 188, 192–93, 197–98. 48 MS Bodl. Latin Miscellany C. 66, fol. 104r, a commonplace book of a Cheshire gentleman, compiled during the 1520s, contains the following prophecy: ‘a lion shuld come out of Walys and also a dragon and lond in werall […] and on wennysday after to drive don Chester walls and after to feght in the fforest delamer with a king of the southe’. Quoted in Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘After Glyn Dŵr: An Age of Reconciliation?’, Proceedings of the British Academy 117 (2002): 139–64 (p. 157). As Griffiths notes, this may be an allusion to the Tripartite Indenture and the Six Kings, of the kind re-worked in Cock in the North; and it also potentially contains a garbled allusion to Richard’s return to the Delamere forest in Percy propaganda of the early fifteenth century. 49 See above, p. 142. 46

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the ‘dede man’ is itself a paradoxical construction. What matters is not the king’s survival but the utility of his name as a reproach to Henry and as a standard of opposition. This was in many respects a hugely cynical manoeuvre – there is no evidence of a genuine belief among this faction in the survival of Richard: the Percy manifesto recorded in John Hardyng’s Chronicle espoused the royal claim of Edmund Mortimer, the young earl of March and nephew of Hotspur’s wife.50 Rather, this kind of imagining was part of a cultivated portrayal of the family not as rebels against the Lancastrian regime but as Ricardian loyalists, and this might be understood as genuinely propagandist. Yet, as we find across the first centuries of political prophecy in England, it was more than propaganda. The author of Cock in the North exhibits a deep-rooted emotional investment in a mode of collective identification used by an aristocratic affinity, with a very particular comprehension of its own history and place in contemporary political life. We see here again the insidious nature of the operation of elite ideology, which – to borrow a concept from Louis Althusser – is part of an imaginative order that is lived by the author. The text is ‘the material action of a subject acting in all consciousness according to his belief’.51 That is to say, Percy propaganda defined the principles through which the prophecy-author comprehended his history, and organised his reality. The prophecy suggests a considerable belief not in the possibility of Richard’s return, but rather in the Percy cause, and the various imaginative apparatuses used to promote it. The prophecy-author draws on a distinctively Percy-ite understanding of history in circulation from about 1403, functioning in direct opposition to the Lancastrian version of the events of 1399.52 This was a history which, it has been suggested, was as highly revisionist as the Lancastrian project. One of its most important aspects is the accusation of perjury against Henry IV, first raised by the family during the rebellion of 1403. This rested on the contention that the Percies supported Henry’s claim to his own inheritance in 1399, but not his claim to the throne, and they never intended Richard’s deposition.53 This is the broader ideological context in which we must place the dead man’s assault on Troy untrue: H. Ellis, ed., Chronicle of John Hardyng (London, 1812), pp. 351–53. Discussed by McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition, and the Legend of Richard II’s Survival’, p. 104; J. M. W. Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, History 44 (1959): 212–27 (p. 221). 51 Althusser, On Ideology, p. 44. 52 For the Lancastrian narrative of 1399, see ‘Records and Process’, in Chris GivenWilson, ed. and transl., Chronicles of the Revolution 1397–1400: The Reign of Richard II (Manchester, 1993), pp. 168–89; St Albans Chronicle II, pp. 168–219. 53 The fullest discussion of this claim remains Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’. For discussion of the changing policies of Henry and Northumberland in 1399, see also James Sherborne, ‘Perjury and the Lancastrian Revolution of 1399’, Welsh History Review 14 (1988–89): 217–41. 50

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‘Than shall troy untrew tremble þat dayes / ffor drede of a dede man when þay here hym speke.’ This is a reference to London, an allusion to the city’s origin legend in Historia I, where it is founded by Brutus as ‘Troiam Nouam’ and governed with just laws – laws which, the prophecy-author suggests, are no longer upheld.54 This also sits interestingly with a feature of contemporary anti-Lancastrian discourse noted by Walker: an association of Henry’s kingship with an illegitimate election by the ‘rabble’ of the City of London.55 It might also be understood as a deliberate subversion of the association of Henry IV’s kingship with the glories of the Trojan, and British past, cultivated by pro-Lancastrian authors, a tendency reflected (perhaps with tongue in cheek) by Chaucer, who in his Complaint to his Purse lauded Henry as ‘conquerour of Brutes Albyon’ (22).56 Yet, in insular political prophecy, the very mention of a false Troy implies the existence of a true one. In an explicitly Galfridian context, invocations of the Trojan past are associated with British territorial ownership, lost to the Saxons. So in Cock in the North we read: Then shall saxons chese theym a lord þat shal rewle hem rightfully and bryng hem vnder A dede man shall make bytwene hem acorde and this a seely and grete wonder he that is ded and buryed in sight shall ryse agayn and lyve in lond

marvel

‘Saxon’ is not a term commonly used in English political prophecy of this period. English prophetic authors generally drew on British as a synonym for English. Its function was undoubtedly antipathetic. The Saxons are (in the rationale of Galfridian prophecy) usurpers. This can only be an allusion to the Lancastrian regime, who have brought new Troy, and the rest of the island with it, into disorder. During the Wars of the Roses, the application of the terms Historia I, lines 492–505. Walker, ‘Rumour, Sedition, and Popular Protest’, p. 167. 56 ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse’, in Chaucer, p. 656. For a more general discussion of this movement, see Fulton, ‘Arthurian Prophecy and the Deposition of Richard II’, pp. 76, 82. We might also note the broader interest in Trojan treachery we find in late medieval English literature, for example, in the writings of Gower and the Gawain-poet. ‘Vox Clamantis’, in The Major Latin Works of John Gower, ed. and transl. Eric W. Stockton (Seattle, WA, 1962), p. 69; J. J. Anderson, ed., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London, 2004), 301n. For a discussion of the association of London with ‘New Troy’ in literature of the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV, see Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages (Minneapolis, MN, 2003), pp. 1–28. 54 55

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Saxon and Briton to English factions came to be common practice, particularly in Yorkist prophecies (discussed further below). In adopting this strategy, however, Cock in the North is the earliest example of the type. It presents a fully naturalised variant on an old Welsh theme, a prophecy of a great king who will restore the island to the Britons and suppress the Saxons. A very similar figure appears in a Welsh prophecy from the Wars of the Roses, concerned with the historical oppression of the Welsh, ‘weddillion Troea’ (‘remnants of Troy’) by the English.57 While it is tempting to suggest some acquaintance on the part of the Cock in the North-author with Welsh prophetic depictions of the usurping Saeson during the period of the Percy-Owain Glyn Dŵr alliance, this is distinctly unlikely. While (as the second half of this chapter explores) a good deal of English prophecy circulated in Wales during the fifteenth century, there is no evidence of English awareness of Welsh-language prophecy – there were no great mediators, no authors working after the fashion of Geoffrey of Monmouth or Gerald of Wales, active during this period. Rather, the Cock in the North-author probably drew on a framework of meaning that was accessible through the English Galfridian tradition. Indeed, in his envisaging of the assault on London, the author again leans very heavily on the final portion of the Six Kings. The trembling of Troy Untrue corresponds to the description of the conquests of the antiEnglish alliance in the English Couplet Version: ‘Þhan sall all Inglond quakeand be, / Als leues þhat hinges on þhe espe tre’ (239–40). This strongly suggests that a causal relationship was intended in Cock in the North between the union of the Welsh dragon and the Percy lion, and the conquests of the dead man. The dead man’s march on London appears to bring about the effects of the Indenture, and certainly his final act is to grant lands to the lion, Northumberland’s receipt of his promised territories. Although there is no direct Welsh influence detectable in the prophecy, its author subscribes to a broader contemporary interest in anti-Lancastrian activity, which also took in allies in Wales, and allowed for a new, positive English application of the anti-English alliance of insular political prophecy (re-interpreted as anti-Lancastrian). It is possible that the prophecy-author located the activities of the Percies in the context of the broader alliance building of Owain Glyn Dŵr, whose letters to the king of Scotland and the lords of Ireland drew on political prophecy as part of a long-lived discourse oppositional to English hegemony active in both Wales and Scotland. Owain invoked Welsh, Scottish, 57

W. Leslie Richards, ed., Gwaith Dafydd Llwyd o Fathafarn (Cardiff, 1964), p. 121; transl. Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation: Wales, c. 1415–1642 (Cardiff, 1987), p. 9.

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and Galfridian prophetic constructions of the anti-English alliance.58 During this period, anti-Lancastrian material spanned borders, and members of religious orders in England involved in opposition to Henry IV (a category in which we might include the prophecy-author) appear to have been in contact with their Welsh counterparts.59 The prophecy-author may well have had some awareness of contemporary Welsh strategies, if not Welsh prophetic texts. Yet his treatment of the ‘Saxons’ differs markedly from that of the Welsh model: they are to be brought under the governance of a British king, but they are not to be exiled from the island entirely, and are brought to a new peace. This is a decidedly Anglo-centric tempering of the British restoration paradigm, reflective of the interests of a political group cultivating a simultaneously British and English identity. The re-fashioning of the Percy cause as British must have been sizeably endorsed by its connection to the Welsh cause, and the dragon Owain, but this strategy did not originate in an awareness of the association between Welshness and Britishness alone, but rather the uses of Britishness in the political prophetic traditions of northern England, which go all the way back to the reign of Edward I. As in earlier prophecies from this region, to assume the mantle of Britishness is to stake a territorial claim. What is more, this claim was customarily applied on the behalf of English royalty. In order to understand the deep investment in the undisclosed, but presumably (for the earliest readers) implicitly recognisable, claim framed in Cock in the North, we must first understand the extent and shape of Percy influence during this period. Much has been written about the development of the family’s power base in Yorkshire and Northumberland, and their prominent role in the English defence against Scotland. As wardens of the marches during the late fourteenth and into the fifteenth centuries, the Percies dominated border politics, acting at a remove from the direct influence of the crown.60 A famous anecdote contemporary with Printed and translated in Casebook, pp. 64–65; discussed by Fulton, ‘Owain Glyndŵr and the Prophetic Tradition’, pp. 477–82. In his Scottish letter, Owain made use of the Galfridian legend of the three sons of Brutus, emphasising the common descent of the Scots and Welsh, and alluded to a prophecy of the release of the Welsh from Saxon oppression with the help of the Scots. As Fulton notes, he may well have been drawing on Bruti Posteritas, which certainly was known in Wales (see above, p. 0). His Irish letter also invokes political prophecy – probably Welsh prophecies of a Cambro-Irish alliance, in the vein of Armes Prydein. 59 McNiven, ‘Rebellion, Sedition, and the Legend of Richard II’s Survival’, pp. 101–03. For a comment on the high level of clerical involvement in the rebellion against Henry, from across England and Wales, see R. A. Griffiths, ‘Some Secret Supporters of Owain Glyn Dŵr’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 37 (1964): 77–100 (p. 85). 60 See above, p. 149 n. 141 and n. 143. For discussion of the Percys continued role in 58

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the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 shows something of the authority they enjoyed in this region. Riding north to escape the revolt, John of Gaunt sought sanctuary at the Percy stronghold of Alnwick Castle, where Northumberland’s messengers refused him entry at the decree of the earl, ‘a principall and sovereigne of all the heads of Northumberland’.61 This was a perception which became all the more pronounced during the early years of the fifteenth century. A direct personal seizure of the crown by the Percies may well have operated as a genuine expectation within the Percy milieu during the early years of the fifteenth century. Walsingham records that at the Battle of Shrewsbury, Hotspur’s troops cried out ‘Henry Percy Kyng’.62 The Dieulacres chronicler writes of an extraordinary outburst by Henry IV during this time, preserved in no other historical source, claiming that Northumberland intended to crown Hotspur or his son, side-lining the young Mortimer heir and manipulating the Mortimer right to the throne through Hotspur’s wife, Elizabeth Mortimer.63 An authorising association of the Percy cause with the Mortimer line may well have been invoked in the place of the lioness in Cock in the North (the lion was a Mortimer cipher as well as a Percy one). Yet this royal interest may have had a more localised meaning: an investment in a specifically northern kingdom, of the same type as the Indenture. It is in respect of petty or regional kingship that the application of distinctively royal ciphers to the Percies in the prophecy must be understood. The first is Arthur, to whom the Percy lion is likened in the opening lines. This analogy serves to legitimise the final accession of the lion following the departure of the dead man (himself a more conventional, royal, fit with English Arthurian prophecy). It implies not only a legitimising Britishness, but – by extension – a territorial right drawn in royal colours. The second royal cipher in the prophecy is the cock, with whose military activities the prophecy begins. In its broader context, the cock can only have been intended to mean Hotspur, and the opening sequence an allusion to the unsuccessful rebellion of 1403. The cock is a particularly interesting choice as unlike the lion and the moon it is not found in Percy heraldry, but is an earlier defence against Scotland in the early years of the reign of Henry IV, and border interests, see Cynthia Neville, ‘Scotland, the Percies and the Law in 1400’, in Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs (York, 2003), pp. 73–93; Peter McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies and the Strategy of the Rebellion of 1403’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 62 (1980): 498–530; Storey, ‘The Wardens of the Marches’, p. 603. 61 Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, p. 214. 62 St Albans Chronicle II, pp. 370–71. 63 Clarke and Galbraith, ‘Deposition of Richard II’, pp. 135, 179. See also, Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, p. 226.

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prophetic cipher borrowed from the Prophecies of John of Bridlington. Bridlington is cited alongside Merlin, Thomas, Bede and the obscure ‘Banaster’ as an authority for the prophecy in most extant copies of Cock in the North: This bridlyngton bede boks and banaster tellis Thomas and Merlyon the same wt outen lese They recorden and other that with prophecy medlis

falsehood meddle

Bridlington saw extensive political re-application, and was drawn on by a number of commentators in relation to political events of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.64 The text held a particular interest for partisans of the Percys: a number of fifteenth-century commentaries gloss the prophecy’s interest in Scottish affairs in relation to Percy prowess on the northern English border.65 In Bridlington the cock is a cipher for Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince, in a prophecy of his conquest of France: ‘Tempore brumali gallus nido boreali/ Pullos unabit, et se volitare parabit’ (‘During winter time the cock in the north will gather chicks to nest, and prepare them to fly’).66 As noted in the previous chapter, this identification operated as a play on the word for Frenchman in Latin prophecies, ‘gallus’, and framed a claim to English rule in France.67 Like the prophecy’s commentator, we must understand the chicks as an army led by the Black Prince; and their flight an invasion of France. In Cock in the North this is reworked as a figure of a northern English force marching south. A significant moment in the history of English political prophecy, Cock in the North is the earliest surviving prophecy to apply a royal cipher to a non-royal referent. In Bridlington the cock is a figure of territorial possession, and its use by the Cock in the North-author suggests that he understood the Percies’ actions in the early 1400s to be defensive rather than purely aggressive. He borrows from a prophetic discourse engaged in constructions of national territorial authority, and to return to the terms of Saskia Sassen, the prophecy reads as an a­ ssertion of territory, authority, and rights.68 A rhetoric of national belonging was reworked Walsingham applied the prophecy to the capture of Archbishop Scrope in 1405. St Albans Chronicle II, pp. 448–49. Adam Usk drew on Bridlington in relation to the deposition of Richard II. See Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 50–53; discussed by Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, p. 12. 65 Eckhardt, Prophetia Merlini, p. 28; Michael Curley, ‘Fifteenth-century Glosses on The Prophecy of John of Bridlington: A Text, Its Meaning, and Its Purpose’, Medieval Studies 46 (1984): 321–39 (p. 27). The prophecy was later drawn on by Yorkist partisans, for which see Curley, ‘Prophecy of John of Bridlington’, pp. 332–33. 66 Wright, Political Poems and Songs, I, pp. 204–05. 67 See above, p. 148. 68 See above, p. 9. 64

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in localist, factionalist terms. As a vehicle for Percy partisan prophecy, Cock in the North indicates a shift in the Erceldoune tradition from prophecies concerned with Anglo-Scottish conflict to prophecies invested in the interests of a northern English political faction acting in opposition to the English crown. Although its author drew on a contemporary discourse of Ricardian loyalism, the returning king functioned as a mechanism for bestowing authority on a territorial claim understood to be beyond the direct authority of the kings of England. To this end, Cock in the North presents a new type of English insular imagining, in keeping with the ambitions of the Tripartite Indenture. It envisages a redrawing of the map of insular power, and looked not for unification but redistribution.

