Introduction Charlemagne in England: Owning the Legend

Summary

THE idealized figure of Charlemagne (742–814), ‘Christian Emperor, mighty conqueror and patron of learning’, has long been associated with a European sense of identity. A succession of recent scholarly and popular histories of Charlemagne stress this concern in their subtitles – ‘Father of a Continent’, ‘The Formation of a European Identity’ – or make it explicit in their introductory pages. Charlemagne's modern role as embodying the idea of European integration is seen in diverse invocations, from the name of the building that houses the European Commission (the Charlemagne building) to the prize awarded for ‘distinguished service in the cause of Europe and European unification’ (the International Charlemagne Prize), though behind this focus on Charlemagne as icon of Europeanness is a history of conflicting attempts to appropriate his founding status for both German and French national identities. Charlemagne's relation to England has seemed less obvious: indeed, on 9 July 1960, contemplating the reasons for a possible British application to join the Common Market, Harold Macmillan confided to his diary his fear of a future ‘caught between a hostile (or at least less and less friendly) America and a boastful, powerful “Empire of Charlemagne” – now under French but later bound to come under German control’. Here the exclusively continental identity of a political alliance imagined in terms of Charlemagne's empire seems logically opposed to British involvement. Half a millennium earlier, Caxton, though celebrating both as Christian Worthies, set the native Englishness of Arthur, ‘kyng and Emperour of the same [royame of Englond]’, against the alterity of Charlemagne's identity as ‘kyng of fraunce & emperour of Rome’; and one modern scholar has noted as an ‘amusing irony’ (in view of ‘the age-old and perennial animosity between France and its cross-Channel neighbours’) the fact that the most famous literary Charlemagne text, ‘the French national epic’, is known from its English provenance as ‘the Oxford Song of Roland’, while another ponders the ‘paradox’ inherent in ‘the production of the Middle English Charlemagne romances … during a period of prolonged Anglo-French hostility’. However, this sense of strangeness fluctuates according to historical distance and political perspective. Fifty-odd years earlier than Caxton, Lydgate, in his ‘Ballade to King Henry VI upon his Coronation’, addressed Henry as a descendant of both St Edward and St Louis, and immediately invoked the parallel paired kings, ‘knightly’ Arthur and ‘Charlles of gret prys’ (l. 13), as his twin secular patrons.