SOURCE: Anderson, Carolyn. “Narrating Matilda, ‘Lady of the English,’ in the Historia Novella, the Gesta Stephani, and Wace's Roman de Rou: The Desire for Land and Order.” Clio: A Journal of Literature, History and the Philosophy of History, 29, no. 1 (fall 1999): 47-67.

[In the following essay, Anderson considers the significance of Wace's treatment of the figure of Matilda, the mother of England's King Henry II.]

Robert Wace's Roman de Rou¹ virtually omits Queen Matilda and most of the twelfth-century English civil war she fought with her cousin, Stephen of Blois. Given the text's predilection for battles and wars, Matilda's disappearance is anomalous. After all, in her own generation, she is represented as a powerful actor in texts as varied as legal documents and contemporary chronicles, which deal with the English succession dispute. In this article, I suggest that Matilda is a feminine threat to order and that contemporary misogyny in the early texts also masks the Rou's obsession with the imposition of order, which in turn actually reveals a cultural anxiety over the loss of settled claims to land.

I intend to demonstrate that Matilda does have a voice in the affairs of her time, and thereby power, in the disposition of lands, grants, and titles to her supporters. These legal texts chart her personal involvement as a ruler with the affairs of the kingdom.² The chronicles of William of Malmesbury,³ and the anonymous Gesta Stephani Regis,⁴ reveal anxiety over the prospect of Matilda as a powerful queen by elaborating and maximizing the roles of male relations and rivals, thus reducing the representation of Matilda as a powerful figure. These texts represent Matilda's occasional irreducibly personal and powerful acts as the operation of Fate or of an improper woman. In both ways, this rhetoric disguises the underlying anxiety over the maintenance of a settled system of law and inheritance of land. Misogyny is thus a motif for discussing the relationships of power, but for the Normans, power and successful control of land are the preeminent sources of anxiety. In the next generation, therefore, a dynastic historian such as Wace represents Matilda in a very limited and controlled way as the source of Henry II's inheritance, and then goes on to address the fear of disorder the civil war created. Wace's Henry II inherits after only a brief scene between Matilda and Stephen, and Wace details the relentless imposition of order and restoration of legal customs in previous generations by all Henry II's ancestors.⁵ Stephen's reign is thus a usurpation, and Henry II uses the practices of rule he learns from his maternal grandfather, Henry I, as the model for his behavior, which is frequently the introduction of laws that strengthen a centralizing monarchy.⁶ Matilda and her decades-long struggle are elided, not only because she symbolizes the disruptive nature of women, but also because her generation is anarchic, and a failure at the Norman business of conquest.

Matilda was “lady of the English,” to whom her father's barons had sworn allegiance as his designated heir, but the throne went to her cousin, Stephen, and then to her son, Henry II. Contemporary chronicles grudgingly identify Matilda with power, focusing on Matilda's familial relationships to male leaders, such as her first husband, Emperor Henry, her half-brother, Robert of Gloucester, and her second husband, Geoffrey of Anjou. Whether approving or suspicious of her actions and motives, the chronicles all attempt to reduce her role in the machinations of the civil war. Rather than allowing Matilda an independent voice and an independent agency, the authors juxtapose all representations of Matilda with elaboration of the men's plans, actions, and characters in emblematic scenes detailing crucial military and political developments in the civil war. This reaction to the threat Matilda poses is shaped as a response to her gender. This misogyny is not consistent, and commentators adopt it disingenuously, since the underlying concern is inheritance and title to land, whether through the female or not. The remarkable anarchy of the civil war, with its rival claimants to earldoms, alienated lands, proxy battles, invasions, rebellions, endless legal challenges, and betrayals on each side, exacerbated tensions over dynastic ambitions and revealed the rawly predatory nature of everyone in power, male or female.⁷ Chroniclers can blame some of that on Matilda as the source of the excessive, the disorderly, and the feminine (which are identified as synonymous in the earlier texts, even by those authors who supported Matilda's cause).

