Pete Scully, MA English
April 2005
How does the
poem ‘St Erkenwald’ illustrate medieval London’s desire for New Troy?
Sythen that Bretayne was
biggede and Bruyttus it aughte
Thurgh the takynge of Troye with tresone withinn
There hathe selcouthes bene sene in seere kynges tymes
Bot neuer so many as nowe by the nyne dele.
(‘Wynnere
and Wastoure’, lines 1-4)[1]
With these lines by an anonymous poet the ‘Alliterative
Revival’ began in the mid-fourteenth century[2].
This revival of an older, Anglo-Saxon tradition was probably a response to the
decline of French as a language of literature in England. French had not only
begun to profoundly alter the English tongue but was the source of influence
for the rhyming poems which had previously begun to find favour. It was an
expression of Englishness, as Turville-Petre explains: “Perhaps, too, there was
satisfaction in the knowledge that the alliterative line was a uniquely English
form, without parallel in French or Latin literature.”[3]
The Revival encompassed many well-known pieces, such as Gawain and the Green
Knight, Layamon’s Brut, and Langland’s Piers Plowman,
although interest in this style had severely waned by the sixteenth century.
What I find particularly interesting about the opening lines of Wynnere and
Wastoure, a poem which probably dates from around 1352-3, is that they
immediately draw us into the tale of Britain’s mythical foundation by the
Trojan “Bruyttus”, and inform us that even since then, never have times been so
bad as they are in the present. Post-Black Death England was destined to
undergo more turbulence, and such an obvious remark looking back to the halcyon
days of New Troy can only serve as an indication of the prevalent mood of the time.
Over thirty years later, during the rule of Richard II, the anonymous poet of St.Erkenwald
did more than just make reference to Trojan Britain. Telling the tale of
another revival, that of the pagan judge from ancient New Troy by the seventh
century Bishop of London, the poem attempts to deal with the Trojan origins by
giving them a direct link to the Christian age. In this essay I will examine
how the St.Erkenwald poet does this, and try to show how the poem
illustrates late fourteenth century London’s obsession with the idea of ‘New
Troy’. It was a city recently invaded by an armed insurgence, beset by a
culture of factions and in fighting, and a mayor, Nicholas Brembre, who
attempted to re-baptize London as Parva Troia (“Little Troy”)[4].
Why was it so fashionable to aspire after an ancient, decadent city best known
for having suffered an ignominious, cataclysmic fall?
St.Erkenwald opens by immediately placing
the reader in the Saxon London of Erkenwald, when he, already named as a “Saynt”,
was “byschop in þat burgh” (line 3)[5].
It was not long after Christianity first gained sway in England, and we are
treated to a short history of the conversion from the heathen era of “Hengyst
dawes” (line 7) to the Christian by Augustine (“Saynt Austyn”, line
12). Temples were cleansed and converted into Churches, and pagan figures and
idols were dramatically replaced with conveniently alliterating Christian
alternatives. Raymond P. Tripp Jr explains that “the poet’s synopsis is less a
history than a judgement of how Austyn went about his reforms, which he
presents as hasty and shallow, little more than changing the signs on the
door.”[6]
For the greatest temple of all, however, simple rededication would not suffice.
The “temple Triapolitan” (line 36) had already been rechristened in the name of
St.Paul, but was “now being torn down to be rebuilt for the ‘New Werke’.”[7]
The major difference being highlighted here, as Ruth Nissé points out, is that
although the poet tells us that the temple served “a mighty devel” (line
27), the “dryghtyn derrest of ydols praysid” (line 29), he “suppresses
the actual name of the temple’s former deity, leaving its past a cipher.”[8]
It is during excavations for this new foundation of Christian London that the
ancient Trojan past is accidentally uncovered, in the form of a perfectly
preserved corpse, dressed up in the regalia of a king, itself impossible for
Londoners to decipher until Erkenwald commands it to speak.
‘New Troy’ is first mentioned in line 25:
“Now þat London is nevenyd þe New Troie / þe metropol and mayster-toun hit
evermore has bene.” This has been read in a couple of different ways. A
Book of Middle English translates line 25 as “What is now known as
London was called ‘the New Troy’”[9].
Sylvia Federico, in the opening chapter of New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in
the Later Middle Ages, phrases it as “now that London is the New Troy”.
She is making the point that London in the late fourteenth century was actually
calling itself by its Trojan moniker, and the poet was using the term to “describe
the city’s current status as a center of moral virtue and economic success”[10].
