Landscapes of Concealment and Revelation in the Brut Narratives: Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace, and Laȝamon

Summary

Increasing attention has been paid in recent years to the role of landscape, environment and place in the De gestis Britonum and two vernacular translations and adaptations, Wace's Roman de Brut and Laȝamon's Brut. This essay builds on that work by considering the ways in which landscapes are re-presented across these works in various contexts pertaining to concealment, whether planned and considered, such as ambushes, or out of necessity, such as when we find armies making a tactical retreat, or routed and in flight. The process of adapting and translating landscapes in these works, as we hope to demonstrate, offers interesting ways of understanding how these authors were making sense of physical and textual landscapes in their own writing and in their sources. We have chosen to examine several episodes that operate in this way, drawing on archaeological methods that stress the shifting nature of the landscape in accordance with temporality and seasonality, and which recognize that the landscape is not a static backdrop, but is an active presence which interacts in complex ways with weather and the time of day, not to mention human activity.

Geoffrey of Monmouth's De gestis Britonum became very popular from the moment it was completed in the mid-twelfth century. It survives in various versions in 225 manuscripts and was widely translated and adapted into different vernaculars. It is generally accepted that the civil war of the mid-twelfth century between Empress Matilda and her cousin King Stephen provides the context for Geoffrey's narrative of the rise and fall of kings and peoples. He had certainly completed the work, dedicated to Matilda's half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, by 1139 when Henry of Huntingdon was amazed to find a copy of it in the library of the abbey of Le Bec. The conflict continued until the treaty of Wallingford in 1153 which recognized Matilda's son Henry as Stephen's heir. He became king in 1154 and a year later Wace completed his Norman French verse version of De gestis Britonum, known today as the Roman de Brut, which he presented to the Angevin court. This text, also incorporating information from Bede and elsewhere, was substantially the basis for Laȝamon's Brut, whose specific date is not our focus in this essay, but which might have been completed anywhere between the death of Henry and the later thirteenth-century contexts of the two surviving Brut manuscripts.