Ceiliog y North and the Yorkist Cause in Wales The transmission of Cock in the North in Wales may very well be originally indebted to Percy involvements there during the early years of the fifteenth century. The family fostered significant political interests in Wales, first in the service of, and later in rebellion against, Henry IV.69 They were also in possession of two-thirds of the Mortimer estates of the young earl of March (Hotspur’s nephew) during the earl’s minority, a considerable proportion of which were on the Welsh border.70 Their activities in Cheshire have been noted above, and evidence survives from the early 1400s of plans for a Percy-led coup d’état in north Wales, with support sought from Owain Glyn Dŵr and the Tudors of Anglesey.71 However, it is probably the prophecy’s connection with the dukes of York (also the earls of March) – cemented by 1450 at the latest – that was in large part responsible for its Welsh circulation.72 The primary function of Cock in the North R. A. Griffiths, The Principality of Wales in the Later Middle Ages: The Structure and Personnel of Government, I. South Wales, 1277–1536 (Cardiff, 1972), pp. 122, 125, 126; Alastair Dunn, The Politics of Magnate Power in England and Wales, 1389–1413 (Oxford, 2003), pp. 98–99; Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, pp. 220–21; Ralph Griffiths, ‘Wales and the Marches’, in Fifteenth-century England, 1399–1509, ed. S. B. Chrimes, C. D. Ross, and Ralph Griffiths (Stroud, 1997), pp. 145–72 (pp. 147–48). 70 Bean, ‘Henry IV and the Percies’, p. 219; McNiven, ‘The Scottish Policy of the Percies’, p. 499. 71 Ralph Griffiths, ‘The Glyn Dŵr Rebellion through the Eyes of an Englishman’, BBCS 22 (1967): 151–68 (pp. 155–56, 168); McNiven, ‘The Men of Chester and the Rebellion of 1403’, pp. 6–7; J. E. Messham, ‘The County of Flint and the Rebellion of Owen Glyndwr in the Records of the Earldom of Chester’, Flintshire Historical Publications 23 (1967–68): 1–34 (pp. 9–10). 72 Cock in the North appears alongside proto-Yorkist prophecies and verses in Cotton Roll, II. 23, which very plausibly suggests its association with Richard Duke of York by 1450. 69

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from the mid-century onwards appears to have been as a statement of Yorkist support. Beyond the Percy milieu, into the 1450s the lion of the prophecy was recognised as the white lion of the earls of March, claimants to the throne, whose British ancestry was celebrated enthusiastically by partisan authors on both sides of the Anglo-Welsh border.73 Nonetheless, this association must have been at least partly endorsed by the prophecy’s historical relationship to the activities of Owain Glyn Dŵr. The late medieval English and Welsh prophetic traditions represent two very distinct bodies of material, but with significant points of overlap. As Fulton has observed, the political ambitions of medieval Welsh and English prophecy were by no means one and the same.74 The main pre-occupation of Welsh political prophecy is the re-conquest of Britain – a vision stretching back as early as the ninth century, which in the years following 1283 came to signify ambitions for the independence of Wales from England. Representations of legendary-historical, and future, British pan-insular rule provided a compelling vocabulary for the assertion of more localised political-territorial control. This material achieved new pertinence in the context of the Penal Laws instituted in the aftermath of the revolt of Owain Glyn Dŵr, which drew a sharp line between the Welsh and the English populations of Wales and the March, curtailing the political and economic rights of the Welsh.75 This experience of national oppression facilitated the oppositional uses of nationalist constructions, including political prophecy, which in Wales historically possessed a heavily anti-English impetus. Meanwhile, during the same period, the English prophetic tradition continued to engage, as its primary point of interest, with the imperial ambitions of the English kings. However, there is an important historical connection between the two. The dominant tradition of political prophecy in England began in the twelfth century with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who brought a number of Welsh prophetic tropes, including pan-insular sovereignty, into the Anglo-Norman cultural mainstream. This commonality lay the groundwork for a continuous level of cross-border and Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda’; Allan, ‘Political Propaganda’; Sydney Anglo, ‘The British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 44 (1961): 17–48. Two important collections of Yorkist prophetic and genealogical material invested in the line’s descent from Brutus and Cadwaladr are MS Bodl. 623; MS Bodl. Ashmolean Roll 26. These are discussed by Allan, ‘Political Propaganda’, pp. 213–15. Treatments of the family’s Welsh genealogy in late medieval chronicles have been noted in Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family’, p. 73, 83; and more extensively, in Mary E. Giffin, ‘Cadwalader, Arthur, and Brutus in the Wigmore Manuscript’, Speculum 16 (1941): 109–20. 74 Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics, p. 13. 75 Davies, Age of Conquest, pp. 458–59; Davies, Lordship and Society, p. 307; Glanmor Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation, pp. 10–11, 13–14. 73

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cross-linguistic borrowing throughout the Middle Ages, including the enthusiastic reception of Geoffrey’s Historia in Wales.76 In the mid to late fifteenth century, the distinct expectations of English and Welsh political prophecy were brought into dialogue. The contest for the English throne between the houses of York and Lancaster, known as the Wars of the Roses, saw the emergence of cross-border political factions and the investment of expectations for Welsh self-governance in Welsh and part-Welsh political actors with a place in the English political system.77 Expectations accrued around the Lancastrian supporters Owain and Jasper Tudor; the Yorkist William Herbert; the first Yorkist king, Edward IV, and his father, Richard of York, who had a remote genealogical connection to the princes of Gwynedd; and finally, at the very end of this period, Henry Tudor (later Henry VII), descended from Edward III on his mother’s side, and the Welsh house of Tudor on his father’s.78 These figures all attracted the enthusiastic support of the Welsh bards, but by virtue of their English ancestry, Richard of York, Edward IV, and Henry Tudor were also the focus of English language prophecies which circulated in Wales and were translated into Welsh.79 Part English, part Welsh, Richard, Edward, and Henry met the requirements of both English and Welsh prophecy, and the imperial imaginings of English prophecy came to assume a new authority in Wales. In translated English political prophecies, Welsh subjects engaged with English kings and claimants to the throne with Welsh heritage. This movement must be See above, p. 24. The most detailed overview of the Anglo-Welsh politics of this period remains H. T. Evans, Wales and the Wars of the Roses (Cambridge, 1915). 78 For discussion of the immense prophetic expectation in Wales associated with Henry Tudor, see T. Gwynn Jones, ‘A Study of the Tudor Period in Wales’, Y Cymmrodor 31 (1921): 160–92; David Rees, The Son of Prophecy: Henry Tudor’s Road to Bosworth (London, 1985); Glanmor Williams, ‘Prophecy, Poetry and Politics in Medieval and Tudor Wales’, in British Government and Administration: Studies Presented to S. B. Chrimes, ed. H. Hearder and H. R. Loyn (Cardiff, 1974), pp. 104–16; Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘The Bardic Road to Bosworth: A Welsh View of Henry Tudor’, THSC (1986): 7–31. Expectations associated with Edward IV have seen slightly less attention, although this is briefly discussed in Victoria Flood, ‘Henry Tudor and English Prophecy in Wales’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 34 (2014): 67–86 (pp. 71–76). 79 For editions of a number of English prophecies translated into Welsh during this period, and into the sixteenth century, see Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics [Prophecy of the Last Six Kings to Follow John]; R. Wallis Evans, ‘Proffwydoliaeth y Disiau’, BBCS 21 (1966): 324–33 [The Prophecy of the Dice]; R. Wallis Evans, ‘Canu Darogan: testunau amrywiol’, BBCS 36 (1989): 84–96 [Cock in the North, Prophecy of the Six Kings]; R. W. Evans, ‘“Y Proffwydoliaeth Fawr” a’r “Broffwydoliaeth Fer”’, BBCS 22 (1966–68): 119–21 [Prophecy of the Six Kings]. 76 77

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aligned with a gradual historical shift in strategic identifications among some parties in Wales. The Wars of the Roses saw the development of factional sympathies that spanned the Anglo-Welsh border – in many respects an echo, even a continuation, of the cross-border politics of Owain’s time. The primary audience for these translated texts was probably the same uchelwyr (Welsh gentry) audience identified for late medieval Welsh language poetry. A good deal of this material also found its way into Welsh-language political prophetic poetry, cywydd brud, aimed also at an uchelwyr audience.80 For the uchelwyr, prophetic texts of English origin presented an engagement with the conditions of political power. The circulation of English prophecies in Wales during this period, supplementary to older and non-Galfridian Welsh traditions, can be understood as one facet of a broader Welsh perception of the possibilities for national selfdetermination, and personal promotion, presented by highly pragmatic engagements with English politics and political figures.81 Yet this was a political class who were also literate in English, and who engaged significantly not only with English politics but also patronised English-language literary activity.82 Indeed, a good number of the translated prophecies appear in the same manuscripts as English originals. The question is then, why were these texts translated at all? Although we must not presume a simplistic Welsh/English linguistic and political binary in Wales during this period, Welsh certainly remained the language

See below, pp. 195–96. See also Victoria Flood, ‘Early Tudor Translation of English Prophecy in Wales’, in Crossing Borders in the Insular Middle Ages (forthcoming). 81 Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation, pp. 9–10; Williams, ‘Prophecy, Poetry and Politics’, pp. 72–73; Griffiths, ‘After Glyn Dŵr: An Age of Reconciliation?’, pp. 159–62; Helen Fulton, ‘Class and Nation: Defining the English in Late-Medieval Welsh Poetry’, in Authority and Subjugation in Writing of Medieval Wales, ed. R. Kennedy and S. Meecham-Jones (New York, 2008), pp. 191–212 (pp. 202–04). For comment on the audience of political prophecy in Wales, see also Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales (Cambridge, 2004), p. 15. For a discussion of the prophetic interests of this class into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see John Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Gentry and the Image of the Cambro-Briton, c. 1603–25’, Welsh History Review 20 (2001): 615–21. 82 For example, William Herbert, patron of the Welsh bards, commissioned an elite Middle English manuscript, intended for the king of England: MS BL, Royal 18.D.ii, a copy of Lydgate’s Troy Book. See Dylan Foster Evans, ‘William Herbert of Raglan (d. 1469): Family History and Personal Identity’, in Gwalch Cywyddau Gwŷr: Ysgrifau ar Guto’r Glyn a Chymru’r Bymthegfed Ganrif/Essays on Guto’r Glyn and Fifteenth-century Wales, ed. Dylan Foster Evans, Barry J. Lewis, and Ann Parry Owen (Aberystwyth, 2013), pp. 83–102. The multilingual poetic patronage of the Welsh gentry is celebrated in sources from the fourteenth century onwards. See Davies, ‘Peoples of Britain and Ireland IV’, p. 7. 80

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of conservative nationalism, and continued to function as a prestige language.83 We might understand the translation of English language prophecies into Welsh as important evidence of the naturalisation of this material in Wales, in line with the interests of the uchelwyr. This in large part rested on their close correspondence to, and compatibility with, earlier Welsh political prophecy. This stems from the significant commonality that was in place between English and Welsh prophecy by this period: a common use of Britishness as a mode of communal address. One of the most important repositories of this cross-border appropriation is MS NLW Peniarth 50, also known as Y Cwtya Cyfarwydd o Forganwg (The Short Guide of Morganwg), compiled c. 1445–56 in Glamorgan, possibly at Neath Abbey.84 It is the earliest surviving trilingual manuscript from Wales to use English alongside Welsh and Latin, and has been understood as marking a shift in Welsh interests away from English material written in French towards English material written in English.85 It contains Welsh- and English-language prophetic traditions alongside each other, including both an English version and the earliest surviving Welsh translation of Cock in the North, which I title here after its opening allusion in the Welsh, Ceiliog y North.86 Although Peniarth 50 is better noted for its Welsh prophecies, it incorporates a number of Englishlanguage political prophecies.87 Alongside Cock in the North, these include a

Davies, ‘Peoples of Britain and Ireland IV’, p. 12. Huws, Medieval Welsh Manuscripts, p. 61. 85 Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Crossing the Borders: Literary Borrowing in Medieval England and Wales’, in Authority and Subjugation, pp. 159–71 (p. 168). See also Ceridwen LloydMorgan, ‘Writing without Borders: Multilingual Content in Welsh Miscellanies from Wales, the Marches and Beyond’, in Insular Books: Vernacular Manuscript Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain, ed. Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (Oxford, 2015), pp. 175–92. For recent discussion of the circulation and translation of French literary material in Wales, alongside Lloyd-Morgan, see Erich Poppe, ‘Charlemagne in Wales and Ireland: Some Preliminaries on Transfer and Transmission’, in Rittersagas: Übersetzung, Überlieferung, Transmission, ed. Jürg Glauser and Susanne Kramarz-Bein (Tübingen, 2014), pp. 169–19; Erich Poppe and Regine Reck, ‘Rewriting Bevis in Wales and Ireland’, in Sir Bevis of Hampton in Literary Tradition, ed. Jennifer Fellows and Ivana Djordjević (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 37–50. 86 Jones, Darogan, pp. 244–45. 87 For a transcription and discussion of the Welsh prophecies of Peniarth 50, see Bonner Jenkins, ‘Aspects of Welsh Prophetic Verse’. The English-language prophecies of the collection have received little attention, with the exception of Scattergood, Politics and Poetry, pp. 391–93; and scattered references in Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 200, 209, 212. For a brief discussion of the multilingual status of Peniarth 50, alongside MS NLW Peniarth 26 (discussed further below), see also Jones, Darogan, pp. 128–32, 193–209. 83 84

