Ordinatio (broadly speaking, the basic presentation and organization of a work), apparatus (elements provided to aid navigation and interpretation of the text), and annotation (by which I will mean marks made by users after a manuscript's initial production) are almost always attenuated or invisible in modern editions of medieval texts, but they are of course a fundamental part of the experience of reading in manuscript. Each of the major versions of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut has a characteristic ordinatio.

Although the manuscripts are far from uniform, all tend to be designed to have larger initials separating sections of text. Even this basic guidance was not so basic that it could not be foregone, since in many manuscripts the initials were never put in, and the reader navigates via blank spaces. The chronicle's fundamental organizing principle is the reign of a king, and for the many reigns that are briefly reported, the reign is also the basic narrative unit. When accounts of single reigns run longer – as with Brut, Arthur, and the kings from Edward the Confessor on, and especially in the continuations – the unmanageable length of the sections elicits a range of responses from bookmakers. Their choices about if and how to divide text within reigns reveals something about how they make sense of the narrative.

In the Oldest Version, four of the five surviving manuscripts have brief rubrics heading each section, usually identifying the king in question and perhaps mentioning an outstanding feature of his reign (see Plate 9). Among the manuscripts, these headings appear to be related to one another, but also to be adapted by individual rubricators to, for example, fit the space available. The majority of Short Version manuscripts have headings only at the beginning of the prologue and main text, if even then, the result being a set of manuscripts that are not easy to navigate without the addition of supplemental apparatus (see Plate 11).

Amelodramatic novel that moves at a breathless pace, Austrian journalist Hugo Bettauer's The Blue Stain has much in common with the modernist literature of the Harlem Renaissance era, as it plumbs the alienation of its mixed-race protagonist Carlo Zeller. Carletto, as he comes to be called, is the child of a German botany professor and a barely literate mulatto daughter of Georgia tenant farmers. The title is a reference to the myth that no matter how light-complexioned an African American might be, she or he can always be identified by the allegedly blueish tinge to the lunula of the fingernail. (More about this detection method anon, along with another foolproof method employed by whites for detecting African Americans who tried to pass: using their noses to sniff the suspect for blacks’ telltale unpleasant odor.) As an avowedly anti-racist Bildungsroman, it shares a conceit with other writings of the time that Europe and Europeans were more hospitable to African Americans than the United States generally and the American South in particular. And like that other writing, it caricatures southern whites as possessing the outward trappings of civilization but being essentially morally depraved and prone to outbursts of violence for the purposes of punishing and terrorizing African Americans and as a source of entertainment and diversion in small-town life. And yet, for all its eff orts to embrace a forward-looking point of view, including notably its closing embrace of the civil rights program of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Blue Stain trades in the casual racism that infects the works of many of the moderns and promotes retrograde stereotypes of the unchecked sexual urges of black women and men and the race's uncivilized nature generally. This mixed and unstable legacy of an ostensibly anti-racist novel is the central concern of this afterword.

The Blue Stain is replete with restless characters trying either to escape their pasts or to come to terms with new worlds they find unwelcoming and alien. Michael North in his suggestive Reading 1922 (1999) and Clare Corbould in her excellent Becoming African American (2009) identify peripatetic behavior as a hallmark of the modern.

For all its modesty and pragmatism, for all its promotion of peace, prosperity, and order over combat, magnificence, and adventure, and for all its acknowledgment of the disappointments of even the greatest rulers, the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut does display a larger triumphalist impulse within its survey of one king after another. The chronicle's structure unites narrative and lineage, representing them as not only coherent, but nearly synonymous: continuous story and continuous succession.

For one of the Oldest Version's main, if unstated, goals is to give its readers a sense of essentially unbroken lineage from the time of Brut straight through to that of the Plantagenets in power when the chronicle was composed. The writer faces a substantial task, given the island's long record of conquest and displacement – a record emphasized in the chronicle's sources. While manifesting awareness of the horrors and constant risk of dynastic breakdown and deploying as cautionary tales the stories of vexed succession provided by his sources, he nevertheless provides an account of British history that offers a reassuring sense of continuous heritage on a grand scale.

