7 - William's Carolingian Sources

Summary

WILLIAM'S Gesta Regum Anglorum, completed early in 1126, is of course primarily a history of England; primarily, but not solely, and certainly not in any narrow sense. On the contrary, William felt it necessary to at least summarize, in a series of digressions, the history of those peoples who, by invasion, intermarriage or diplomatic intercourse, became part of England's history. So, he dealt with the continental Saxons and Scandinavians briefly, the Frankish, German and French royal families and the Normans in greater detail. The excursuses became more frequent as, on nearing his own time, his vision grew even more pan-European, encompassing the First Crusade, the later stages of the Investiture Controversy and the appearance of new monastic Orders. More frequent also become the notorious and baffling fables and folk-tales, apparently (but only apparently?) introduced as light relief. William justified these excursuses in various ways. The one that claims our attention here is his prolonged treatment of the revived Empire of Charlemagne and his successors. The subject attracted him, not merely because of his perception of the various links between these monarchs and the English ones; he was also interested in the notion of ‘empire’, which he saw as an entity with an unbroken existence stretching from classical antiquity to his own day. Its history is summarized and interpreted by him in one of his best-known collections, the partly autograph Bodl. Libr. MS Arch. Seld. B. 16, written in 1129.This double interest is made abundantly clear in the introduction to his first section on the Franks in the Gesta Regum:

Quoniam ad id locorum uenimus ut Karoli magni mentio ultro se inferret, uolo de linea regum Francorum, de qua multa fabulatur antiquitas, ueritatem subtexere; nec multum a proposito elongabor, quia progeniem eorum nescire dampnum duco scientiae, cum et confines nobis sint, et ad eos maxime Christianum spectet imperium.

There follow three pages on the history of the Frankish royal house, from its misty origins to Charlemagne, and thence to the end of his line and the resuscitation of the Empire by Otto the Great, from whom ‘modernus Henricus … lineam trahit’. In his next book, prompted by the meagre excuse of Æthelwulf's marriage to Judith, daughter of Charles the Bald, William intrudes a further seven pages De successoribus Caroli Magni, from Louis the Pious to Louis the Child.Both sections are based mainly upon annalistic and genealogical sources.