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relatively lose Welsh translation of the Six Kings (Darogan Chwe Brenin); and Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid, a Welsh composite text drawing on the legend of the Holy Oil of St Thomas and Arthurian material, working from source texts in Latin, French, and English.88 Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid is particularly interesting for what it can tell us about the relationship between Welsh and English prophecy during this period. The prophecy follows a preface, in the hand of the redactor, with a colophon which gives the name ‘Dafydd’ (normally taken as the identity of the compiler). Dafydd writes that ‘ryw dirgeledic gydym­ ddaith ydolygawdd ym drossi man betheu droganawl o ladin franghec a saesnec ynghymraec’ (‘some mysterious companion made me translate odds and ends of prophecy from Latin, French, and English into Welsh’).89 Although these lines refer to Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid, it has been noted that they might also be applied to the collector’s broader interest in Welsh translation from other insular languages across the collection (principally English). This has been understood as an exercise which goes beyond ‘any one national perspective’.90 However, I suggest we might better conceptualise the impulse behind the collection as one which at times elides the relationship between language choice and national identity, although places a particular value on the use of Welsh as a language for translation. Like the vast majority of political prophecies translated from English or Latin into Welsh, Ceiliog y North is a prose work. The Welsh translator is extremely faithful to the English version, and introduces no major innovations to the material. A later version of the text survives in MS NLW Peniarth 58, a manuscript which although probably compiled in the final quarter of the sixteenth century, contains an important collection of Welsh political prophecies of far earlier provenance, pertaining to the Tudor accession and early Tudor rule.91 Some of these prophetic materials are translations from English texts, although most are Welsh compositions in verse. The compiler of the manuscript may very well have copied his material directly from a Tudor partisan prophetic collection of the late fifteenth century. The Peniarth 58 Ceiliog y North exhibits a similar faithfulness as the Peniarth 50 version to the English original, although here the prophecy is heavily truncated: it omits the second half telling of the dead man’s crusade and the final triumph of the lion. The significance of this witness in our understanding Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics, pp. 27–32; Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Prophecy and Welsh Nationhood in the Fifteenth Century’, THSC (1985): 9–26. 89 Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Welsh Nationhood’, p. 19. Lloyd-Morgan’s translation. 90 Jones, ‘Prophecy as Criticism’, pp. 145–46. 91 J. Gwenogvryn Evans, Report on Manuscripts in the Welsh Language: Vol I, Part 2 (London, 1899), pp. 432–35. Evans notes the date M.D.lxxv in the margin on p. 17, in the main scribal hand. 88

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of Anglo-Welsh prophetic interactions in the early Tudor period is a matter to which we will return presently. For now, the most important observation across these two texts is their essential consistency with English versions. Differences in choices of vocabulary between the Peniarth 50 and Peniarth 58 versions suggest that the two represent separate translations from a very similar if not identical English text, consistent with versions in circulation in England and also in Wales. In its English language form, the prophecy saw relatively broad circulation in Wales as in England: as well as Peniarth 50, a version appears in Peniarth 26 (c.  1450s–60s), another multilingual compendium, compiled in, or close to, Oswestry on the northern March.92 We can see the close translation process at work particularly interestingly in the passage depicting the dead man’s march to London, as we find it in the Peniarth 50 Ceiliog y North. I quote this alongside this section in Cotton Roll II. 23: Troya anghywir a ofna yr amser. A holl dreuydd kent y ry y vyny y agoradeu rac argyssvr gwr marw pan y klywan yn dywedut a llwycuan o berkynhyl ar hynny a dyrr. Pan ddifetthyr pryuet a whynn ay mynet ymaith a chyfyownder reoli pob peth a dallu enwiredd yna y tyf yn mysc daeoni a gras. Yna yr heul ar lleuat a echtywynna yn eglur y rei a vu mewn parhaus dywyllwch ys llawer dydd ay daeoni yn anyanawl a ddangossant dydd a nos. (False Troy will fear that time. And all the towns of Kent will give up the keys for fear of a dead man when they hear him speaking and an ambush of Berkenhill thereupon will break. When worms and weeds are destroyed and they go away and righteousness rules every part and wickedness is blinded, then will grow among us goodness and grace. Then the sun and the moon will shine forth brightly, that were in continual darkness since many a day, and their goodness naturally they will show day and night.)93 Than shall troy untrew tremble þat dayes ffor drede of a dede man when þay here hym speke The town and þe commons of kent shall cast vp þe keyes þe busshement of brykhull þer with shall breke When wormys and weds are wasted and awey went Peniarth 26, pp. 39–41; Peniarth 50, pp. 1–3. From the text printed in Evans, ‘Canu Darogan’, pp. 84–85. See also, Haferkorn, When Rome is Removed, pp. 144–46. My punctuation.

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And ilke a segge in seson kyndly set and song And all right hath his rewle and falsenes is blent All grace and goodenes shall growe vs among The sonne and the mone shall shyne full bright That many a day full derk hath ben And kepe þer cowrses by dayes and by nyght

The Welsh comes very close to the English, so close in fact that a new addition to Welsh prophetic vocabulary is called for. The English allusion to the breaking of the ‘busshment’ of Berken Hill, meaning the carrying out of an ambush, is translated in Welsh as the breaking of ‘llwycuan’, an otherwise unrecorded compound word from ‘llwyg’, hiding, and ‘man’, place – used to mean ambush. The translator’s faithfulness to an English idiom demands the creation of a new term in Welsh. Welsh translators of English prophecies were by no means always so faithful to their sources. The Welsh texts of the prophecy stand in striking contrast to the Peniarth 50 Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid, which substitutes references found in its Latin analogues to ‘reges anglorum’ (‘kings of England’) with ‘brenhinoedd yr ynys honn’ (‘kings of this island’); England with ‘yr ynys honn’ (this island); and omits all allusions to English re-conquest of French territory.94 This is not the case in Ceiliog y North, because like the rest of the Erceldoune tradition it is far more interested in Britain than England. Furthermore, its vision of heroic Britons and treacherous Saxons (although a modification) was essentially compatible with Welsh prophetic paradigms. As Glanmor Williams has observed, the Welsh poets cast the Wars of the Roses not as ‘faction fights between rival sets of contenders for power in English politics but rather as further episodes in the age-old contentions between Welsh and English’, painted in the old colours of British and Saxon contestation.95 Indeed, it is striking how neatly the treacherous Saxons of Troy Untrue fit with Welsh narratives of historical Saxon usurpation. Yet the prophecy also rests on a strong current of intertextuality in the English prophetic tradition that was clearly recognisable in Wales. It was endorsed by the very sense of continuity and antiquity presented by the long uses of this material in England. In order to understand this, we need to appreciate the circulation of English political prophetic material in late medieval Wales. Its source traditions certainly were known in Wales: not least, the Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune. Although its Welsh circulation has been little noted, and no full translation survives, we have seen that the prophecy of Lloyd-Morgan, ‘Welsh Nationhood in the Fifteenth Century’, p. 17. Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation, p. 7.

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the bastard is preserved in Peniarth 26, a manuscript closely contemporary with Peniarth 50.96 The Romance and its derivative prophecies had a more significant impact on Welsh prophetic culture than has often been observed. M. E. Griffiths has commented upon the integration in Welsh prophetic culture of ‘Rhyd y Tywod Duon’, Sandyford, and the other battles of the Erceldoune tradition (Seton and the Sea and Gladismore) alongside Cors Fochno, Cyminod, and other battles for restoration which appear in Welsh political prophecies.97 Details from the Erceldoune tradition appear in both Welsh- and English-language political prophecies from fifteenth-century Wales. For example, in an English-language combining and reworking of a number of historical political prophecies in Peniarth 50, we read of an eagle at the Battle of Cyminod, who will stand on a stone and drink its fill of blood: ‘the egle schall stonde on the stone in the mede that is callyd kymmot and drynke of the blode of dede bodyes’.98 Griffiths has suggested that this bears a debt to a figure found in a Welsh language prophecy ascribed to Rhys Fardd, which also appears in Peniarth 50.99 Although bloodthirsty birds of prey feasting on corpses is a common motif in Welsh political prophecy and poetry, this particular image (in both the English collection and in the poetry of Rhys Fardd) also corresponds to the raven which in the Romance and Prophecies alights on a stone cross after the futurist Battle of Gladismore, and drinks the blood of fallen knights (567–76; Cambridge, Sloane, and partially preserved in damaged passages in Cotton and Thornton). The Peniarth 50 English-language sequence in which the Erceldoune allusion appears is headed: ‘A remembrance of termys of diuerse prophecyes that wallyshmen fyndeth in her bokys.’ This reminds us of the bilingualism of the literary-political milieu of the Peniarth 50 scribe, and the place of English prophecy within this space of literary and linguistic exchange. As William Marx has noted of this text, the use of Middle English is manifestly functional: it should not surprise us to find Welsh sentiments expressed in what was, after all, the secondary language of medieval Wales.100 As Aled Llion Jones has observed, this represents a complex linguistic situation: the use of a language of Wales’s oppressors

See above, p. 142. Griffiths, Early Vaticination, p. 211.  98 Transcribed by William Marx, Index of Middle English Prose, Handlist XIV: Manuscripts in the National Library of Wales (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 33–34.  99 Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 178, 213. For discussion of Rhys Fardd, see Jones, Darogan, pp. 151–226. 100 William Marx, ‘Middle English Texts and Welsh Contexts’, in Authority and Subjugation, pp. 13–26 (p. 18–19).  96  97

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(English) to express fantasies of its liberation.101 Yet this is precisely the point: the very instruments of that liberation were part-Welsh and part-English Yorkist or Lancastrian political actors with a claim to the English crown. Accordingly, fantasies of English hegemony could be drawn on to serve a Welsh political purpose, and the English language itself might be mobilised in the service of Welsh political agendas. Ceiliog y North contains one preserved English, or at least English-language, signpost. Where the authority of Thomas of Erceldoune is cited, he is quoted as the English Thomas (rather than the Welsh Tomos or Tomas). This is a common feature in late medieval Welsh texts, where English names are generally retained, and we might also note the use of the name ‘Thomas’ in Welsh patronymics during this period. We might understand this as part of a broader process of the assimilation and naturalisation of English in Wales during this period, as we see in the proliferation of English loanwords more generally.102 Of course, ‘North’ in the opening lines is an English loanword, which according to the GPC was in use in Wales from the fourteenth century onwards, in application to the north of England, although increasingly north Wales also. It is difficult to say whether this implies that the cock was still associated with an English historical figure (Hotspur), or it simply reflects a broader linguistic assimilation. Importantly, one prophetic name is translated: we read of Myrddin (rather than the English ‘Merlin’) who reacquires the Welsh form of his name. This invokes a very clear Welsh, rather than English, tradition of political prophecy. As Fulton has noted, in the assimilation of English traditions of prophecy, Welsh authors were engaged in an active process of reclaiming what had long been (falsely) understood in England as ‘authentically British’, as a medium for articulating genuine Welsh expectations.103 We can certainly understand the appeal of Cock in the North, derived as it is from the final sequence of the Six Kings, in a Welsh context. It is a remote derivative (through Geoffrey of Monmouth) from the anti-English alliance found in Armes Prydein, a prophecy of Saxon exile and British restoration. The Six Kings was ripe for assimilation into Welsh prophetic culture. The dragon of Ceiliog y North was probably recognised as the dragon of the Six Kings in the Welsh tradition as it was in the English. Despite some alterations to other portions of the text, the mid-fifteenth-century Welsh translation in Peniarth 50 of the Six Kings (Darogan Chwe Brenhin) concludes, like the English texts, with the Jones, Darogan, p. 204. Dafydd Johnston, ‘“Ceidwaid yr hen iaith?” Beirdd yr Uchelwyr a’r iaith Saesneg’, Y Traethodydd 155 (2000): 16–24. 103 Fulton, Welsh Prophecy and English Politics, p. 2. 101 102

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decline of the ‘gwadd’ (mole), under pressure from an angry and warlike dragon (alongside a lion and a wolf): ‘Yna y daw sarff, yr hwnn a vyd llidiawc a thringar’ (‘Then the dragon [lit. serpent] will come, the one who will be angry and warlike’). The ‘Sarff ofnedic’ (dreadful dragon) of the Peniarth 50 Ceiliog y North is surely one and the same as this warlike ‘sarff’. The dragon, whichever word is used (and we might note that the Peniarth 54 translator of a shortened version of the Six Kings, y Broffwydoliaeth Fer, opted for ‘dreic’), was a recognisable symbol of British restoration, used by authors of Welsh prophecy from the ninth century, and the composition of the Omen of the Dragons, at the very latest. It may very well have been associated by the author of Ceiliog y North with Owain Glyn Dŵr and historical ambitions for Welsh independence. Alongside its restoration narrative, the Six Kings offers another obvious intersection with Welsh literary culture: its use of animal ciphers. Importantly, these are rare in the earliest works of Welsh political prophecy, and where they do appear, they function in line with the heroic epithets of praise poetry, where this device is more common. They are generally held to indicate heroic qualities: this is the meaning of the reference to Cynan and Cadwaladr (along with the whole of the British host) in Armes Prydein as bears, or to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth in the Cyfoesi as a lion possessing the grasp of a wolf.104 The first half of Ceiliog y North, as in the English versions, is a vision of an alliance between various factions, and a number of these ciphers present an important point of overlap with Welsh praise poetry. This is no coincidence: the use of animal ciphers is one of the primary characteristics of the English Galfridian tradition, a practice that Geoffrey of Monmouth is thought to have lifted from Welsh heroic verse.105 The lions and dragons of Galfridian political prophecy saw a clear parity with Welsh cywydd moliant (praise poetry) of the fifteenth century, a form of poetic production that stood in close relation to cywydd brud. For example, in one of Dafydd Llwyd’s pro-Tudor works, in a sequence pertaining to Owain Tudor, with the precedent of Owain Glyn Dŵr in mind, we read of Owain: ‘A’r llew coch mewn eurlliw can,/ A’ r dreigiau, mawr yw’r drogan’ (‘Great is the prophecy of the red lion in brilliant gold, and the dragons’, 29–30).106 Figures like the lion and the dragon were not only staples of Welsh heroic verse, but had very specific politicalhistorical applications. The lion was associated with the kingdom of Gwynedd, Armes Prydein, lines 113, 170; Cyfoesi, col. 580, lines 15–16. See above, p. 23, n. 22. 106 Dafydd Llwyd, pp. 37–40. This is a re-punctuation of the line, which in Leslie Richards’s edition reads: ‘A’r llew coch mewn eurlliw can, / Ar dreigiau, mawr yw’r drogan.’ I am indebted to Helen Fulton for the suggestion of this more plausible punctuation, and reading. 104 105

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whose arms (the four lions) were adopted by Owain Glyn Dŵr in the early 1400s as a standard for Welsh independence.107 In the political context of the second half of the fifteenth century, the decades following the defeat of Owain, the heirs to these great ambitions were the house of York, and the white lion of the earls of March came to converge, in some prophetic imaginations, with the red lions of Gwynedd.108 This is certainly part of the broader context of the circulation of Cock in the North in Wales. Although the family’s claim to the throne rested on their English descent, their Welsh ties proved to be more interesting to Welsh authors of political prophecy than their English royal connections, although the latter provided the occasion for the former. Welsh interest in the house of York was rooted in the family’s genealogical connection to the kingdom of Gwynedd. The earls of March were descended from Gwladus Ddu, a daughter of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, who married Ralph Mortimer of Wigmore c. 1229. This was an incredibly important connection for the Mortimers, and appears in a number of family chronicles from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries.109 In the political upheaval surrounding the deposition of Richard II in the late fourteenth century, the family’s connection to the kingdom of Gwynedd inspired at least one prophetically minded poet to frame a royal claim that was at once English and Welsh. In a panegyric to Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, composed during the 1380s, Iolo Goch wrote of hopes for the accession of the fourth earl, Roger Mortimer – then understood by many to be the heir to Richard II: 110 Darogan yw mai’n draig ni A lunia’r gwaith eleni: O ben y llew glew ei gledd Coronir câr i Wynedd