Over and over in the opening chapters of the prose Brut, families quarrel, the realm is divided, war results, and unity is achieved again only at great cost. Contested and broken succession leads to a generation or more of misery, while restoration achieved by a deserving and rightful heir who seeks alliance with others, or by the last-second aversion of civil war, leads to generation after generation of stability. Order is the element that linear genealogy and smooth succession provide, and from which all stand to benefit. Only when lineage and succession hold can the land remain united and sound. And order is shown as something to be cultivated, not presumed or undermined. Up to a point, the writer of the Oldest Version is working with extremely tractable materials, ones that show the full range of possibilities but always bring back the rightful line. The Roman occupation of Britain poses a greater challenge and marks a larger-scale editorial effort.

The Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut chronicle offers figures who tend to act according to recognizable types or conventions. Blustering tyrants, saintly bishops, and wicked pagan invaders take their turns. Just as the men do, the women of the chronicle appear in traditional, often overlapping, roles: mother and stepmother, saint and martyr, seductress, queen, servant, and victim of rape.Even female saints are portrayed primarily in relation to men – St Eleine is noted first as Constantine's mother, and then as the finder of the True Cross, and Ursula wins her martyr's crown in the defense of her virginity – but the socially determined and gendered nature of women's roles in the Oldest Version is nothing unusual. Social and familial relationship is the basis of individual identity in the chronicle. Men, too, appear in a set of socially determined roles, as good or bad kings and vassals, husbands, fathers, sons, holy men, servants, lovers, rapists, and assassins. But the women of the chronicle do not necessarily conform to stereotypical expectations of what their roles mean and what they demonstrate about women. The Oldest Version does not have much to say about gender or gender roles: what it manifests about them is all the more interesting and potentially significant for the fact that it is not explicit.

Mediators, Fighters, Mothers

The composer of the Oldest Version does not make the same effort to provide consistent morals to stories of feminine heroism or transgression as he does with, for example, would-be usurpers. He does not attempt to teach and reinforce lessons about proper womanhood as he does about kingship. Thus, although he may efface the regnant Queen Marcie to show his good kings to better effect, he does not hesitate early in the text, when her story has compelling lessons to offer, to portray a queen who does more than rule.

Locrin, Brut's eldest son, makes a good start to his reign by defeating the invader Humbar and his men, but he then falls into disastrous error:

In the face of modern depictions of Merlin as everything from comic sorcerer complete with pointy hat to proto-environmentalist Druid, medievalists – particularly those who teach undergraduates – often find themselves emphasizing him as first and foremost a prophet in the eyes of medieval audiences. Geoffrey of Monmouth, the first main promulgator of the matter of Merlin in writing, claims that interest in Merlin's prophecies was so great that he had to stop work on the Historia to translate them. Geoffrey interrupts his narrative with an unusual first-person comment:

In the Historia, when the doomed usurper Vortiger has haled Merlin into his court, after being advised to temper the mortar of his castle's unstable foundation with the blood of someone who has no father, Merlin reveals that the foundation is undermined by a pool of water inhabited by two dragons, red and white, the sight of which inspires him to deliver a lengthy, violent, cryptic beast allegory extending well beyond the meaning of the dragons themselves. As Crick has argued, the presence of prophecy seems only to have strengthened the authority of the entire Historia for much of its audience: ‘Merlin seems generally to have enhanced, not detracted from, Geoffrey's respectability as a historian.’ Geoffrey's prophecies, which constitute Book 7 of the Historia, were also copied and transmitted separately. New prophecies were being composed and attributed to Merlin into at least the fourteenth century, and they remained common enough cultural currency that Shakespeare can have the Fool joke about them, prophesying prophecy, in King Lear.

It seems that sometime during the reign of Edward I, perhaps in the north of England, early enough that the king was still in his prime, but late enough that it was worth emphasizing his lordship over Scotland, a secular patron asked a cleric to compose a succinct history of Britain in French for a lay audience. The cleric was well suited to the task. He had access to a good library – one of institutional, probably monastic, quality. He was comfortable reading both Latin and French and was acquainted with some historical matter in English, whether in oral or written form. Whatever his position, he could write with understanding of and sympathy for the life of a secular household. Rendering verse and prose sources in a range of styles and languages into plain, accessible prose, he wrote more to communicate than to impress.

If the oldest surviving version of his work represents something close to what he wrote, he provided it with no title, no dedication to a patron, no selfidentification as author, no prologue describing how hard he worked, how many sources he used, and why his book was worth reading, and no request for a reward, position, or even the prayers of his audience in return for his effort. All that is known about him and the origins of the book comes from its content.