However, I think she creates this variant translation to back up her argument,
for she disregards the word “hatte”, implying that New Troy is not the
city’s old name, but it’s new one. Nonetheless, it is clear that the poet at
least is reminding his audience, who would have been fully aware of London’s
Trojan aspirations, of the city’s Trojan origins, a myth that had gained much
currency. The tale that follows this statement is one that requires readers to
accept the myth as truth.
The discovery of the undecayed corpse
causes uproar in London, attracting all manner of people from across the city
to St. Paul’s. The rabble all but cause a riot, “Ronnen radly in route with ryngand
noyce” (line 62), which is only quelled when Bishop Erkenwald is called
back to London from Essex, when “Tulkes tolden hym þe tale with troubull in
þe pepul” (line 109). After much discussion and meditative reflection, the
bishop, in front of the massed congregation and hierarchy of the town, commands
the body to speak and reveal his identity. This being the site of the greatest
of the temples of the mightiest of Saxon devils, it is unsurprising that this
mysterious body should provoke such interest among the populace and such
anguish and uncertainty in the bishop. To be sure about where the corpse’s soul
lay, he bids it to reveal “queþer art þou joined to joy oþir juggid to pyne”
(line 188). The “bry3t body” stirs and proceeds to tell them his story –
yet interestingly, like the “maghty devel”, his name remains a secret.
He explains that contrary to his “semely septure” and the “coron ful
riche”, he was “never kyng ne cayser ne 3et no kny3t nothyre” (line
199), but a judge in the city of New Troy when the kingdom was torn by
unhappy war between King Belyn and his brother Berynge. His was a position, a “mayster-mon”,
which Israel Gollancz likens to the later medieval office of Lord Mayor of
London[11].
Although he claims that the citizens of New Troy were difficult to govern at
first, his rule of fair law was so appreciated that upon his death he was
bedecked with the majesty of a monarch. However, being from a time prior to
Christ, his spirit could not ascend to heaven, until finally by the tears of
Erkenwald he was baptized, “þe soule was sesyd in blisse” (line 345).
The unnamed pagan is thus awarded status of saint, a fact acknowledged by the
sudden ringing of bells across the city.
Who was Erkenwald? Though his name is
largely unfamiliar nowadays, the man who was Bishop of the East Saxons from
675-693 was very well known in late medieval England. His shrine, the “chief
glory of Old St. Paul’s” was “famous far and wide”[12]
drew in many pilgrims, and the cult of Saint Erkenwald inspired not only the
alliterative poem but Latin accounts of his life and miracles, the Vita sancti Erkenwaldi and the Miracula. His miracles were ascribed to
him posthumously; twenty-three of them are chronicled in the Miracula. These deal with events such as
blind women receiving the gift of sight, and the gift of sudden death to a man
who refused to commemorate the saint’s feast day[13].
The Miracula was, according to
Whatley, likely to have been written around 1140, a good two and a half
centuries before the Erkenwald poet.
Importantly, the poem’s miracle does not appear to be part of the saint’s
oeuvre, and differs fundamentally from those in the Miracula in that the Bishop is still alive when he performs it. It
could be argued that, since ultimately the act of making the corpse speak from
his tomb was the work of Jesus – “I bydde
on his behalve” (line 181) – this miracle was not the bishop’s, but
possibly the judge’s, who is made a saint by the poem’s end. Nonetheless the
poem forms part of a resurgence of interest in the East
Saxon bishop in the 1380s, when “the metropolitan church was trying to stage a
comeback for the famous London saint”[14].
Robert Braybroke, who became Bishop of London after the Peasant’s Revolt “to
control the behaviour of the people within the cathedral”[15],
restored Erkenwald’s feast-days in 1386; Gollancz states that observance of
these days “had become somewhat neglected”[16].
While the poet may be comparing the appointment of Braybroke to hush the masses
and make them “al as stille as þe ston”
(line 219) with both Erkenwald and the judge, I believe that he is tying this
renewed interest in Erkenwald with the prevailing interest in New Troy. One of
the clues lies in the poem’s most likely source.
What was the poet’s inspiration behind
this miracle story? Gordon Whatley has indicated that “all modern scholars
agree that one or another of the late medieval versions of the legend of Pope
Gregory and the emperor Trajan” was the poem’s most likely model, in particular
a version of which that shows up in a commentary on Dante’s Commedia by Jacopo della Lana[17].