As Marjorie Chibnall points out, “there was almost no place for reigning queens in the twelfth century.”⁸ Anglo-Norman barons and magnates occasionally approved of Matilda's cause, but her gender proved an obstruction even for her erstwhile supporters. For instance, the Gesta Stephani Regis accounts for the failure of Stephen's followers to keep oaths sworn to her on the grounds that they were extorted by a woman, who “did not keep to the modest gait and bearing proper to the gentle sex” (Gesta Stephani, 78-80).⁹ The available heirs to Henry I of England were his daughter, Matilda, and his nephew, Stephen. Previous Norman kings had grasped the throne by combining proximity to the actual crown with force and deceit. The early weeks of the succession crisis reveal the uncertain nature of family loyalties: William of Malmesbury notes that Stephen arrived in England long before Matilda, and that the people of London and Winchester received him as king (HN [Historia Novella], 460). Stephen's brother, Henry, Bishop of Winchester, waited before assuring Stephen's coronation, and later repudiated his oath of allegiance (HN, 15). Robert of Gloucester, Matilda's brother, did homage “sub conditione,” “conditionally,” to Stephen, because he judged that Stephen was “instabilitatem fidei eius, [likely to break his word]” (HN, 18).

The Gesta Stephani demonstrates the apparent anxiety over Matilda's gender when it recounts that Stephen's supporters claimed that the oaths they had sworn to her had been forcibly extorted by Henry I, and were therefore invalid. The objection to extorted oaths is separate from the objection to Matilda's gender, but the first is an excuse for the second. The anonymous author, who clearly supports Stephen, develops the idea that gender is the obstruction rather than anything else, when he emphasizes the offer (possibly apocryphal) of the crown to Robert of Gloucester, Matilda's illegitimate half-brother. In this maneuver, Robert would be the proxy for Matilda, and the inheritor of the extorted oath, which suggests that it was not the mere fact of extortion that concerned the barons. Robert, for whom the text shows approval, refuses the offer and suggests that the throne should go to his sister's son (Gesta Stephani, 12-15, and HN, 457). Matilda's second marriage, arranged by her father to consolidate continental possessions, was the stumbling block for her opponents, who tended to have lands in both Europe and in England. Geoffrey of Anjou represented ambition for land, titles, and conquest, and in the Norman world, gaining land implied that someone else would lose it. Matilda's alliance with Geoffrey created the fear of a more widespread rule, which might come to dominate other duchies, as, indeed, it did. Geoffrey campaigned in Normandy, wresting it from Stephen's forces, adventured in Boulogne, with varying success, and eventually allied Aquitaine to this burgeoning empire by marrying his son to Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Matilda was no puppet of her husband or anyone else, as various cartularies consistently show. In the summer weeks of 1141, she calls herself queen because she anticipates that title, “M[atildis] imperatrix Henrici regis filia Anglorum regina.”¹⁰ Surely a formulaic opening, the announcement of her titles is interesting nevertheless because it omits her politically inconvenient husband, along with his threatening ambitions. In fact, the reference to “imperatrix” points attention to her first husband, the Emperor of Germany, whose ambitions (since he was dead) could be considered minimal. Matilda emphasizes the source of her blood claim in this accumulation of titles, shifting from a no longer relevant title as “imperatrix” to her assumed title as “regina Anglorum,” by way of being “filia regis.” The suggestion is surely that she will be content with the English throne and that her second husband's ducal opportunism is an entirely separate matter.

Luring baronial and ecclesiastical support through widespread dispensations of land, restoration of titles, and financial favors, Matilda opposes Stephen's rival grants and confirmations of inheritances. Mixed in with proclamations concerning such subjects as the rights to hold land (Regesta, 553), to inherit land (Regesta, 43), and to hunt in the forests (Regesta, 112), we find numerous public announcements of grants for monastic foundations and abbey lands. After April 1141, Matilda styled herself “M[atildis] imperatrix regis Henrici filia et Anglorum domina” (377), which acknowledges her legal loss of power while still claiming the right to dispense land as “lady of the English.” Her husband Geoffrey's efforts in the duchies had been militarily successful, and concessions he made to lords in his newly acquired lands attracted support for Matilda.¹¹ Combined with the death of Stephen's designated heir, these conquests enforced Matilda's exercise of power, even if at the expense of the title of queen.