Williams, Recovery, Reorientation and Reformation, p. 4. The white lion of March was another heraldic cipher used by the first Yorkist king, Edward IV. See Aveling, Heraldry, p. 306. 109 Charles Hopkinson, ‘The Mortimers of Wigmore 1282–1330’, Transactions of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club 38 (1995): 303–34 (pp. 318–19); L. C. Perfect, ‘The Mortimers of Wigmore’, Transactions of the Radnorshire Society 9 (1939): 4–18 (p. 12). See also Given-Wilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family’. 110 For discussion of Roger Mortimer’s status as Richard’s heir, see Alastair Dunn, ‘Richard II and the Mortimer Inheritance’, in Fourteenth Century England II, ed. Chris GivenWilson (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 159–70. For an overview of chronicles recording the rumour and expressing related expectations, see Thomas B. Pugh, Henry V and the Southampton Plot of 1415 (Southampton, 1988), pp. 73–77. This expectation was felt with particular force in Wales and the March. 107 108

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(It is prophesied that it will be our dragon who will make the action this year: from the head of the lion with the valiant sword one akin to Gwynedd will be crowned.)111

That Roger might prove not only a successor but a corrective to the rule of Richard, was clearly in the minds of those in the service of the Mortimers during this period. Adam Usk wrote of the popular hopes associated with Roger, that he might deliver England from Richard’s tyranny.112 Iolo’s poem presents a synthesis of English and Welsh meanings and expectations. The rule of the lion was a motif with a long life in Welsh political prophecy. It is found in a number of prophecies pertaining to the insular rule of the lion of Gwynedd in circulation in Welsh political culture from the time of Llywelyn the Great onwards, whose name lent itself to this epithet.113 To prophetically minded Welsh partisans of the earls of March, there was a clear historically endorsed association between the lion of Gwynedd and the white lion of the earls of March. The dragon, which also appears in Iolo’s poem, had a similarly important relationship to the house of York during this period. The red dragon of the Britons is a feature of a number of Yorkist genealogies.114 We also find it in a prophetic diagram in MS Bodl. 623, a Yorkist collection of Latin prophetic and astrological material. This sets out ciphers for the first Yorkist king, Edward IV. Among them, we read of various conventional terms for a heroic king of England, such as Sextus and the boar, but others more specifically British in their conceptualisation: Brutus, Cadwalladrus, and ‘ruben draco’ (red dragon). These are followed by a similar key identifying the Lancastrian kings with a number of antipathetic figures, including the white dragon of the Saxons, and the mole.115 We can recognise the Yorkist utility of Cock in the North, and its British restoration narrative, heroic dragon and pernicious moldwarp, in line with these identifications. This use of the red dragon in application to the family almost certainly began among Mortimer partisans in north Wales and the March, and may actually pre-date the beginning of the Wars of the Roses by nearly half a century. One of the earliest examples of this is the series of illustrations which accompany the

Cited and translated in Johnston, ‘Iolo Goch and the English’, p. 88. Chronicle of Adam Usk, pp. 38–39. Under the patronage of the Mortimer earls of March, the Chronicle of Adam Usk is considered a Mortimer chronicle by GivenWilson, ‘Chronicles of the Mortimer Family, c.1250–1450’, pp. 69, 82–83. 113 For example, the Cyfoesi. See above, pp. 62–63. 114 Allan, ‘Yorkist Propaganda’, pp. 187–88. See further Anglo, ‘British History in Early Tudor Propaganda’, pp. 22–24, 43, 44. 115 MS Bodl. 623, fols 71r–72v. 111 112

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Prophetiae in BL Cotton Nero A. iv (Plates 1–4).116 The manuscript was produced in Ludlow, an important site of Mortimer influence.117 The scribe and illustrator both show a particular interest in the figure of the red dragon and Cadualadrus. We have already noted, in Chapter 2, how the illustrator read the Prophetiae in relation to the Six Kings, extending his historical applications as late as the reign of Richard II, identified as the ass. For my present purposes, the most important material is that which follows – a sequence that stands in an uncertain relation to the text of the Prophetiae, but suggests a particular political agenda. We see an illustration of a king (annotated ‘rex’), with an owl, holding a sword against a red dragon annotated ‘comes’. The sequence concludes with another depiction of the ‘comes’, this time a red lion, fighting a boar annotated ‘rex’; and a naked figure (with some similarity to a homunculus), annotated ‘rex’, decapitating a kneeling figure. It is possible that the homunculus may depict the soul of a dead man, and this may actually be a pictorial representation of the rumour of Richard’s return.118 The sequence reads most clearly as a statement of opposition to Henry IV in the early years of his rule. The ‘comes’ can only be the earl of March, a red dragon of the Britons, and a lion (presumably a double reference to the kingdom of Gwynedd and the Mortimer lion) who is pitted against two consecutive kings: we might suspect, Richard II and Henry IV, although the first could equally function as an allusion to earlier opposition to Edward II.119 Similar material concerning the house of York is found in a number of short Welsh-language compositions in Peniarth 50. These mix Welsh prophetic frames of reference with political expectations rooted in the place of Richard of York in the English political system. One of the most striking of these begins ‘Brenhin pell y ergit a ddewedir amdanaw’ (‘A far-reaching king shall be spoken of’).120 It prophesies the progress of this king towards Manaw (a kingdom of the British Old North; and traditional location associated with the arrival of a prophesied hero in the Welsh tradition), the sailing of fleets in a ‘gorllewyn tes’, a westerly sunshine or haze. This hero, with his northern and western fleets, wins the kingdom to

See above, p. 92. Ludlow was the principal seat of the earls of March, from the time of the first earl onwards. See Hopkinson, ‘Mortimers of Wigmore’, pp. 320–21. 118 See above, pp. 166–67. 119 The owl on fol. 75r may have been intended to represent the Despensers, hated advisers to Edward II (and particular subjects of Mortimer antipathy), who appear as owls in the English Prose Translation of the Six Kings. Brut, I, p. 73. For a discussion of antipathy between Roger Mortimer, later First Earl of March, and the Despensers, see Pugh, Henry V and the Southampton Plot, p. 68. 120 Printed and translated in Bonner Jenkins, ‘Aspects of Welsh Prophetic Verse’, p. 469. 116 117

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which he is entitled, ruling from ‘Llwdlaw’ (Ludlow).121 As the earl of March and Ulster, Richard of York was in a unique position to mobilise supporters on both sides of the Irish Sea. In the late Middle Ages, the Mortimer inheritance was one of the few remaining lordships to span England, Wales, and Ireland, a formidable power base.122 The allusion to Manaw must be understood as a reference to York’s northern English lordship, cast in the colours of the antiquated British past. His territorial interests are used in aid of vision at one with that of the oldest Welsh political prophecies: the unification of the island’s people under a British leader aided by a host from across the Irish Sea, a theme in existence from at least as early as Armes Prydein. Very similar material also appears in an English-language text, known as the When Rome is Removyd C-text, containing a number of Cambricised spellings. It is preserved as a unique witness in Peniarth 26, alongside a wealth of Yorkist material (including Cock in the North).123 A modification of a much longer, originally Scottish prophecy dating from the 1380s, in circulation also in England, it forecasts a union between the Scots, Welsh, and Irish, and the establishment of a new regime understood as a form of British re-unification.124 Variant versions of the prophecy are found in other mid-century manuscripts, but none make use of the same, highly localised, material as Peniarth 26.125 It concludes: ‘owte of brawe the keynde blode of brutus then/ the ryght schall to the lyne of brutus lyne of gwladus’.126 As the scribal mistake here suggests, the line of Gwladus is interchangeable with ‘keynde blode of brutus’. This is an interesting choice of terminology: ‘keynde’ implies not only a natural or innate right, but also a familial or even racial one. Its author shares the same interest Philip Schwyzer has observed in Welsh-language prophecies composed for the uchelwyr: a fascination with British blood.127 Richard of York is held to be representative of the blood line of the kingdom of Gwynedd, who in the long-lived terms of Galfridian prophecy, will restore the island to Brutus’s name. Although the piece has previously been understood as a propagandist attempt to foster regional support for the Yorkist cause, we can better understand it as a reflection of pre-existing local interest in For the particular association of Richard Duke of York with Ludlow during the 1440s and 1450s, see Griffiths, ‘After Glyn Dŵr’, p. 151. 122 Dunn, ‘Richard II and the Mortimer Inheritance’, p. 159. 123 Peniarth 26, p. 122; DIMEV, no. 6400. Printed by Haferkorn, When Rome is Removed, p. 112; Jason O’Rourke, ‘Imagined Histories: An English Prophecy in a Welsh Manuscript Context’, Journal of the Early Book Society 5 (2002): 151–60 (p. 154). 124 See above, p. 122. 125 MS BL Cotton Cleopatra C. iv; MS BL Royal 7 A. ix. Printed in Wright, Political Poems and Songs, II, p. 249; Robbins, Historical Poems, p. 313. 126 My transcription. 127 Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory, pp. 13–31. 121

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York as the heir to the Mortimer line.128 It is part of a much bigger cross-border prophetic and political movement, to which also belongs Ceiliog y North. The association of Cock in the North with the house of York and Welsh prophetic expectations was drawn on by Yorkist partisans far beyond the AngloWelsh border. This perception is strikingly in evidence in MS TCD 516, the commonplace book of John Benet, a Bedfordshire vicar, who wrote a Yorkist chronicle and collected political memorabilia during the 1460s and 1470s.129 Benet’s book contains a reworking of Cock in the North, beginning ‘This is the propheci yt thai have in Wales.’ A two-stanza prophecy in rime royal, it forecasts an assault on London by the Welsh, Scots, and Irish under the leadership of the heir of Lionel Duke of Clarence, second son of Edward III, the earl of Ulster, and a royal figure with significant Marcher connections (he married a Mortimer heiress, from which union derived the royal claim of the house of York). The text concludes ‘and sir lyonil the mortimer shall have ye best the prise’.130 A re-visiting of the dead man’s march on London, this was almost certainly used to allude to York’s own march on London in 1460: he returned from Ireland, bearing the arms of his ancestor, Lionel.131 Even and especially for an author writing in England, York’s western territories presented a reserve of military strength, indicative of a pan- and trans-insular sphere of influence; and this was drawn on as a locus that was understood to be prophetically authorising. In its earliest uses in Wales, Ceiliog y North functioned as a statement of the pan- and even trans-, insular rule of the house of York, cast as returning Britons in the fashion of Welsh political prophecy. It represents a fusion between English political prophetic traditions and Welsh, grounded in fundamental correspondences that were the result of the early Welsh influence on the Galfridian tradition in England. Cock in the North was originally conceived as a prophecy envisaging O’Rourke, ‘Imagined Histories’, pp. 155–56. For a discussion of Benet’s Yorkist sympathies, see G. L. Harriss and M. A. Harriss, eds, ‘John Benet’s Chronicle for the Years 1400–1462’, Camden Miscellany 24, 4th series, Vol. 9 (1972): 151–232 (pp. 168–69). We cannot regard this prophecy, as Robbins once argued, as a Lancastrian pastiche. Robbins, ‘Poems Dealing with Contemporary Conditions’, p. 1535. For further information on the manuscript, see T. K. Abbott, Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin (Dublin, 1900), pp. 78–79; John Scattergood, ‘Trinity College MS 516: A Clerical Historian’s Personal Miscellany’, in Makers and Users of Medieval Books: Essays in Honour of A. S. G. Edwards, ed. Carol M. Meale and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 121–32. Its prophetic contents have been catalogued by Coote, Prophecy and Public Affairs, pp. 250–51. 130 MS TCD 516, fols 16r–16v. My transcription. The prophecy is titled ‘The Fall of London’, in DIMEV, no. 5718. 131 Anne Crawford, The Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty (London, 2007), pp. 16–17. 128 129

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some manner of Welsh independence as a coda to events in English politics. In the text’s subsequent life in Wales, Welsh independence and total insular restoration were drawn into the same paradigm, as both the lion and the dragon came to function as ciphers for genuinely Welsh – or at least, part-Welsh, political figures, both historical and contemporary. The Welsh uses of the prophecy belong to a time when renewed ambitions for Welsh independence, and Welsh and English pan-insular imaginings, converged in the claims of part-Welsh political figures to the English throne.

Proffwydoliaeth y Wennol and the Origins of Tudor Prophecy Ceiliog y North saw continued utility in Wales into the later fifteenth century, where it was drawn on by new factions, not as a statement of support for the Yorkist cause but the Lancastrian: as a Tudor prophecy. Alongside the circulation of the Welsh translation of the prophecy, during this period it was integrated in new Welsh prophetic compositions. I close this chapter with a brief introduction to one of these: the Proffwydoliaeth y Wennol (Prophecy of the Swallow), a text that makes very clear the (timely) political perspective from which Ceiliog y North was read during the 1480s. Notably, it is in Wales that we see the first indications of the transformation of this anti-Lancastrian prophecy to a statement of Lancastrian support. A significant witness of this text is found in a collection of prophecies relating to the Tudor accession in the late sixteenth-century Peniarth 58, where it directly precedes a truncated version of Ceiliog y North. So closely are the terms and interests of the two related, that these prophecies were read by at least one earlier scholar as part of a single continuous text.132 The chief interest of the prophecy is the exile and return of a swallow, his help from a raven, and his opposition to a blind son or mole, ending in an alliance between the Cymry and un-named international allies resulting in the establishment of British rule, with old cruelties avenged. It is a clear example of a Tudor partisan prophecy: the swallow was a customary prophetic cipher during this period for the Tudors, associated in its earliest usage with Owain Tudor; and the raven, taken from the crest of the Welsh house of Dinefwr, conventionally refers to the arms of Henry’s chief Welsh ally, Rhys ap Thomas.133 As is common to texts from both sides of the Anglo-Welsh Evans catalogued the two as continuous in his account of Peniarth 58 in Reports, p. 433. Evans, ‘Prophetic Poetry’, pp. 266–67. This includes a useful table outling the most common applications of Welsh prophetic ciphers during this period. For a brief discussion of the ravens of Dinefwr, see Jerry Hunter, Soffestri’r Saeson: Hanesyddiaeth a

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border during this period, the mole, whose very name threatens deposition, was understood to be the usurping Richard III. The text draws on a number of the key allusions of Ceiliog y North in order to imagine Henry Tudor’s return from France to depose Richard. It was probably written between Henry’s abortive first attempt to take the throne in autumn 1483 and his success at Bosworth in August 1485. Although it may have been understood by the Peniarth 58 scribe, writing nearly a century later, as fulfilled in 1485, its original composition was probably anticipatory rather than celebratory. It contains none of the conventional details we find in Welsh prophetic accounts of the Battle of Bosworth pertaining to the battle itself, and no reference to the death of Richard III. The prophecy survives in a number of other collections from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two of which are associated with the sixteenth-century chronicler and enthusiastic collector of historical Welsh material, Elis Gruffydd.134 There is also an English-language prose version of the Proffwydoliaeth in MS NLW Peniarth 53, compiled during the mid-1490s. This probably entered circulation soon after the composition of the Welsh text, for although it is possible that it represents an English original from which the Welsh-language prophecy was translated, there are some indications that the English was translated from a Welsh-language source (discussed below).135 As Griffiths long ago noted, prose is a more common feature of Welsh translations of English prophecies than it is of Welsh prophetic composition during this period.136 However, this does not necessarily militate against an originally Welsh-language source for the prophecy, rather it might suggest the influence of Welsh treatments of English prophecies on this Welsh composition. Potentially, Ceiliog y North presented a model for late medieval Welsh prose prophecy: we have already noted that in Peniarth 58 the two run continuously.137 Proffwydoliaeth y Wennol forecasts the accession of the ‘mab ddall’ (‘blind son’) after a lioness – a Yorkist queen (the same cipher as in Yorkist readings of Cock in the North). In the English version this association is made clear: we read of the mole as born from the ‘belly’ of the lioness. The implication is that although others Hunaniaeth yn Oes y Tuduriaid (Cardiff, 2000), p. 2. Siddons, Development of Welsh Heraldry, II, pp. 498–99; IV, p. 215, see also Plate 11, C, an image of the standard of Rhys ap Thomas from a manuscript collection, c. 1500, belonging to Mr Thomas Woodstock. For a brief discussion of poetic use of the ravens of Dinefwr, see I, pp. 120–21, 129–34. 134 For an itemisation of the extant witnesses of the prophecy, see R. Wallis Evans, ‘Daroganau’, BBCS 9 (1939): 314–19 (pp. 315–16). 135 Transcribed by Marx, Index of Middle English Prose, pp. 34–35. 136 Griffiths, Early Vaticination, pp. 195–213. 137 I am indebted to Erich Poppe for his suggestion of this interesting possibility.