In the Middle Ages, he goes on, “the figure of Trajan came to be regarded as a
kind of secular saint, a shining example of the virtues of rational
self-control and just government”[18].
If this is the case then the parallels between Trajan and the judge are clear
enough. However the most striking similarity is that Gregory, a real figure
from Rome’s early Christendom (indeed the one who famously instigated the
conversion of the Anglo-Saxons) makes a connection with a past leader who,
though undoubtedly historical, represents a pagan Rome whose foundations were
popularly linked with the fall of Troy, a fable concocted by Virgil in the Aeneid: “Look for a great city to establish for them after long wanderings
across the sea”[19].
In his article Aeneas in 1381, Christopher Baswell notes that at the start of the Aeneid, Virgil “compares the forces of
nature to an urban mob”[20].
Speaking of the episode in which Neptune pacifies the tempest thrown up in the
sea by Juno, Baswell sounds as though he could be speaking about either St.
Erkenwald or the judge when he says that the “image of a grave and pious man
calming an urban rabble is the first elaborate epic simile of the Aeneid”[21].
The translation of human mobs into animal or elemental forces was common in the
wake of the Peasant’s Revolt. John Gower’s Vox
Clamantis offers a dark parody of the Rising during a dream in which the
poet sees “innumerable terrifying
monsters, various rascally bands of the common mob”[22].
He uses terms such as “wild beasts”, “unreasoning brutes”, “lions in search of their prey”.
Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale uses
the image of the farmyard to express a vision of the Rising. The Aeneid actually reverses the simile, but the effect is much the same.
Virgil’s tale of Trojan exiles destined to found great imperial cities and
empires seemed to strike a chord in medieval Europe. Baswell remarks that
“ancient and authoritative narratives of imperial and civic foundation
exercised an undiminished appeal,” derived from “centuries-old habits of royal
and noble houses underwriting their dynastic and territorial ambitions with
ancient epic, most often Virgil’s Aeneid
and the story of Troy.”[23]
In England this ambition manifested
itself most successfully in the writings of Geoffrey of Monmouth. His Historia regum Britanniae opens with an
account of how Brutus, great-grandson of Trojan survivor Aeneas, led his people
to the island of Albion where he defeated the giants and founded Britain.
Brutus needed a capital, and choosing a site on the Thames, “he built his city and called it Troia Nova.
It was known by this name for long ages after, but finally by a corruption of
the word it came to be Trinovantum.”[24]
John Clark explains that the evidence for this name most likely came from accounts
of Julius Caesar’s campaigns, which mention a city called “Trinovantum” and
tribes called the “Trinovantes”[25].
By a process of inventive etymologizing, Geoffrey eventually gives the city its
contemporary and even its Norman French name: “As languages evolved, it took the name London, and later still, when
the foreign invaders landed and conquered the country, it was called Lundres.”[26]
Although large swathes of Geoffrey’s Historia had little to do with actual
known history, a point acknowledged even in the mid-twelfth century when it was
written, it was an enormous success and certainly pandered to its intended
audience, the Norman ruling classes, the “foreign
invaders”. They identified themselves with the Britons who had been
displaced by invading Saxons, whom they themselves had conquered and continued
to subjugate. There were gaps in known history, and Geoffrey intended to fill
them with what Clark calls “a foundation epic, comparable with the Aeneid, with as little basis in
historical fact”[27]. He makes the
point that “Geoffrey’s Trinovantum might reflect the aspirations of medieval
Londoners, but it could also serve to bolster these aspirations.”[28]
The desire for a classical ancestry was strong, and the New Troy of the Historia reflects “not the origins of
London but London’s need for a pedigree.”[29]
This need was evident not only in England and imperial Rome, but in other parts
of Europe too, particularly in France.
Why was it popular to be associated with
Troy? After all, it was famous predominantly for having fallen, never to rise
again; in fact it had disappeared entirely, until Schliemann uncovered what are
believed to be its remains a century ago (although there are those that have
argued that Troy was actually located in the Baltic[30]).
Federico notes Troy’s “liminal location between history and fantasy”,
explaining that it was “always a place-name and never a place” [31].
Trojan society was regarded as noble, but ultimately they were undone by their
own internal divisions and treachery[32].
Why would London want to aspire to a city like this?