William of Malmesbury supports Matilda's cause, and there is substantial evidence that Matilda directed the diplomatic conduct of the war, especially in negotiating with men who changed sides (HN, 491). Despite William's bias in favor of Matilda, he attributes the tactical motivation for action to the two chief male opponents, Stephen and Robert of Gloucester, whom he clearly prefers. Robert behaves “interea modeste se agere [with restraint]” (HN, 483), while Stephen's supporters are wretched and disorderly (HN, 483). Robert “satis habebat in officio continere [was content to maintain men in their positions]” (HN, 483), and only “levels castles when necessary” (HN, 483). William lauds Robert as the desired arbitrator between the two persons who torment his country (HN, 488). By juxtaposing descriptions of Robert with Stephen, the chronicler can ignore Matilda's role, except for the predictably misogynistic account of her meeting with the London commune after the temporary capture of King Stephen.

William sets the scene with an encomium on Robert's virtues (HN, 497). Assiduous in supporting and enlarging her dignity, Robert speaks well to the powerful and the humble, promises and intimidates where necessary, and is well on his way to “in omnibus partibus imperatricis faventibus iustitiam et patrias leges et pacem reformando [beginning the restoration of justice and the ancestral laws and peace in every region that supported the empress]” (HN, 497). Matilda is the sole cause of the next disaster, which reverses the victory her forces had just achieved by capturing Stephen. William delicately reports that “it is well established that if the other members of his party had trusted his restraint … they would not have endured ill fortune” (HN, 497), going on to explain that the Londoners rose up against her because she was “haughty.” There is no specific link between the two statements, but William indicates Robert's success and obliquely hints that Matilda would also have been successful if she had adopted her brother as a model of behavior. Matilda's personal courage in a rout of her forces becomes a sneering reference to her flight, “quadam militari disciplina urbe cesserunt [with a kind of military discipline they left the city]” (HN, 498). When she is the agent of her own fortunes, her bravery is a sign of her improperly unfeminine behavior. William describes her physically dangerous escape from a besieged castle as the act of a “virago [a woman of masculine spirit]” (HN, 497).

William has already announced his grave concern when assigned gender roles are blurred early in the text. As an omen of the disasters to come, a knight who wore his hair long and in curls dreamed of being strangled, and the knights of Henry I's day returned to the habit of short hair. William uses this probably apocryphal incident to criticize the knights of his time as men “crinitis nostris, qui, obliti quid nati sunt, libenter se in muliebris sexus habitum transformant [who wear long hair, forgetting what they were born, enjoying transforming themselves into the sexual appearance of women]” (HN, 453). The wariness the author displays betrays not only a suspicion of the feminine, but also a fear of the possibility that male identities and natures can change. The text recommends Robert as an exemplum, because he is not arbitrary (and therefore not changeable like a woman), and because he represents the possibility of success.

The Gesta Stephani does not grant Matilda much more recognition as a powerful actor. The text is notably focused on religious explanations for the destructive anarchy of the civil war and structured by alternating episodes of sinful action and God's retribution, with repentance and reward as organizing motifs in the narrative. The anonymous text sees any successes in miltary leadership and dominance by Matilda's party both as Robert's responsibility and as God's temporary punishment of Stephen for his violated oaths and treatment of papal and other ecclesiastical officials.

According to this pro-Stephen text, Londoners initially supported him because of his birth and character, considering him unobjectionable and a man of resolution (Gesta Stephani, 12). The expected opposition between the leaders of the two parties does not occur in the text. The text considers Stephen to be too soft, too compassionate, and its author desires that he “induit virum sanguinem [put on the man of blood]” (Gesta Stephani, 47). Matilda is too masculine, while Stephen is carefully not represented as too feminine. The suggestion is there, but specific versions of the opposition between the rivals would favor Matilda, since she is successful, at least nominally and in the early stages of the war, and she demonstrates the requisite ruthlessness to win. Stephen returned hostages, and in the case of the future William the Marshall, spared the boy from certain hanging, despite the callous announcement by the father that he still had the equipment to make more sons. Instead, we get oppositions between Stephen and Robert, and also between Bishop Henry of Winchester and Robert. There are references to episcopal rights and to Biblical precedents throughout this chronicle, and Matilda's influence is deplored. Until the death of Stephen's heir required the acknowledgement of Matilda's son as heir, the Gesta Stephani focuses on Robert, discussing his army and his headquarters at Bristol in derogatory feminine terms. Bristol is “stepmother of England, the deceiveress, a pit of perdition,” with a pun on “impostrix” and “imperatrix” (62-64).