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from the house of York may have been, in the terms of political prophecy, lions and lionesses, Richard is cut from another cloth. Andrew Breeze has noted similarly unfavourable comparisons between Edward IV and Richard III in the proTudor poetry of Dafydd Llwyd, and it seems that during the 1480s memories of the previous Yorkist king were largely positive for Welsh Lancastrian writers (many of them, including Dafydd, had previously composed Yorkist panegyrics).138 The mole carries out poisonous deeds and a bird flees across the sea to France. This bird possesses the heroic attributes of a number of conventional prophetic heroic ciphers: the bull, the wolf, the lamb, the swallow, and – importantly, the lion (a displacement of the Yorkist heroic cipher from Cock in the North/Ceiliog y North) and ‘ceilioc y brytainait’ (cock of Britain, another allusion to this prophecy). The bird then fights an unsuccessful battle, presented as a board game. This is a Welsh rather than English motif – we might think of the Breuddwyd Rhonabwy (Dream of Rhonabwy).139 The game ends with the suppression of the Britons and the rise of the Saxons. Now identified as the swallow, the bird is chased by a number of antipathetic ciphers from Cock in the North/Ceiliog y North, and is aided by a raven while her (the Welsh noun is feminine) birds are scattered: ac yna i kyvyt llewpart a chath a ffwlbert ac eryr ac arth drwy gyngor y hauk ar rybydd a gaiff yn ddirgel gan y deryn bran … ac yna ir heta y wenol dros vor ai hadar a ant ar engkil r(hai) i vchelder y mynyddoedd dyrys eraill i ddirgel llechvae yn y dyffrynt nit a gida ac ef nam y rhan leia(f) or adar (And then a leopard will rise with a cat and a polecat and an eagle and a bear through the council of the hawk, and [the swallow] will receive a warning in secret from the raven… and then the swallow will fly over the sea, and her birds will go into retreat, some to the height of the wild mountains, others to secret hiding places in the valley; together with him only the smallest part of the birds will go.) (Peniarth 58, p. 16; my transcription and translation) Then schall aryse a lebard a catt a filbert a bore an egyll a ber then by the menys of a crow he schall haue a dern warnyng … then schall the swallow fle ouer the see and her bryddys schall skatyr abrod some to the montens yn to the skerrys and som to dern valeys and woddys and with her schall go but the beste part of them. (Peniarth 53) Andrew Breeze, ‘A Welsh Poem of 1485 on Richard III’, The Ricardian 18 (2008): 46–53. M. Richards, ed., Breudwyt Ronabwy (Cardiff, 1972).

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Notably, the English-language version identifies the swallow as feminine, although in its broader context it figures Henry Tudor.140 The Welsh noun gwennol is feminine, and it seems likely that the scribe worked from a Welsh version of the text (although a difference between the gender of the noun and its referent is suggested by the use of the masculine pronoun in the final clause in the Welsh). We might further note that the mole (gwadd, also a feminine noun), is also treated as feminine elsewhere in the English-language version. This is at odds with the unmistakably male political referents of the prophecy, but in keeping with a literal translation of the Welsh. To return to these figures themselves, in Cock in the North/Ceiliog y North, with the exception of the polecat – who is named separately later in the prophecy as an enemy of the lion – these are leaders of the hosts associated with the mole: Y llewpart a enir o natur kaeth gida seren bethlem a gyvyt yn y dehev yr eryr ar antilob a arhoa at yn eoffyn. Y march ffrwynoc ar arth amddengys mewn gloywon arve. Y wadd ar vorvorwyn a ssymvdwyt mewn coff. Krist yr hwn yssydd grewdyr ai yssgymvna hwynt ai enav. (The leopard begotten of slavish nature with a star of Bethlehem will rise in the south. The eagle and the antelope will wait ?as enemies. The bridled horse, and the bear will appear in bright armour. The mole and the mermaid have been moved into memory. Christ that one who is creator curses them with his mouth.) (Peniarth MS 58, pp. 18–19; my transcription and translation) A libard shall be gendred of a natiffe kynd With þe sterre of bedlem shall ryse in the southe The molle and the mermayden mevith in mynd Criste that is our creature hath cursid hem by mouthe The Egill and the antelope shall boldly a bide A bridellid hors and a bere with bronds so bright (Cotton Roll II. 23)

(Again, we must note here the essential commonality of the Welsh version, with the English: ‘ssymvdwyt mewn coff’ is a direct translation of ‘mevyd in mynd’, a Welsh idiom with the same meaning: to be reminded of.) The use of these figures by the Proffwydoliaeth-author was rooted in a familiarity with their function in The slippage in gender in the final line of the Welsh may be due to the use of the feminine noun as a cipher for a masculine historical figure.

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Ceiliog y North, as part of the company hostile to the lion and dragon. There is a notable innovation in the English-language version, which adds a boar to this group: the white boar was, of course, the crest of Richard III. After eluding these enemies, the swallow of the Proffwydoliaeth arrives again in a foreign country, where he collects international allies and returns to Britain to revenge himself against the mole, and the same board game we read of earlier is played successfully. A new age of the Britons then begins. Conceptually, the prophecy is indebted to Ceiliog y North. One of the ciphers by which the swallow is also identified is ‘ceilioc y brytainait’. This is a reference to the opening allusion of the earlier prophecy, and the fourteenth-century Latin source tradition from which it is derived: the Prophecies of John of Bridlington, which we have seen describes the flight of a cock and his chicks across the French sea. This is the same image of flight as in Cock in the North/Ceiliog y North and in the flight of the swallow of Proffwydoliaeth y Wennol. Like the Cock in the Northauthor, the Proffwydoliaeth-author may well have also had Bridlington specifically in mind: Bridlington appears as an authority in Welsh manuscripts containing Cock in the North/Ceiliog y North. Like the cock of the Latin text, this flight is across the French sea, in this case not to conquer France for England, but the conquest of Britain following continental exile. Of course there are a number of Welsh prophetic analogues, from as early as the tenth-century Armes Prydein Vawr, which forecast the return of a British hero from overseas to rule, but we do not find this in conjunction with bird imagery during the earlier period. The utility of this paradigm during the 1480s was surely in part facilitated by the prominence of Rhys ap Thomas and the ravens of Dinefwr, which sat very conveniently within this frame of reference – a fortuitous conjunction between prophetic paradigms and heraldry.141 This is not the end of the story of this material’s integration into Welsh political prophetic culture. There are multiple instances of its re-use in the cywyddau brud of Dafydd Llwyd, one of whose prophecies is even a direct reworking of the Proffwydoliaeth in cywydd form.142 I am interested specifically in his use of this material in relation to the Battle of Bosworth as part of a new prophetic composition. Writing after Henry’s victory, Dafydd framed an ex eventu prophecy of the success of the swallow aided by the raven against the mole. He writes: Hon a fydd garw ei hanian Ar ôl ymladd â’r wadd wan, Chware’n flin â’i byddinoedd, See above, n. 133. This is printed by Evans, ‘Daroganau’, pp. 316–17.

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A throi gwadd o’i gwaith ar goedd. A’r wennol, heb fawr ddolur, Llueddog yw’n lladd â’i gwŷr. [...] Un edn sy yn gwynadu A dery’r ddig darren ddu. Taer yw honno, trwy’i hanian, Adwaen fry adain y frân. (21–26, 29–32) (The nature of that one will be terrible after battle with the feeble mole – unlucky jest with her troops, publicly the mole will be turned from her course. And the swallow, without great tribulation, will be valiant while killing with her men. […] One bird, which is grieving, strikes the angry black rock. That one is strong, because of her nature, she recognises from on high the wing of the raven.)143

The passage concludes with a direct reference to the arrival of ‘Harri’, and the alliance of a black bull (another common prophetic figure for the Tudors) with the raven. Although there are some obscurities in this passage (especially when the swallow is meant and when the raven), it rests on a network of allusions rooted in the familiarity of English political prophetic material in Wales during the second half of the fifteenth century. We read the now-familiar narrative of the victory of the swallow through his union with the raven against the mole – a prophecy pertaining to Henry Tudor, Rhys ap Thomas, and Richard III, a chapter in the Welsh reception history of Cock in the North. This is a particularly interesting passage in relation to the Proffwydoliaeth. The notion of the mole’s ‘chware’n flin’ (unlucky game) comes very close to the terms used for the battle between the blind son and the swallow: Y tiria dracheffyn i ynys brydain i ddiail i hen weithyredo(e)dd. Yna i dechreu oi chwarev o newydd ac i gossot i ŵyr genedyl i hvn yn y dabyler ac i bwrw y dissie(u) am y klawr ac i tyn i hen eraill allan yn amharchvs. (He [the swallow] will land back in the island of Britain to avenge the old deeds. Then he will begin of his game afresh and will arrange his countrymen on the board and he will throw the dice on the surface and he will pluck out the old others irreverently.) (Peniarth 58, p. 17) Dafydd Llwyd, pp. 95–96. My translation.

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He schall lond ageyn withyn the seyd brutayn for to be avengyd on the olde dedys done agenste hym then schall the game begyn of the new and putt hys owne kyndred yn the tabyllus and caste the old men unreuerently owte then cast the dycys. (Peniarth 53)

As I have already noted, this vision of the fateful game is a Welsh construction, but the broader framework of meaning it occupies in both texts rests on a familiarity with figures that are derived from English texts: the despised mole and the heroic bird. Dafydd Llwyd may well have been directly familiar with Yorkist political prophecies: like many of his contemporaries, he composed panegyrics for the Yorkist cause in Wales as well as the Lancastrian, and his re-use of this material for a Tudor subject might be understood simply as an economy of effort. Yet Cock in the North does appear to have offered a genuinely productive application to the expectations of the 1480s that cast Henry as a British hero returning to depose a usurping English king. In its narrative trajectory this material coheres to the oldest stratum of Welsh political prophecy, yet the ciphers through which this was presented were not only Welsh but English also, part of a fifteenth-century vogue that began not on the Welsh border but in the northern heartlands of the Percy earls of Northumberland.

Conclusion This chapter has traced the origins of Cock in the North as a Percy-ite political prophecy composed and circulating during the anti-Lancastrian rebellion of the early fifteenth century, and its continued utility as a textual model into the period of the ascendency of the house of York, and later the house of Tudor, in changed political circumstances and in line with new political interests on both sides of the Anglo-Welsh border. This textual movement, from partisans of the Percies on the northern English border to anti-, and later pro-, Lancastrian factions in Wales, underlines the broad geo-political utility of late medieval political prophetic texts – they travelled, both geographically and politically. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s borrowed (Welsh) prophetic narrative of the promise of British restoration was reworked across the island over centuries, and created a genuinely pan-insular political discourse, which by the fifteenth century functioned as a meaningful term of communal address for political groups throughout Britain and across insular languages. One of the most important elements of this history is its fundamentally multilingual context. This cross-border and cross-linguistic movement stands at the

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foundation of our understanding of the shape of political, partisan and on occasion national imaginings during the fifteenth century. The Welsh translation of Cock in the North represents not only a linguistic act of translation, but a political one also: the insertion of the text into new political frameworks of meaning, invested in the ideological claims of new elites. In his assessment of the relationship between English and Welsh political prophecy during the fifteenth century, Aled Llion Jones has suggested that this body of material can ‘do nothing if not counter any suggestions that there is a necessity to read the prophecies nationalistically. This fuller context […] opens the meaning of texts and further splits the literary reference, as each text is seen potentially to contain its translational other.’144 While I certainly agree with Jones that this is a space of multiple meanings, and the effect of the Ceiliog y North and its derivatives depends on the productive presence of the dual meanings of its symbols across English and Welsh contexts, this multiplicity can in no way be understood to extinguish the political significance of these acts of translation. For while Ceiliog y North contains more than a slight echo of the interests of its northern English source text, the act of translation suggests a considerable assimilation and naturalisation of this material in Wales. It becomes a prophecy of a Welsh king on the English throne. The use of this prophecy in Wales presents an important act of cultural reclaiming: the re-appropriation of a prophetic narrative that made its first journey from Wales into England 300 years previously.

Jones, Darogan, p. 208.