The Erkenwald
poet’s use of the Gregory-Trajan story as a model serves to remind us that
although Troy may have been the ancestor, it was more likely that Rome was the
real inspiration. After all, the Roman Empire was a phenomenal success. While
it is true that eventually even Rome fell, its far-reaching influence and
importantly its language – Latin – did not vanish. The evidence seems to point
in this direction, for it would make more sense to aspire to be a successful empire,
particularly one that – having Trojan foundations itself – was practically a
brother. So why did London, which after all had a very visible Roman past, not
hanker to be called New Rome?
Part of the problem was that in medieval
Europe there already was a Holy Roman Emperor, the heirs to the throne of
Charlemagne. They had the authority and the blessing of the Pope, and it would
have been politically unwise for any state or city to go around calling itself
the heir of the Caesars. New Troy, on the other hand, gives a city the same
heritage as Rome; this would thus give legitimacy to do as the Romans, and
fulfil an imperial destiny. Federico gives examples of how English rulers
exploited this myth. Edward I invoked Geoffrey’s Historia when exerting
hegemony over Scotland by claiming his “superior right as the descendant of
Locrine, the eldest son of Brutus of Troy.”[33]
According to the Débat des Herauts de France et de l’Angleterre both
England and France used their claims of Trojan heritage against each other
during the Hundred Years War[34].
Trojan ancestry could thus be used as a political weapon.
The proliferation of the Brutus myth can
be found in many places; the alliterative Gawain and the Green Knight is
book-ended by references to the siege and assault at Troy, briefly plotting the
line of “Ennias þe athel and his highe kynde” to “Felix Brutus”[35].
Brut by Layamon is essentially a reworking of Wace’s Roman de Brut,
itself a French rendering of Geoffrey. But what impression is given of Troy
itself in English literature contemporary to St. Erkenwald?
The
Destruction of Troy
is an Alliterative Revival translation of Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae, which
medieval scholars “accepted as absolutely genuine”[36].
It was not the only English translation; the Laud Troy Book and John Lydgate’s Troy Book were also produced, but in the rhyming style. The Destruction is remarkably faithful
to its original, although the poet does employ some medieval terms which are
specific to his time and not Troy’s, such as Priam’s “parlement” and the list of Tradesmen; Benson explains that this
was possibly done on purpose “to make the story real and understandable to his
audience”[37]. One of the
best examples of how fourteenth century England might have imagined Troy is a
poem that does not attempt to produce genuine history, but a knowledge of that
history and the fate of Troy appears to be required. Chaucer’s epic Troilus and Criseyde, in the words of
Vance, paints Troy as “a town sick with love from within, besieged by hostile
forces from without”[38].
It is thought to have been completed at about the same time as St.Erkenwald, and likewise seems to be a
reflection on 1380s London. Treachery and urban division are apparent in Troilus, and the way in which Chaucer
presents these themes has been described as “a product of a specific historical
moment”[39].
As in The Destruction, Troy has a “parlement”, and these scenes offer one
of the clearest similes to contemporary London, when the stirrings of the
common mob are influential in the Trojan’s decision to hand Criseyde over to
the Greeks in exchange for Antenor, the “traitour to the toun” (IV: 204):
“The noyse of the peple up
stirte thane at ones,
As breme as blase of strawe iset on-fire”
(IV: 183-4)
If treachery, faction and civic
antagonism were among the causes of Troy’s demise, then these were certainly
evident in Chaucer’s London. After the Peasant’s Revolt, in which London was over-run
by mobs from Kent and Essex,
scapegoats were made out of the “treasonous aldermen” that had allegedly
allowed the insurgents to breach the city walls[40].
The years that followed saw tensions mount between Richard II, Parliament, the
City of London, Mayors Nicholas Brembre and John of Northampton, and the
Church. The side-switching and eventual execution of Thomas Usk are testament
to the political atmosphere of the 1380s. Like the lust-ridden Troy of Troilus, London was
“full of deviant rulers whose passions would lead to the destruction of the
city”[41].
The city had already suffered invasion. It has been remarked by Eugene Vance
that Troy’s fate should serve as a warning to London not to misread the
tell-tale signs, as the people of Erkenwald’s London did when opening what they
presumed to be a king’s tomb. He calls Troilus “both tragic history and
potential prophecy”[42].