His reserve should not be taken as a sign of lack of interest in the job. If he had wanted just to fulfill a commission, he could have taken his three major sources, abridged them, and been on his way. Instead, as will become apparent, he did much more than that. Self-effacing and given to supererogatory effort, he was clearly not destined to get ahead in the world. But the book he wrote was an extraordinary success. It became the core of the most popular secular vernacular work of the late Middle Ages in England:the prose Brut chronicle.

In what is now known as the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, the chronicle offered its audiences unprecedented access to a complete history of the land, from the story of Britain's Trojan founder Brut to the death of Henry III in 1272.

In my analysis of its depiction of Brut and Rome, I have tried to demonstrate both how the Oldest Version works from its sources and what some of the effects of that work are, in order to articulate both its narrative techniques and the ideals that emerge from its presentation of the history of Britain. To continue throughout with the painstaking close reading of text against multiple sources entailed by that sort of analysis would be taxing on all parties concerned. I will now try to step back for a wider perspective, and to move along more quickly, while reserving the right to stop and focus on particulars from time to time.

When understood in context, even the Oldest Version's greatest departures from its sources become comprehensible as part of a program promoting the ideal of a cohesive community of the realm that extends across time and population. In this chapter, I will discuss some major concerns of the Oldest Version, considering episodes throughout the text, offering longer readings of specific incidents, and showing how it links its separate stories to create a typology of secular history.

King and Baronage

Following the model set by Brut, the prose Brut's good rulers are worthy and wise. They contribute to the general welfare by establishing laws and by building cities, roads, temples, and eventually Christian houses of religion. They respect the powerful and help the weak. They are beloved by their people. These traits recur in the brief characterizations that serve to describe obscure kings and introduce famous ones. Most frequently mentioned in these lists are good and noble rule, the love of the people, and courtesy. In the adjectival forms curtois or deboner, this word seems to have little to do with the finer things in life; instead courtesy serves as a mark of decorum towards others, an opposite to the pride evinced by the Brut's tyrants. Somewhat less frequently mentioned are marks of individual heroism, when the king is explicitly associated with knighthood and is ‘beau’, ‘vaillaunt de corps’, ‘fort’, and ‘large’ (‘handsome’, ‘powerful of body’, ‘strong’, and ‘generous’).

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury … is universally considered the sole adviser of the King about the disturbances of Scotland.’ So reported Francesco Zonca, Venetian secretary in England, in April 1638. Zonca's next comment, that Laud was, as a result, ‘trying to exonerate himself … from this deeply rooted opinion’, affirms the archbishop's strategy of disengaging from unpopular policies, a tactic encountered in the previous chapter. So effective was Laud at disassociating himself that even scholars have succumbed to his spin, arguing that his influence was on the wane by 1638. To test this view, the present chapter will investigate Laud's contribution to the negotiations between crown and Covenanters in 1638; the aim is to show that he was closely engaged with the handling of the Scottish crisis as it unfolded, providing an integral link between Charles and James, 3rd Marquis of Hamilton, during this crucial period. An examination of the triangular relationship between king, archbishop and marquis reveals Laud's part in the provision of royal counsel during perhaps the most important year in the king's reign.

The analysis in this chapter is sub-divided into three parts, mirroring the course of events, as well as the surviving evidence, and it follows a chronological course, since this is the most effective way of mapping the archbishop's influence against the complex progress of the negotiations. The chapter's first section is concerned with the period from the prayer book riots in July 1637 to the initial signing of the National Covenant in February 1638. In this initial phase, little was done to prevent opposition from growing, although Charles was kept abreast of developments via the usual channels of the Scottish Privy Council, mainly through John Stewart, 1st Earl of Traquair, and Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Roxburgh. Hamilton and James, 1st Duke of Lennox, were the key lay advisers in London. The second section will explore the period from May, when the king appointed Hamilton as royal commissioner, to the end of the Glasgow Assembly in December 1638. After Hamilton's appointment, the process of resolving the mounting crisis can be charted through his correspondence with Laud and Charles.