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I’ll speke a prophecy ere I go: When priests are more in word than matter; When brewers mar their malt with water; When nobles are their tailors’ tutors; No heretics burn’d, but wenches’ suitors; Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion. (King Lear, III. II, 80–86)

I

begin this conclusion with a quotation from Shakespeare’s fool, who ascribes the verse to Merlin, although faithful to the logic of Shakespeare’s Galfridian universe, he informs us that he ‘lives before his time’ (95). The debt of the fool’s forecast to prophecies in circulation from at least the mid-fifteenth century, bearing Merlin’s name, is well noted.1 This material also bears a debt to the English Erceldoune tradition, not least in its use of the ‘when-then’ formula. Although often regarded as a burlesque, it reads as the end product of a continuous English tradition, which goes all the way back to the twelfth century.2 This alone makes it a particularly fitting end to my study. More importantly still, however, this prophecy, which locates itself in the distant British past, encompasses something of the double pan-insularity of the English prophetic tradition, from which it derives its medieval inheritance: a concern with pan-insular rule, and an engagement with prophetic influences from across Britain. The fool’s prophecy, concerned with the coming of ‘confusion’ to the realm of ‘Albion’ (the earliest name given to Britain in Geoffrey’s Historia), relates directly to Lear’s division of his kingdom, a scene of insular splitting inspired by the pan-insular fantasies and concerns of the Historia, itself indebted to a much

Dean, Medieval English Political Writings, p. 16. Merlinian prophecies of this type are printed by Dean, pp. 9–10. See also Siegfried Wenzel, Preachers, Poets, and the Early English Lyric (Princeton, NJ, 1986), pp. 194–95.  2 For discussion of the prophecy as burlesque, and the parody of Merlinian prophecy, see Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples, pp. 194–96.  1

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older Welsh anxiety about the historical fragmentation of British insular rule.3 We might note also, its debt to a Scottish tradition: ‘Albion’ recalls the name of the second son of Brutus, Albanactus, from whom, in the false etymologies of the Historia, the name for Scotland is derived (Albania). Indeed, Shakespeare almost certainly had in mind Scottish prophecies relating to the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England in 1603, of the type found in the Whole Prophesie of Scotland, then in English circulation. As we have already noted, the Erceldoune tradition loomed large in this collection. Shakespeare gives his fool a prophecy concerned with insular rule, after the British tradition. ‘British’ is a term which I employ in the knowledge that is fraught, complicated, and multifaceted. Shakespeare’s prophetic Britishness is a mingling of English, Welsh, and Scottish elements, with a long history of mutual interaction and hostility. Although it is a complex history, I have suggested that it is possible to construct a developmental model for English prophecies of pan-insular rule, with a mind to the contributions made by authors working on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and the sizeable influences of Welsh and Scottish prophecies in contemporary circulation. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, clerical authors, with connections to the Welsh border, and drawing on Welsh source materials, used political prophecy to frame a claim for insular dominion on behalf of the kings of England. Chief among them was Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Prophetiae Merlini is the foundational text in the English prophetic tradition. After Geoffrey, came Gerald of Wales and the author of the romance Fouke le FitzWaryn, who used prophecy in application not only to the kings of England but local dynastic figures also. In their use of prophecy as a form of territorial ratification, these authors were indebted to a much older Welsh source tradition, and so formative was this influence that the existence of the English tradition is unimaginable in the absence of the Welsh. However, the eyes of these authors were firmly focused on a political sphere that was not Welsh but English, and their engagements with prophecy must be situated in the vanguard of a broader English literary and political co-option of the discourse. The English Galfridian prophetic vogue stands at the very foundation of an English imperialist ideology, articulated by no less than Edward I himself in his papal letter of 1301, where he declared his right to insular high kingship in the fashion of Brutus and Arthur. Edward’s letter is in many respects the next most significant moment of innovation in the English prophetic tradition, second only to the composition of the Prophetiae itself. It represents the fullest articulation Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory, p. 159. For further comment on Shakespeare’s engagements with the British past, see also Schwyzer and Maley, eds, Shakespeare and Wales.

 3

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of the vision of English pan-insular rule in application to Scotland, as a meaningful political ambition rather than piece of rhetorical hyperbole. It inspired a tradition of prophecy which took root with particular force in northern England, stating the right of the king of England to rule in Scotland. We find it in the writings of Pierre de Langtoft, the Six Kings tradition, and the English prophecies which bear the name Thomas of Erceldoune. These are a body of texts which, although composed across the languages of medieval England, stand in direct line of descent from the Prophetiae. The influence of this prophetic model continued to be felt and coloured expectations into the reign of Edward I’s great-grandson, Richard II. English political prophecy, particularly in the north of England, was also informed by the oppositional uses of Galfridian prophecy by Scottish elites, not least by partisans of the Bruces, who drew on Regnum Scotorum and Bruti Posteritas and, I have suggested, the early Erceldoune tradition. In the early fifteenth century, the English imperialist vision saw its first English deconstruction by supporters of the Percy earls of Northumberland, also writing in the north of England, who reformulated the Galfridian vision as a demand for an independent, extended Percy lordship. English royal ideology was reinterpreted as dynastic. However, its scope remained in some sense compatible with national perspectives, not English but Welsh, for in the second half of the fifteenth century, the supreme prophetic statement of Percy interests, Cock in the North, was re-framed by Welsh partisans of the dukes of York, and later, Henry Tudor, as a prophecy of a Welsh king on the English throne. Across these texts, political prophecy functions as a vehicle for high political ideologies, which must be understood (even as its material crosses political and territorial borders) as national. Prophecy rests on the perception of a relationship between, to return to Saskia Sassen’s terms, territory, authority, and rights – the mentality out of which nations are born.4 We cannot approach prophetic literature as in any sense pre-national, any more than we are now, in any real sense, post-national. The dominant mode of political prophecy in England during the centuries surveyed in this book, rests on the concept of an ‘imagined community’, extending from the Britons of the distant insular past to present or future English rulers, or would-be rulers, of insular territories. Prophecy shares with ideology the power to shape perceptions of persons and events, and to drive high political behaviour. Prophecies occupy a unique position among medieval English political texts, not only reflecting high political interests and events, but on occasion preempting and even driving the future they forecast. A historicist study of political prophecy (as I have here attempted) is by extension also a study of the history of the period in question. The direct engagement  4

See above, p. 9.

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of high political figures with prophecy, and the place of prophecy in elite identifications, brings a new dimension to our understanding of medieval political behaviours and mentalities. The hold of prophecy on medieval imaginations goes some way towards explaining the shape of all manner of high political decisions, or at least the form they took: from Edward I’s Galfridian letter, the overtures of the Bruce brothers to Wales, and of the Tripartite Indenture of the Earl of Northumberland and Owain Glyn Dŵr. It has even been suggested that prophecy might explain Richard II’s ill-fated journey to Ireland in 1399. We might also wonder if prophecy on occasion proved to be self-fulfilling: for the career of the adult Edward III came very close to that of the imperial boar of Windsor, a prophecy attendant on his birth, and which pre-dated his French wars by a good decade and a half. Prophecy created a climate of expectation, which generated particular political behaviours. This climate is nowhere more markedly apparent than in the prophecies associated with Henry Tudor in circulation in Wales during the 1480s – prophecies which, I have observed, were not only drawn from a native Welsh tradition, but from significant translations from late medieval English prophecy. In order to understand the nature of political prophecy in medieval Britain – a context in which I have necessarily approached my English titular subject – we must recognise the fundamental interconnectedness of the British political landscape, and its national histories which cannot be told in isolation, any more than can its literary histories. The development of political prophecy in England is only one aspect of what is, at the very least, a three-sided history, and which must take account of developments in Wales and Scotland as well as England. In large part due to the widespread influence of the Prophetiae, English, Welsh, and Scottish authors share a number of common preoccupations, not least with the Britons, the rightful heirs to the island of Britain. Precisely who are the Britons, in the context of this study, may cause some consternation for the reader who dips in and out of this book – for they are, by turns, Welsh political actors (both in their own terms, and those of Scottish authors and politicians); the kings of England; and, by the early fifteenth century, the earls of Northumberland and their partisans. These movements did not occur in isolation, and certainly Geoffrey of Monmouth is not the only common factor to the development of prophecy in England, Wales, and Scotland: rather, the far-reaching popularity of the Prophetiae paved the way for future, and multiple cross-border influences and borrowings across Britain. The history of prophecy is, then, also one of a network of interconnected literary currents, and the rigid national divisions which underlie its very utility were elided by the movement of source material across the political and linguistic borders of medieval Britain. Study in this field demands a comparative and connective framework of analysis. It is only through such an approach that we can strip away obsolete, and

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obstructive, terminology. The history of insular political prophecy is not one shrouded in Celtic mists, but material which we can read and interpret as we might any other literary text. In order to read and understand them, however, we must be prepared to work across languages, and to extend our discursive frameworks to encompass histories which are genuinely trans-national. The study of prophecies, in themselves statements of early insular nationalism, can only be understood through a model of scholarship which moves beyond the limitations of national histories and literatures. The identities prophecy articulates exist in tension with competing alternate formulations, and its very development is defined by strategies of containment, appropriation, and re-use. Therefore, it is no surprise that prophecies count among the most mobile texts of the insular Middle Ages, transmitted across borders in both translated and original form. Indeed, they were not limited in their transmission to Britain: their reception in the Norse world is also the object of increasing scholarly interest.5 Future study in this field – one which is so rich in connections – must necessarily be collaborative. There is a great deal of work still to be done. At the start of this study, I set out to say something about the reasons for the importance of political prophecy in medieval Britain, as a discourse which endured in near continuous circulation for over three centuries. Prophecies are notoriously slippery texts – they slip through times, places, and languages, and are some of the most malleable works of the Middle Ages. But when we can pin them down, at particular moments, the prophetic text illuminates certain aspects of the political world around it, and that world in turn comes to illuminate the text. This was precisely its medieval appeal. Prophecy was not simply an interpretive framework, the imposition of order on a disordered world, rather it was hardwired into the medieval subconscious, as a way of talking about political power and territorial claims. Its relationship to imaginings of insular sovereignty is consistent across the writings of the three nations of Britain. As Glanmor Williams writes of the Welsh tradition, prophecy certainly was used to fuel private political ambitions, but if this were all ‘it could never have lasted so long or exerted so profound an influence. Only in response to a deeply felt social need could it have renewed itself repeatedly over generations.’6 Its appeal lay in its relationship to a very specific social need, and an elite one at that: the development of incipient nationalism in medieval Britain. Prophecy is rooted in

For a brief overview of the Icelandic reception of the Prophetiae Merlini see Stefanie Gropper, ‘Breta sőgur and Merlínússpá’, in The Arthur of the North: The Arthurian Legend in the Norse and Rus’ Realms, ed. Marianne E. Kalinke (Cardiff, 2012), pp. 48–60.  6 Williams, ‘Prophecy, Poetry and Politics’, pp. 79–80.  5

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a particular relationship to an imagined national past and future, which was in its very essence historically transferable. It could be projected indefinitely into a continuous future, its terms re-interpreted with each generation of readers and authors. In all this, the island itself remained an ideological constant: a territory desired, contested, and imagined.

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Index

This study draws on source materials in English, Welsh, Latin and insular French. Due to the frequency of the occurrences, references to these languages have not been indexed. Discussions of prophetic production in languages which are peripheral to this study – such as Gaelic and Cornish – have been. Similarly, as this study contains frequent, comparative and connective, references to England, Wales and Scotland, occurrences of these have not been indexed. However, discussions of other locales, such as Ireland and Cornwall, are indexed. Adam Davy’s Five Dreams about Edward II  131 Adam Usk (Chronicle)  162 n. 24, 174 n. 64, 187 Albanactus (legendary ruler of Scotland)  69–70, 79, 200 Albania  27, 79, 81–82, 86, 122, 134, 143, 200 Albion  38, 199–200 Aled, Tudur (poet)  64 Alexander, Bishop of Lincoln  22, 24 Alexander III, King of Scotland inauguration and legendary genealogy  78, 79, 81 subject of prophecy  79, 116–17, 130, 135, 140 death  68, 116–17 Alexander the Great  89–90 Alliterative Morte Arthure  153 Als Y Yod  102–09, 139 Althusser, Louis  3 n. 9, 169 anarchy of Stephen’s Reign  21–43 Anderson, Benedict  9 Andrew of Wyntoun (Orignal Chronykil of Scotland)  116–17, 129 Annales Londonienses  89–90 Antichrist 74–76 anti-English alliance in Welsh prophecy  4–5, 27–31, 34, 55, 73, 184, 198–90 in Geoffrey of Monmouth  27–31 in Gerald of Wales  48 in subsequent English prophecy  100–02, 122, 171, 190 in Scottish prophecy  66, 80, 81–83, 122–23 historical precedent  80, 83, 84–86, 101, 155–56, 171–72

anti-prophecy legislation  12, 120, 159 Aoife ní Dairmait  55 Armes Prydein Vawr vision of pan-insular British rule  4–5, 17 model for Geoffrey of Monmouth  27–31, 40, 41, 73, 83 evidence for early vernacular prophetic composition in Wales  36 conventional description of Saeson  53 role of St David  55 continued political utility in Wales  86, 184, 189, 195 use of animal epithets  185 see also anti-English alliance and Dygogan Awen Arthur, King of the Britons (legendary) in Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Kambriae 47 re-interment at Glastonbury  69 exemplary subject for kings of England  70, 73–74, 89, 97–98, 132–33, 173, 200 illegitimacy in Scottish sources  70, 122–23 crusading figure  74–76 three crowns of  70, 97 in the Brut  88 in southern Scotland  113 in Percy-ite prophecy  161, 173 Auchinleck MS  115 Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury  45, 54 Balliol, house of John Balliol, King of Scotland  79–80, 93, 94, 119, 126 Edward Balliol  107, 152 in Scottish succession  67, 119

232

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Bannockburn, battle of  95, 119, 125–27, 131, 152 Barbour, John (Bruce)  80, 95, 118, 133, 143 Bartlett, Robert  44 Bayeux Tapestry  38 Beauchamp, Guy, Tenth Earl of Warwick 88 Becket, Thomas, Archbishop of Canterbury  49 n. 126, 108, 122 n. 52, 132, 145, 147 see also Holy Oil of St Thomas Bede  122, 174 Y Bedwenni  32, 51–52 Bek, Anthony, Bishop of Durham  71 Belinus, King of the Britons (legendary)  38 Benet, John (Chronicle) 190 Bisset, Baldred (Instructiones and Processus) 80 Black Agnes, Countess of Dunbar  128–29 Black Book of Carmarthen  30, 32–33, 47, 51–52, 62 Bodleian Library, Oxford MS 623  176 n. 73, 187 MS Ashmolean Roll 26  176 n. 73 MS Hatton 56  122 n. 52, 164 n. 33 MS Lyell 35  160 Bollard, John  62 Book of Taliesin  27, 34, 53–54, 55 n. 150 Bosworth, battle of  121, 192, 195–97 Bower, Walter (Scotichronicon)  79, 82, 116–17, 128, 135 Brandl, Alois  136–37, 157–58 Breuddwyd Rhonabwy  193 British Library, London MS Additional 31042 see London Thornton MS MS Arundel 57  130–35 MS Cotton Galba E. ix  163–64 MS Cotton Julius A. v  102–08 MS Cotton Nero A. iv  73 n. 27, 91, 92, 93, 188 MS Cotton Roll II. 23  159–75, 176 n. 72, 181–82, 194 MS Cotton Vespasian E. vii  160–61 MS Cotton Vitellius E. x  119, 129, 136–37, 140, 141–44, 150–52, 183 MS Harley 273  123 MS Harley 746  89–97, 100–01 MS Harley 1717  160–61 MS Harley 2253  60, 105, 123–30 MS Lansdowne 762  136–37, 138 n. 105, 140, 141–44, 147, 150 MS Royal 12. C. xii  60, 123, 131 MS Royal 18. D. ii  178 n. 82 MS Sloane 1776 see Giles Chronicle