The impression we are given of British
Troy in St. Erkenwald also reflects
contemporary issues. The judge tells the bishop that “Brutus þis burgh had
buggid on fyrste” (line 207), a line reminiscent of Wynnere and Wastoure,
but that in his time the people were “felonse and fals and frowarde to
reule” (line 231). This description of an unruly mob is hardly a picture of
a golden age, but it does echo the troublesome people of Erkenwald’s city. John
Longo describes these Londoners as “the spiritual heirs of the judge’s own
citizenry”[43]. This in
turn also provides a mirror of the recent events surrounding the Peasant’s
Revolt. Christine Chism notes that “If the poem was written around 1386, it was
composed only five years after the Rising of 1381” and that St. Erkenwald “distantly echoes the
memory of such civic disorder when it depicts the city-wide insurgency of
frantic movement towards the discovered tomb.”[44]
Moreover, the
descriptions of other civic figures in Erkenwald’s London do not give the
impression of a particularly unified city. The bishop and the barons appear to
face off against the mayor, “with ma3ti men and macers before hym” (line
143), as well as the dean of St. Paul’s. The absence of a king, however, has
been seen as crucial to the poem’s message. For Ruth Nissé, the evocation of
New Troy is ultimately anti-Ricardian. Alluding to Richard’s recent royal
processions through London, she remarks that the procession in the final lines
is “as unlike Richard II’s as possible”, and that even without a monarch “the
citizens of London take their place in a truly new ‘New Troy’, invested with
the authority of a fundamentally virtuous history.”[45]
Similarly in the judge’s city, the “wrakeful werre” was the doing of the
king and his brother; it was ultimately under the rule of law, not king, that
the factions were brought together. This is why the New Trojans invested the
judge with status usually afforded to a king, and he had earned it through
deed, not birthright.
By forging a
link with London’s ancient past, Erkenwald the spiritual leader becomes
the willing pupil, listening to the judge and learning from his tale. In the
same way, the Erkenwald poet is inviting his audience to do the same, to
learn from a good example of how to manage civic unrest. New Troy was both a
warning and an ambition
for medieval London, and as such represented the anxiety that comes of being
such a politically charged and powerful city. St. Erkenwald reflects the
desire for change, for unity under the stability of law, but not the rule of
the king. If Ruth Nissé’s reading is taken further it could be said that St.
Erkenwald is a very republican poem, one which desires the Republic of New
Troy.
Bibliography:
Articles:
[1] ‘Wynnere and Wastoure’, ed. Stephanie Trigg, (1990)
[2] Turville-Petre, Thorlac: The Alliterative Revival, p.1
[3] Turville-Petre, p.26
[4] Federico, Sylvia: New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages, p1
[5] Edition used: A Book of Middle English, 2nd ed., J.A. Burrow and T. Turville-Petre, p.203
[6] Tripp, Raymond P.: St. Erkenwald: a tale of two souls, p94
[7] Tripp, p.95
[8] Nissé, Ruth: “A Coroun Ful Riche”: The Rule of History in
St.Erkenwald, pp277-95
[9] Burrow & Turville-Petre, p203
[10] Federico, p1
[11] Gollancz, I.: St. Erkenwald
(1922), p.xxix
[12] Gollancz, p.xxvi
[13] Whatley, E. Gordon: The Saint of London: the Life and Miracles of St. Erkenwald (Binghampton, 1989)
[14] Chism, Christine: Alliterative Revivals, p47
[15] Chism, p54
[16] Gollancz, p.xxvi
[17] Whatley, Gordon: Heathens and Saints: St. Erkenwald in Its Legendary Context, p334
[18] Whatley, Heathens and Saints, p341
[19] Virgil, The Aeneid: Book II
[20] Baswell, Christopher: Aeneas in 1381, p7
[21] Baswell, p8
[22] Gower, John: Vox Clamantis
[23] Baswell, p16
[24] Geoffrey of Monmouth: The History of the Kings of Britain, pp73-74
[25] Clark, John: Trinovantum: the Evolution of a Legend, p139
[26] Geoffrey, History, p106
[27] Clark, p143
[28] Clark, p147
[29] Clark, p149
[30] Felice Vinci: Homer in the Baltic, http://itis.volta.alessandria.it/episteme/ep2vinci2.htm
[31] Federico, p3
[32] Federico, p2
[33] Federico, p68
[34] Federico, p69
[35] Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, in Burrow & Turville-Petre, pp182-183
[36] Benson, C. David: The History of Troy in Middle English Literature, p5
[37] Benson, p55
[38] Vance, Eugene: Mervelous Signals, p256
[39] Turner, Marion: Treasonous Aldermen, p226
[40] Turner, p226
[41] Federico, p2
[42] Vance, p283
[43] Longo, John: The Vision of History in St.Erkenwald, p41
[44] Chism, p42
[45] Nissé, p291