‘Having travailed a great way this last Summer, none of ye Baggpipes in the North could alter me or my pipe.’ This telling comment, made by Laud to Wentworth in December 1633, following his return from Edinburgh for the king's coronation, sets the tone for his overall stance on the development of a new prayer book and canons for Scotland. To varying degrees, both projects were supervised by Laud from court, with an emphasis on ensuring, as much as possible, conformity with England. As shown in the previous chapter, the bishops were key to the successful implementation of reform: without them, neither king nor archbishop would have been able to push forward with the changes they sought to make in Scotland. It was not simply in ensuring compliance with royal policies that the episcopate's contribution was central, but their co-operation was also paramount in procuring the publication of the 1636 book of canons and the 1637 prayer book, through which crown policies were disseminated to Scottish worshippers. The purpose of this chapter is to juxtapose Laud's known contribution to preparing the prayer book with his less familiar but coeval role in ensuring that Scotland had a book of canons consistent with those of Ireland and England. In the process, it will expose the true nature of Laud's working relationship with the king in its Scottish context. It will show his ability to make some blatant and consequential changes during the drafting process, casting doubt on his putative circumspection in handling Scottish church affairs and revealing the considerable free rein that Charles was prepared to give his archbishop in the formulation and administration of ecclesiastical policy. The argument here is not that Laud operated alone, since the bishops were integral to the whole process, but rather that he was a dominant figure in converting his own and the king's wishes into actions. The argument will be presented in three parts. As canons and prayer book were developed simultaneously and by an overlapping group of bishops, the ‘official’ evolution of the two projects will be considered in tandem in the opening part of the chapter.

In the first part of this book, I examined the text of the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut (as established in an edition) against sources and analogues (generally also as established in editions) and attempted to identify (through the filters set by editions) patterns of composition and adaptation that reveal something of its maker's intentions, in order to articulate what dominates the understanding and presentation of history that the Oldest Version provides, what sets it apart from its ancestral texts, and how it challenges received opinion about the range of views commonly available and held in late medieval England. The meanings with which a writer seeks to imbue a text are one thing: the meanings that arise from it over time are another. Trying to recover intention is of course not at all equivalent to trying to declare the true meaning of a work. It may, however, help elucidate what subsequent audiences could have found there as they began the process of generating meanings of their own.

Having considered what went into the Oldest Version, I will now turn to what came of it. In this part of the book, I will consider the production of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, the manuscript context in which it appears, the evidence of ordinatio, apparatus, and annotation, and the illustrations that a few manuscripts incorporate, all of which reveal aspects of reception and interpretation that fall by the wayside in almost any printed edition. The most heavily used manuscripts may be the least prone to survive, and manuscripts held by the highly educated, whose habits of use may well differ from those of the less educated, may have been more likely to make it into institutional libraries and the hands of early collectors. However representative a sample the surviving manuscripts may or may not be, they do provide concrete, contemporary evidence as to what the creators and audiences of the Anglo- Norman prose Brut made of it, as well as their broader approaches to making sense of history and historical narrative.

Scholars of early modern Britain are fortunate in inhabiting a landscape shaped by some great minds. The words of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Christopher Hill, David Stevenson, Conrad Russell and John Morrill, inter alia, have sculpted an impressive legacy: it is rare to find oneself in such prestigious company. When faced with predecessors of this calibre, the temptation for less well-known scholars might be to view their every word as molten gold. Timor reverentialis must not, however, halt the critical interrogation of arguments put forward by our eminent forerunners. Sometimes, small statements by big names can open up avenues of investigation that might otherwise appear to be blind alleys or dead ends. This book is based on one such statement, by one such name.

In 1994, in an influential essay on ‘ecclesiastical imperialism’, Professor John Morrill considered the relationship between the British churches within the early Stuart composite monarchy. Morrill's argument was that, across their dominions, both James VI…I and Charles I sought religious ‘congruity’ rather than uniformity. In this, they were motivated less by a drive to anglicise, or ‘anglicanise’, than by sheer authoritarianism. Responding to Conrad Russell's contention that Charles I and William Laud had sought to ‘construct a new programme of British uniformity’, based on English hegemony– with Laud acting as ‘a sort of secretary for ecclesiastical affairs for all three kingdoms’ – Morrill viewed Laud's ostensible reticence in Scotland and the minor policy variations across the kingdoms as weakening the case for the existence of a ‘British programme’ aimed at anglocentric integration. While claiming that there was no formal attempt to extend the archbishop of Canterbury's jurisdiction beyond England, Morrill also highlighted the apparent inconsistency in approach, in all three kingdoms, of Archbishop William Laud, Charles I's chief ecclesiastical adviser. Laud's continuous, direct and flagrant ‘interference’ in the Irish church was juxtaposed with his more ‘circumspect’ engagement in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs. It is this small statement, by a big name, that lies at the heart of this book.