MS Sloane 2578  119, 129, 136–37, 138 n. 105, 140, 141–44, 150–52, 183 Brittany  4, 24, 27–29, 33, 39–40, 76 Y Broffwydoliaeth Fawr  36 Y Broffwydoliaeth Fer 185 Bruce, house of Robert I, King of Scotland overtures to Ireland and Wales  85, 86, 96, 101–02, 202 allusions in English prophecy  94, 96, 100–02, 119, 125, 133–35 homage to Edward I  96 in Barbour’s Bruce  118, 143 Edward Bruce  85–86, 133, 202 David II, King of Scotland  104, 151 n. 150 candidates for Scottish kingship  67, 105, 119 Gaelic connections  77, 120 partisan prophecy  80, 84–85, 109, 118–23, 133 Brut (English) Anglo-Norman Brut  88–89, 98, 108 Middle English Brut  88, 90 n. 96, 93, 94 n. 104, 95, 108, 188 n. 119 Brut y Brenhinedd  24, 47 Brut Dingestow 30 Bruti Posteritas relationship to Prophetiae 81–82 use as Bruce partisan prophecy  84–85, 86, 201 influence on English prophecy  102, 108–09, 135 influence on subsequent Scottish prophecy  118, 121–23 Welsh reception  82, 172 n. 58 comparison with Welsh prophecies 82–84 Brutus in Historia Regum Britanniae  5, 38, 51, 62, 69–70, 170 in Prophetiae Merlini  27, 48, 73, 143 in Edward I’s papal letter  69–70, 200 three crowns  70, 100 in Pierre de Langtoft’s Chronique  71 in Scottish prophecy and history  79, 80, 81 in Gruffudd Llwyd’s letter  86 in Owain Glyn Dŵr’s letter  172 n. 58 in Yorkist genealogies and prophecy  176 n. 73, 187, 189 see also Troy, Trojans; Diana’s prophecy brych cadarn  53 Bullock-Davies, Constance  42 Burley, Sir Simon (tutor of Richard II)  88

index Cadwaladr, Cadualadrus in Prophetiae Merlini  27–29, 33 in Welsh prophecy  28, 32, 40, 53, 83, 185 in Historia Regum Britanniae  28 in Scottish prophecy  83, 122 in subsequent English prophecy  143 in Yorkist genealogies and prophecies  176 n. 73, 187, 188 Cadwaladr ap Gruffudd, Prince of Gwynedd  33, 46 Cambridge University Library, Cambridge MS Ff. 5. 48  119, 128–29, 136–37, 140, 141–44, 150, 183 MS Kk. I. v  122 and n. 52, 158 n. 12, 160 Caradoc of Llancarfan  41 Cassandra 48 Ceiliog y North  175–91, 192–95, 198 see also Cock in the North Celtic  8, 85 n. 79, 113 n. 10, 203 Chaucer, Geoffrey The House of Fame  14 Complaint to his Purse  170 Cheshire  147, 167–68, 175 Cock in the North  16–17, 145, 155–98, 201 see also Ceioliog y North Cohn, Norman  11–12 Comyn, house of  83, 118, 119 Comyn, John, Third Earl of Buchan  118 Conan III, Duke of Brittany  33 Conanus, Cynan in Prophetiae Merlini  27–29, 33, 97 in Historia Regum Britanniae  28, 76 in Welsh prophecy  28, 32, 40, 83, 185 in Scottish prophecy  83, 122 in subsequent English prophecy  143 Cooper, Helen  112–13, 115, 116 Coote, Lesley  2, 146 Corineus (legendary founder of Cornwall)  26, 62 Cornish language  29 Cornwall in Prophetiae Merlini  26, 27 in Armes Prydein Vawr  28 evidence for Cornish prophecy  29 see also John of Cornwall; Cornish language foundation legend  62 see also Corineus in Pierre de Langtoft  72 the boar of Cornwall  76, 97 earldom see Gaveston, Piers Cors Fochno, battle of (prophesied)  183 Culblean, battle of  116 Curley, Michael  25–26, 29, 52

233

Cyfoesi Myrddin a Gwenddydd ei Chwaer  53 n. 145, 62–63, 83, 185, 187 n. 113 Cyfranc Lludd a Llefelys 36 Cyminod, battle of (prophesied)  183 Darogan Chwe Brenin  179–80, 184–85 Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid  180, 182 David, Bishop of St David’s  51 Davies, R. R.  6, 68–69, 157 Declaration of Arbroath  80–81 Deheubarth, dynasty see also Rhys ap Gruffudd  45, 46, 52, 55 Dewi see St David Diana’s prophecy  5, 39 Diarmait Mac Murchada, King of Leinster  50, 55 Dieulacres Chronicle  147–48, 167–68, 173 Domnall Ua Néill, King of Ireland  85 Dublin  28, 55 Dudo of St Quentin (Historia Normannorum) 39 Dumville, David  29 Dunbar  116, 124, 127–29, 140 Dygogan awen 34 Eagle of Shaftsbury  47, 82, 133, 135 Eckhardt, Caroline  163 Edward I, King of England conquest of Wales  68, 131 involvement in the crisis of Scottish kingship  68–70, 80, 83 Arthurian engagements  69–70, 109 letter to Pope Boniface VIII  69–70, 77, 122, 200–01, 202 three crowns of Brutus/Arthur  70, 93, 106 in Pierre de Langtoft  71–77, 97, 101, 108, 143–45 crusading expectations  74 as dragon of the Six Kings  87, 93, 96 in Scottish prophecy  79 in commentaries on the Prophetiae  73, 91 Edward II, King of England in Pierre de Langtoft  72 as goat of the Six Kings  87, 89–92, 94–96 deposition  87, 123 relationship with Piers Gaveston  90 defeat at Bannockburn  95–96, 126 opposition to  107–08, 188 as capped man  125–26 as subject of positive prophetic expectations 130–35 birth in Wales  131, 134, 148 rumours of survival  166 n. 38

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Edward III, King of England expectations of Scottish conquest  16, 102, 104–06 crusading expectations  74 as boar of the Six Kings  87, 89–91, 93, 96–99, 104–06, 165, 202 Arthurian engagements and associations 97–98 insular imperium  98 French campaigns  98–99, 202 rejection of Treaty of Northampton  105 campaign for the canonisation of Thomas of Lancaster  107–08 victory at Halidon Hill  105–07, 126–27 in the Prophecies of John of Bridlington  148 Edward IV, King of England heraldry  164 n. 34, 186 n. 108 Welsh support  177, 193 British genealogy and prophecy  187 Edward of Woodstock, the Black Prince  148, 174 Eildon Hills  113, 114, 140 Elizabeth I, Queen of England  120 Eulogium historiarum  145, 146, 166 Fifteen Signs before Doomsday  83–84, 127 First English Empire  6 Fitz Warin family  15, 59–60, 61–62, 65 Forfar letter  84–85 Fouke III Fitzwarin  58–59, 60 Fouke IV Fitzwarin  59 Fouke le Fitz Waryn  15, 19, 58–65, 73, 123–24, 200 France northern French circulation of the Prophetiae  24, 25 prophecies of conquest of France by Arthur 76 Henry I  26 Edward I  74, 144 Edward II  132, 134 Edward III  98–99, 145 Edward of Woodstock  148, 174 prophecies of Franco-Scottish alliance  80, 122 historical Franco-Scottish alliances  80, 149 Edward II’s French marriage  94 Richard II’s French marriage  147 Confederation between Wales and France  156 n. 6 Franciscans  131 n. 84, 166–67, 168 Fulton, Helen  3, 176, 184 Gaelic language and heritage of Scotland  78, 81, 119

Gaelic prophecy  45, 77, 113–14, 119, 127 Galaes, Queen of the Britons (legendary) 73 Gaveston, Piers, First Earl of Cornwall  90 Gawain-poet (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight)  111, 170 n. 56 Geoffrey of Monmouth origins of the English prophetic tradition  4–6, 10, 15, 18–43 influence on Chaucer  14 engagement with Welsh prophecy  19 passim ethnic identity  21, 39–40 political agenda  21–22 passim cataloguing of Geoffrey’s works  47–48 Historia Regum Britanniae dedication 41–43 British book  24, 35, 45 Welsh reception history  24, 172 n. 58, 176–77 use by Edward I  69–70 Scottish reception history  78–79 influence on Shakespeare  199–200 see also Pierre de Langtoft; Brutus; Arthur; Conanus; Cadualadrus; Corineus; Locrinus; Kamber; Albanactus; Troy; Diana’s prophecy; Belinus; Geomagog Prophetiae Merlini dedication and prologue  22, 24, 35 use of animal ciphers  23, 185 commentaries  25, 26 n. 31, 37–38, 40, 53, 73, 188 influence on Gerald of Wales  46, 48, 49, 50 influence on the Six Kings  89–93, 101, 184, 156 influence on the Erceldoune tradition  106–07, 111, 143 Welsh reception history  36, 176–77 see also Y Broffwydoliaeth Fawr Scottish reception history  81–82, 84, 86, 121–22 Norse reception history  203 n. 5 see also Pierre de Langtoft; Brutus; Arthur; Conanus; Cadualadrus; Sextus Vita Merlini  23, 27 n. 36, 29, 32 and n. 57, 47, 48 n. 121 Geomagog  60, 62 Gerald of Wales engagement with Welsh prophecy  15, 19–20, 46, 52–55 cultural context  22, 44–45 book at Nefyn  45–46, 69 differentiation between the two Merlins 48–49

index Expugnatio Hibernica  44–46, 49–52, 54, 56–58, 59 Itinerarium Kambriae  45, 47–49, 52, 54 Descriptio Kambriae  48, 52 Topographia Hibernica  56 Geraldines 44–45, 50–51, 55–57, 58, 65 Gesta Stephani  26 Gildas De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae  5 as prophetic authority  133, 135 see also Verses of Gildas Concerning the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Hermit Giles Chronicle  156 n. 2 Gillingham, John  23 Glaswawt Taliesin  55 n. 150 Y Gododdin  28 n. 41 Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge MS 249/ 277  159, 160 Goodman, Anthony  67 Gower, John (Vox Clamantis)  170 n. 56 Gray, Thomas (Scalacronica) 105 Gray’s Inn Library, London MS 9 see also Dieulacres Chronicle  147–49 Great Famine  96, 125 Griffiths, M. E.  62, 183, 192 Gruffudd ap Cynan , Prince of Gwynedd  25, 30, 33–34 Gruffydd, Elis (chronicler)  192 Guichtlacus, King of the Danes (legendary) 38 Gwasgargerdd Myrddin  52–53 Gwladus Ddu, daughter of Lywelyn ap Iorwerth  186, 189 Gwrtheyrn see Vortigern Gwynedd, kingdom and dynasty resurgence following the death of Henry I  22–23, 34, 41 opposition to Henry I  25, 34 internecine violence  26 in the Prophetiae Merlini  26–27 in Armes Prydein  28 prophecies of re-conquest in the reign of Henry II  53–54 oppositional prophecy from the reign of John 62–63 high kingship  25, 33, 62, 63–64, 83 descent of the house of York  177, 186–89 Haakon IV, King of Norway  80 Halidon Hill, battle of  102, 104–05, 107, 108–09, 119, 125–27, 128, 129, 131, 140 Hall, Edward (The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke) 156

235

Hardyng, John (Chronicle) 169 Harold Godwinson, King of England  38 Harry the Minstrel (Life of William Wallace) 117–18 Hengist (legendary conqueror of Britain)  30–31, 36 Henry I , King of England uncertain succession following Henry’s death  22, 26 Welsh campaigns  25 as the lion of justice  26, 40 as British high king  40–41 Henry II, King of England conquest of Ireland  44, 49–50, 54–57, 73 as Sextus  49, 56, 73 in Welsh oppositional prophecy  53–54, 54–55 Henry III, King of England  87, 165 Henry IV, King of England prophetic opposition to  16, 166–73, 188 as mole of the Six Kings  87, 165 as boar of the Six Kings 93 subject of positive prophetic expectation 139 anointment with the Holy Oil of St Thomas 145 Lancastrian revisionism  169 in Chaucer  170 Henry VII, King of England as mab darogan  16, 177, 202 French exile and return  16, 192, 193, 195 victory at Bosworth  see Bosworth, battle of as the banished baron  121, 142–43 as the bastard  142–43 descent 177 as the swallow  191–97 Herbert, William, First Earl of Pembroke  177, 178 n. 82 Herimon, King of Ireland (legendary)  56 Herryson, John  159 Historia Brittonum see also Omen of the Dragons  20, 30–31, 35–38, 39, 78 Historia Gruffud vab Kenan  33–34 Holinshed, Raphael (Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland) 156 ‘Holy Land’  141, 144 Holy Oil of St Thomas  131–32, 145, 146–47, 180 see also Darogan yr Olew Bendigaid Horsa(legendary conqueror of Britain)  30–31, 36 hybridity 22 Iceland  132, 203 n. 5 imagined community  9–10, 201 Ingham, Patricia  8–9

236

index

insular 7 Invective against France 98–99 Iolo Goch (poet)  64, 186–87 Ireland Irish and Welsh alliance in Welsh prophecy  28, 34, 54–55, 188–89 historical expectations and precedent  34, 171–72 in English prophecy (with Scotland) 100–02 in Yorkist prophecy  188–90 as conquered territory  44–45, 68 prophecies of conquest  49–51, 56–57, 72–73, 132, 134, 144 see also Henry II; Geraldines; Richard II; Scota; Scotia; Gaelic; Bruce, house of Isabella of France, Queen of England  88, 94, 105 Jack Cade’s Revolt  159–60 James V, King of Scotland  120 James VI, King of Scotland/ James I, King of England  120–21, 200 James, Second Earl of Douglas  151 Jansen, Sharon  13 Jarman, A. O. H.  47–48, 52 Jerusalem, expectations for re-conquest in reign of Edward I  74 in reign of Edward II  131, 134 in reign of Edward III  97 in reign of Richard II  147, 149 in the Erceldoune tradition  145, 147, 166 Jesus College, Oxford MS 111 see Red Book of Hergest Joachim of Fiore  75 Joachite prophecy  75, 76, 146, 167 John, King of England as lynx of Prophetiae  57–58, 89 as leopard in Fouke le Fitz Waryn 60–61 in Welsh prophecy  62–63 John Ergome (canon of Bridlington)  148 John of Cornwall (Prophetia Merlini) 29 John of Fordun (Chronicle)  78, 79 John of Gaunt, First Duke of Lancaster  149, 173 John of Sheffield, Sheriff of Northumberland 71 Jones, Aled Llion  8, 34, 82, 183, 198 Kamber (legendary ruler of Wales)  69–70 Knight, Stephen  33, 38 Lailoken (legendary wild man)  47 Lambeth Palace Library, London MS 527  91 n. 98