As a variation on ignoring Matilda, the text treats her famous six-mile nocturnal escape, over snow and ice on foot, as a sign of God's favor, which will soon be restored to Stephen. The text calls it a miracle, “quodque manifesti fuit miraculi indicium [and the evident sign of the miracle]” was that she passed to safety dry footed, despite the weather (Gesta Stephani, 72). When she acts courageously, then, she is “femineam semper excedens mollitiem [acting always superior to feminine softness]” (Gesta Stephani, 66). In this chapter, men who escaped in disguise are “militandi abiiectis insignis,” are less than knights because they “threw away the signs of knighthood” (66). They lie about their identities, and hide in ditches, only to be dragged out and beaten by peasants, “tandem inventi probose et indecenter inde abtrahebantur [found by enemies and dragged out in shameful and unseemly fashion]” (66). The theme here is the loss of face suffered by all those concerned, including knights, bishops, nobles, and even the adventuring King of Scotland. When Matilda flees, she transgresses the bounds of proper feminine behavior, and by doing it all successfully, she demonstrates her uncanny and therefore suspicious ability to escape and be personally responsible for her own safety. The opposition between the male opponents proves more amenable and returns as the focus of the text until the chronological organization forces the author back to the empress (Gesta Stephani, 73-75).

The author continues his complaints about Matilda. When she plans new action after this rout, she “ferocem semper et inflexibilem exhalans spiritum [always breathes a spirit of unbending haughtiness]” (Gesta Stephani, 69). Any virtues of military success that he does acknowledge are secondary to her unfeminine behavior. Failures in sieges are the product of her “nimium quidem sui suorumque secura [excessive confidence].” That overconfidence is a personal failing, rather than a recognition that she is leading “splendida secum militantium manu [a magnificent body of troops]” (Gesta Stephani, 71).

Stephen's son, Eustace, is then opposed to Henry, allowing the mirroring of the representation of the violence of the previous generation as male. Henry gains forces from Normandy, which his father, Geoffrey of Anjou, controlled, and goes on to oppose Stephen (Gesta Stephani, 116). When Geoffrey dies, Henry becomes Stephen's chief foe. The opposition is either between the older and younger men, or between the two young men, until there is a treaty between Stephen and Henry, and Matilda has disappeared. Incidental and subordinate treaties between combatants demonstrate the widespread concern over interference in feudal tenure, vassalage, and inheritance, all of which the hectic shifting of members of alliances and various episodes of treachery exacerbated.¹²

Overall, contemporary texts represent Matilda as a powerful but unreliable icon. She refuses the ordinary role of queen as merely the vehicle for male inheritance, until it is forced on her by family deaths, and acts in a masculine fashion. These two authors fluctuate between reluctantly acknowledging her exercise of power, attributing it to her male proxies and substitutes, and representing her as an improper female. In a sense, all of these are conventional motifs, but the usual rhetoric of misogyny and marginalization masks the underlying horror of disorder, bewailed by the survivors of the civil war, and by the next generation, especially as it relates to land and rights of inheritance.

The death and destruction the civil war entailed for a whole generation left magnates and lesser families in uncertain relationships to their land.¹³ What one branch of the family lost and regained in Normandy and Anjou, another might gain and then lose in England. The crucial effect on feudal tenure was that titles changed sides, personal loyalty and vassalage to either Stephen or to Matilda became meaningless after military reversals, and the rough military equality and luck of both sides made the final outcome completely unpredictable. Support of inheritance through the female line or to an actual female was irrelevant to whether an individual could hold land with any reliability and bequeath it to his heirs.