The narrative of the Oldest Version of the prose Brut chronicle is built of kings’ reigns laid end to end. With over a hundred rulers to cover, it goes into detail only on the most prominent and most recent. Aside from a handful of notables, the earlier kings generally make do with a few sentences, brief descriptions stripped down even from Wace, who in turn generally condenses Geoffrey.

A typical stretch on the lives of some lesser-known British kings in the years between Brut and Arthur:

‘I have learned not to be curious in aliena republica’. These words, which could never have been written by William Laud, whose interests crossed several national frontiers, did, however, come from the pen of an archbishop of Canterbury. Scripted by John Whitgift, this statement came soon after his promotion to the primacy by Elizabeth I in 1583. It followed an unsuccessful mission to London by Patrick Adamson, Archbishop of St Andrews, aimed at greater Anglo-Scottish collaboration to curb the growth of Presbyterianism. Whitgift's comment is also a fruitful starting point for this opening chapter, the purpose of which is to consider the origins of Laud's intervention in Scotland, in the context of his archiepiscopal predecessors and his own career trajectory. The analysis will be divided into two parts. The first part will explore the ‘Scottish agency’ of John Whitgift, Richard Bancroft and George Abbot, Laud's antecedents in office, to show that he was not the first archbishop of Canterbury to take an interest in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs. This section will also consider the early stages of Laud's own involvement in Scotland, when he participated in the Jacobean royal visit of 1617. The second part of the chapter will analyse the impact on Laud's career of Charles I's accession to the throne in 1625. The overall argument is that Laud's interest in the Scottish church was not unique per se, but that his active intervention differed from that of his predecessors in two key ways: first, because it predated his promotion to the primacy; and secondly, because Charles I's approach to kingship and counsel provided conditions favourable to the extension of Laud's remit into the north.

The Scottish Church and the English Archbishops, c.1583–1625

The Scottish Reformation was very different from its English counterpart and the individual trajectories of each of the two churches along the path to reformation had implications for the episcopate in both kingdoms. In England, ecclesiastical reform had been spearheaded by Henry VIII and transacted by parliamentary statute in 1533–34. Thus, the structure of archbishops, bishops and dioceses was retained and the monarch assumed the role of supreme governor through the 1534 Act of Supremacy. As a result, papal authority over the church was replaced with royal authority.

Given the density of the narrative presented in this book, it is in order to summarise my key contentions. This book provides a definitive account of all of Laud's Scottish-related activities, from his initial visit to Scotland with James VI…I in June 1617 to his execution in January 1645. Although arguing that he was not the first archbishop of Canterbury to take an interest in the Scottish church, the book shows that he was the first English archbishop to be given relatively free rein to intervene in Scottish church affairs by his royal master, Charles I. Laud's unparalleled position as senior ecclesiastical adviser to the king, who shared his love of ceremony and his preference for order and uniformity, gave him unprecedented access to a church which lay beyond his formal jurisdiction. If his status at court gave him the opportunity to intervene in Scotland, his antipathy towards Presbyterianism provided the motive. During the 1630s, he had no official authority outside the Church of England, but he used his position within the English church to extend his remit beyond English borders, all the while operating outside institutional boundaries to become involved in as many aspects of crown policy in Scotland as possible. Laud did not work in isolation – he needed at least a few of the Scottish bishops ‘on side’ to implement such core policies as the canons and prayer book – but he was a force to be reckoned with when it came to putting in place the king's and his own wish to harmonise Scottish worship with English church practice. Although some of the Caroline episcopate were definitely on the conservative side, in terms of seventeenth-century religion, the bishops in Scotland cannot really be described as ‘Laudian’ as a whole, but they did their level best to comply with the king's and Laud's commands because, as the archbishop made clear, they would not prosper if they failed in this endeavour. Recognising the implications for their church, yet unable to challenge the king directly, most of the Scottish bishops were caught between a rock and a hard place. All they could do was perhaps delay proceedings and try to ensure that core policies like canons and prayer book were in a form as acceptable as possible to Scottish worshippers.