Langland, William (Piers Plowman) 129–30 language choice and national identity  10, 178–80, 183–84, 197–98 and social participation  87–88, 111, 130 Last Roman Emperor see Last World Emperor Last World Emperor  74–76, 134, 144 latimers  42, 61 Lebor Gabála  78 Lincoln Cathedral MS 91 see Lincoln Thornton MS Lincoln Thornton MS  115, 119, 136–38, 144, 146, 153, 183 Lionel of Antwerp, First Duke of Clarence 190 Llechlafar 54 Llwyd, Dafydd (poet)  171, 185, 193, 195–97 Llwyd, Gruffudd (Welsh nobleman)  86 llyminauc 34 Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Prince of Gwynedd  64, 68, 83 Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, Prince of Gwynedd  62–63, 64, 185, 186, 187 Locrinus (legendary ruler of England) 69–70 London in English prophecy  93, 125 n. 62, 129, 170–71, 181, 190 production of prophecy  120, 131 n. 84, 160 London Thornton MS  137, 140, 141 lollards  100, 159 Louis IV, Holy Roman Emperor  99 Ludlow  60, 73 n. 27, 91, 123, 188 and n. 117, 189 and n. 121 Ludlows of Stokesay  60, 123 Lydgate, John (Troy Book)  178 n. 82 Lyle, Emily  114, 115, 116 mab darogan  16, 33 Macsen Wledig, Emperor of Rome (legendary)  28, 40, 69, 75 Magna Carta  63 Magnus Maximus see Macsen Wledig Magnús Óláfsson, King of Norway  133 makwy dau hanner  34 Mannyng, Robert (Mannyng’s Chronicle)  71, 115 Marvin, Julia  12, 88 Mary of Guise, Queen of Scotland  120 Mary Queen of Scots  120 Matheson, Lister M.  88 Matilda, Henry I’s natural daughter  33 Matilda, Holy Roman Empress  22, 26, 33 Maurice Fitz Gerald  50, 51

index Merdin 33 Merlin as prophetic authority  1, 11, 14, 112 Geoffrey’s singular Merlin  23, 32, 35 see also Merlin Ambrosius and Merlin Silvester Gerald’s singular Merlin  48, 54 see also Merlin Ambrosius and Merlin Silvester singular Merlin in subsequent English sources  61, 72, 88, 89, 98, 163, 174 in Scotland  78, 84, 158 in Shakespeare  155, 199 in Tripartite Indenture  156 Merlin Ambrosius  25, 36–37, 45, 47 Merlin Caledonius see Merlin Silvester Merlin Silvester  45–46, 47–48, 49–58, 59, 65 Meurig ap Roger  61 millenarianism  11–12, 84 Minot, Laurence  98, 102, 104, 126–27 Mordred 70 Morgan ap Owain, Prince of Gwent  42 Mortimer earls of March Roger Mortimer, First Earl of March  105, 123 Roger Mortimer, Fourth Earl of March 186–87 Edmund Mortimer, Fifth Earl of March  155, 169, 173, 175 Mortimer heraldry  164, 173, 176, 187 Mortimer, Elizabeth  169, 173 Mortimer, Ralph, of Wigmore  186 Mortimer, Sir Edmund  16, 155, 164 see also Tripartite Indenture Mum and the Soothsegger  163 Murray, James A. H.  112–13, 152 Myrddin origins  23, 27, 32 n. 59 prophecies  27, 37, 48, 52–53, 54, 58, 62–63, 184 Myton, battle of  95 nation national historiography (medieval)  3 national historiography (modern)  7, 202, 203 medieval nation  9–11, 109, 201 and region  11, 15, 59, 65, 105, 149, 151, 154, 174–75 national standards  36, 186 see also language choice nationalism modern  1, 9 pre-modern / proto-nationalism  9–10, 76, 201, 203

237

national movements (Wales)  23, 30–36, 54, 66, 86, 176, 178–79, 198, 201 national movements (England)  66–67, 73, 100, 102, 112, 149 national movements (Scotland)  66–67, 78–86, 118–23 Old Testament nationalism  112 National Library of Scotland MS Advocates 19. 2. 1 see Auchinleck manuscript National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth MS Peniarth 1 see Black Book of Carmarthen MS Peniarth 2 see Book of Taliesin MSS Peniarth 4 and 5 see White Book of Rhydderch Peniarth MS 26  142, 160, 164 n. 33, 179 n. 87, 189–90 Peniarth MS 50  62 n. 178, 160, 179–85, 188–89 Peniarth MS 53  192–94, 197 Peniarth MS 58  180–81, 191–97 Nefyn  45–46, 69 Nennius 31 see also Historia Brittonum Nest ferch Rhys ap Tewdwr  42, 45, 50 Neville family  153 New Testament prophecy  74, 127–28 Nixon, Ingeborg  114, 137, 143, 144 Norman(s) conquest of England and Wales  21, 32–33, 37–40, 44–45, 47, 48, 58, 62, 65, 95 Welsh resistance  22–23, 25, 26, 41 see also Gruffudd ap Cynan audience of Geoffrey of Monmouth  21, 25–27, 29–33, 35, 37–39, 40–43, 76 in Geoffrey’s works  25–26, 37–38, 39–41 in Welsh political prophecy  32–33, 34, 40, 52, 53, 55 historiography (medieval)  39 in Gerald of Wales  48, 50–52 in Scotland  40–41, 67, 83 Normandy  24, 25, 47, 55, 57, 89, 145 Northampton, treaty of  105 Norway  80, 133 Yr Oianau  30, 32, 54–55, 62, 63 Old Testament prophecy  74, 112, 127 n. 71 Omen of the Dragons  35–38, 41, 42, 64, 93, 100–101, 163, 185 orality  13, 77 n. 40, 111, 114, 137 Oreleton, Adam, Bishop of Worcester  123 Orkney 132 Ormrod, W. Mark  98 Otterburn, battle of  139, 150–51, 153

238

index

Owain (name of prophesied hero)  33 Owain Glyn Dŵr and prophecy  12, 16, 87, 155–56, 171–72, 176, 185 alliances with the Percies  16, 155–57, 164, 171, 175, 178, 202 see also Tripartite Indenture defeat of revolt  158, 163, 176, 186 letters to Scotland and Ireland  171–72 in Welsh prophecy  185 standard 186 Owain Gwynedd, Prince of Gwynedd  34, 46 Oxford  10, 18, 20, 24, 35, 43, 166 Palestine  145, 162 Paris 97–99 Payn Peverel  60, 62 Peasants’ Revolt  122 n. 53, 173 Penal Laws  176 Pencader, old man of  52 Percy, house of Henry Percy, First Baron Percy  152 Henry Percy, First Earl of Northumberland alliance with Owain Glyn Dŵr  16, 155, 157–58, 164, 171, 202 see also Tripartite Indenture warden of the east March  150 arms and seal (in prophecy)  162 absence at Shrewsbury  167 refusal of sanctuary to John of Gaunt 173 Henry ‘Hotspur’ le filz Percy warden of the west March  150 in the Romance and Prophecies  150–52 in Shakespeare  155 possible alliance with Owain Glyn Dŵr  156 n. 2 defeat and death at Shrewsbury 162–63 prophecies of his death  162 n. 24 use of rumour of Richard’s return 167–68 royal ambitions  173 in Cock in the North  173, 184 Henry, Fourth Earl of Northumberland 160 Thomas Percy  161 partisan prophecy  159–75 restoration of the family by Edward IV 160 Perironis, river  29–30 see also Perydon, river Perydon, river  30 Philip IV, King of France  94

Philippe de Mézières (Letter to Richard II) 147 Phillips, J. R. S.  132, 133, 134–35 Pierre de Langtoft (Chronique)  71–77, 79, 89, 93, 97, 101, 103, 108, 132–33, 143–45, 146, 154, 201 Pilgrimage of Grace  161 and n. 20 Pinkie Cleugh, battle of  116 Pocock, J. A.  7 Powys, kingdom and dynasty  22, 25, 31, 41 Preiddeu Annwn  34 n. 64 Proffwydoliaeth y Wennol 191–97 Prophecy of Berchán  77 n. 40 Prophecy of the Eagle  37 n. 75, 47, 57 Prophecies of John of Bridlington  141 n. 116, 147–48, 174, 195 Prophecy of the Last Six Kings Original Prose Version  87, 89–102, 103, 105, 108, 110, 130, 145 Revised Prose Version 88 English Prose Translation  88, 93, 100, 102, 164, 188 n. 119 English Couplet Version  163–65, 171 First Revised Couplet Version  164 and n. 33 Second Revised Couplet Version  164 and n. 33 Welsh Translations see Darogan Chwe Brenin and Y Broffwydoliaeth Fer Six Kings (overview)  15, 87–88, 201 misdating  87, 155–56 relationship to Prophetiae Merlini  89–91, 188 influence on subsequent prophecies  102–05, 108, 109, 110, 126, 157, 163–65, 168 n. 48, 184 Prophecies of Merlin Silvester see Prophecy of the Eagle Prophesies of Rymour, Beid, and Marlyng  121, 142–43, 147 Red Book of Hergest  62 Reeves, Marjorie  76 Regnum Scotorum  79–81, 85, 122, 201 Revard, Carter  60, 124 Revelation of Pseudo-Methodius  74 Rhyd Pencarn  52–54 Rhys ap Gruffudd, Prince of Deheubarth  51, 52, 54 Rhys ap Tewdwr, Prince of Deheubarth  45 Rhys ap Thomas (Welsh nobleman)  191, 195, 196 Rhys Fardd (poet)  183 Richard I, King of England  44 Richard II, King of England

index positive prophetic expectations during his lifetime  16, 139, 145–49, 167, 201 as ass of the Six Kings  87, 91, 165, 188 as goat of the Six Kings  93 deposition  139, 169, 186 engagement with the Holy Oil of St Thomas 145 Irish campaign  145, 202 Scottish campaign  149 as boar of the Six Kings 165–66 as the dead man  165–66 rumours of return  166–69 Richard III, King of England  192–93, 196 Richard Fitz Gilbert de Clare, Second Earl of Pembroke (called Strongbow) 55–57 Richard Fitz Gilbert de Clare, Third Lord of Clare  22 Robbins, Rossell Hope  158, 163 Robert Fitzroy, First Earl of Gloucester 41–42 Robert Fitz Stephen  50–52, 57, 58 Roberts, Brynley F.  70 Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Erceldoune modern title  112 fairy narrative  114–16, 139–40 prophecies  118–20, 128–29, 135–53, 154 manuscript history  136–38 influence on subsequent prophecies  120, 157, 165–66, 168, 182–83 Romance of the Battle of Halidon Hill  104 n. 140, 126 Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, King of Connacht 50 Salbri, Robert (Denbighshire justice)  64 Sandyford, battle of (prophesied)  141, 144, 145, 165–66, 183 Sassen, Saskia  9, 174, 201 Scota (legendary founder of Scotland)  78, 79, 80, 81 n. 62 Scoti  78, 81–82, 102 Scotia  79, 80 Scottish Wars of Independence  66–109, 110–54, 158 n. 12 Sextus  49, 50, 56, 57, 73, 134, 146, 187 Shakespeare, William Henry IV, Part 1 155 King Lear  199–200 Shrewsbury, battle of  156 n. 2, 157, 162 n. 24, 163, 167, 173 Shropshire  15, 22, 59–60, 63 Sibylline prophecy  74–75, 112, 127 and n. 71 ‘Sicut rubeum’  47 see also Prophecy of the Eagle

239

Sims-Williams, Patrick  8, n. 22, 31 Sir Tristrem  115–16 Six Kings to follow John see Prophecy of the Last Six Kings Smallwood, T. M.  87, 95, 96, 164 Smith, Llinos Beverley  63 St David  55 St David’s  51, 54–55, 58 St Deiniol  62 St Moling  56 Stanley Earls of Derby  103 n. 137, 121 Stephen, King of England  22, 42 see also anarchy of Stephen’s Reign Stewart, house of Robert II  149 partisan prophecy  113 literary patronage  118 Strathclyde  4, 28 Strohm, Paul  3 Talbots of Ludlow  123 Tatlock, J. S. P.  39–40 Taylor, Rupert  1, 23, 89 Teir Ynys Prydein  157 Teithi etmygant  34 n. 64 Ter tria lustra  146 Thomas, Keith  1, 13 Thomas of Britain (Tristan) 115 Thomas of Erceldoune, or Thomas the Rhymer as prophetic authority  6, 10, 11, 14, 15–16, 77, 110–54, 174, 184, 201 fairy mistress legend  103, 114–116, 135, 137, 139–40, 146–47 historical existence  112 as prophesied hero  113 prediction of the death of Alexander III 116–17 Thomas of Erceldoune’s Reply Harley Reply  105, 123–30, 135 Arundel Reply  130–35 Thomas of Lancaster  88, 107–08 Thomas of Otterburn (Chronicle)  93 Thornton, Robert  137–38, 153 Three Kings (Cologne Cathedral)  96 Tiburtine Sibyl  75 Trinity College, Dublin MS 516  160, 190 Tripartite Indenture  16, 155–58, 163, 164, 168 n. 48, 171, 173, 175, 202 Troy, Trojans British origin legend  5, 14, 38, 48, 78, 170–71 fall of Troy  38, 48 Trojan language  38–39 Norman origin legend  38–39 Geraldine origin legend  50–51 treachery  162, 169–71, 181–82

240

index

Tudor, house of Anglesey Tudors  175 Tudor, Jasper, Duke of Bedford  177 Tudor, Owain  177, 185, 191 Tudor, Henry see Henry VII uchelwyr  178–79, 189 Verses of Gildas Concerning the Prophecy of the Eagle and the Hermit  133–35, 146 Virgin Mary  132, 146–47 Vita Edwardi II  101 Vitalis, Orderic (Historia Ecclesiastica) 25, 26 n. 33 Vortigern (legendary Welsh king)  31, 35–36, 47 Walenses  27, 73 Waleran de Meulan, First Earl of Worcester 42 Wallace, William  117–18 Wallia 27 Walsingham, Thomas (Chronica Maiora)  145, 148, 167, 173, 174 n. 64 Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford  24

Wars of the Roses  158–61, 170–71, 176–98 Wessex, Kingdom of  5, 28, 30–31 Western Isles  94, 96, 132, 133 When Rome is Removyd A-text  121–23, 140–41, 143 C-text 189–90 White Battle (prophesied)  94–95 White Book of Rhydderch  53 White Ship disaster  26 Whole Prophesie of Scotland  120–21, 122, 158 and n. 12, 200 William I, King of England  25, 38, 39 Williams, Glanmor  182, 203 Wynnere and Wastoure  127, 129, 138 Yn wir dymbi Romani kar 53 Ynys Prydein  4, 6, 62 Yonge, Gruffudd (?Confederation between Wales and France)  156 n. 6 York, house of Richard, Duke of York  153, 159, 175, 177, 188–90 partisan prophecy  98, 122 n. 52, 136, 142, 158–60, 175–77, 185–91 see also Edward IV and Richard III Žižek, Slavoj  3 n. 7, 18, 127, 135

Cover image: Merlin Ambrosius prophesies before Vortigern, concerning the red dragon of the Britons and the white dragon of the Saxons. Image taken from a mid-thirteenth-century copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Prophetiae Merlini, with commentary. © The British Library Board, MS BL, Cotton Claudius B. vii, fol. 224r. Cover design: riverdesign.co.uk

lood, Victoria Prophecy, olitics and lace in Medieval England rom Geo rey o Monmouth to homas o Erceldoune Boydell & Brewer Limited, 2016 ProQuest Ebook Central, http //ebookcentral proquest com/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail action?doc D 4721 83 Created rom nyulibrary-ebooks on 2021-08-02 05 41 37

Victoria Flood

Copyright © 2016. Boydell & Brewer, Limited. All rights reserved.

Dr Victoria Flood is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature at the University of Birmingham

Prophecy, Politics and Place in Medieval England

The period from the twelfth century to the Wars of the Roses witnessed the rise of a dominant tradition of secular prophecy engaged with high political affairs, forecasting the rule of the whole of Britain by the kings of England. This book charts the production of key prophetic texts from this long period, drawing on the works of familiar authors and names, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas of Erceldoune, alongside previously unpublished manuscript material, to study identity formation among medieval political elites. Alongside English prophetic texts, the author explores competing visions of the British future produced in Wales and Scotland, with which English prophetic authors entered into an overt dialogue. These cross-border exchanges in many ways shaped the development of this deeply influential discourse. Prophecy is revealed to be a dynamic arena for literary exchange, where alternative imaginings of the future sovereignty of Britain vied for acceptance, and compelled decision making at the highest political levels.

Victoria Flood