By the time Wace writes his Roman de Rou, the putative line of descent between Henry I and Matilda's son virtually elides Matilda and Stephen as mere interruptions, erasing Matilda's claim in her own person to the throne, representing her instead as the vehicle for transmission of heritability. The actual nature of that succession depended on the prior death of King Stephen's heir presumptive, Eustace. After that disaster for Stephen's line, which represented the failure of the dynasty to control the next generation, Stephen reluctantly acknowledged Henry, the son of his rival, as his heir in the Treaty of Winchester. This maneuver allowed him to ignore the issues of gender and inheritance which this succession dispute raised. The actual differences between Stephen's and Matilda's claims to the throne, based on their own gender, and that of the person through whom their succession right existed, disappear entirely in Wace.

Writing for Matilda's son, Henry II, Wace sees Matilda as a threat to the symbolic order of identification with the father, who is, in a process of historical fantasy, made into Henry I, his grandfather, the ruthless king who reigned before the succession crisis. This finalized narrative erases Matilda's power in favor of reducing the actual differences between Henry I and Henry II to male similitude. The third term, Matilda, is the sign of difference and of failure; silencing, displacing, and rewriting her desires is the chosen way for writers to insist on male identity, repetition of the same, and order in the land. Wace's romance reveals the anxiety over the disorder of the civil war in the choice of subjects it addresses and the sheer narrative volume it apportions to Matilda versus Norman ancestors. The Rou represents Matilda and Stephen as actors or speakers in fewer than fifty lines of the 16,930 lines available. Stephen's thwarted dynasty and the civil war disappear along with Matilda's ambitions in the Rou, in favor of thousands of lines rewarding the successful adventurism and conquest of Duke Rollo's descendants.

The past and acts associated with Matilda provide Wace's history with a choice between acknowledging her power and mastering it by renarrating the civil war as a purely male, fratricidal, and generational strife. The narrative tries to represent and restore a stability never seen in the twenty years of the civil war in order to impose the history of the son's court on the anarchic mother who won the throne for him in the course of rebellions, broken oaths, tactical defeats and strategic victories, betrayals, and disappointments. Wace removes Matilda's threatening power by rewriting one of her most famous actions as a romance episode, and then obliterating Matilda's manipulations and statecraft altogether.

Henri estoit petiz quant la guerre li crut
du roi Estevenum, qui a grant tort li mut;
Maheut l'empereiz, qui mere Henri fut,
en soustint maint travail, mainte foiz s'en dolut.
Au siege de Vincestre si grant bonte parut,
quarante jours i fut, Damedieu li ajut!
onques jour asseur n'i menja ne ne but,
mil armes i mena, Dex, tante lance i fut!
N'i a si bon vassal qui travail ne sut,
hons n'i peut autre ateindre qu'il nel prenge ou ne tut.
Priz fu li quens Robert que Maheut secorut,
pour sa serour rescourre l'estor unge arestut,
et Maheut s'en ala tant com cheval corut;
dedenz oxenfort troiz moiz et tois jours jut,
assis en un chastel, que issir ne l'en lut.
Par nuit s'en eschapa, que hons ne l'aperchut,
fors ceuls qui l'enmenerent, qu'a conduire l'estut,
n'i a si bon ami qui au partir salut;
neif fut grant, mez geler souz la neif li valut,
un lincheul affubla, ses anemis dechut,
ad Walerigefort ou Briens la rechut;
mout fu dolenz li roiz quant il ne l'aconsut
Estiennes n'out onc paiz ne avoir ne la dut,
quer mal conseil crei et mal conseil li nut;
tant la destraint li roiz que son droit recongnut,
du regne l'erita, qui a ceus moult crut
a qui la guerre plest at a qui la paiz plut;
diz et noef anz fu roiz, et cel terme morut.

(Chron. Ascend., 108-35)

[Henry was little when the war developed with King Stephen, who started it very unjustly. The empress Matilda, who was Henry's mother, suffered many a torment from it and was often very sorry because of it. At the siege of Winchester her great courage was apparent. She was there forty days, may the Lord God help her! Never did she eat or drink in safety there! She led a thousand armed men; God, how many lances there were! There was no noble so fine that he did not sweat with effort. No man was able to reach another but he captured or killed him. Count Robert, who aided Matilda, was captured. He never stopped the struggle to rescue his sister, and Matilda fled as fast as her horse ran. She lay three months and three days at Oxford, besieged in a castle so that she was not allowed to get out. She escaped by night so that no one saw her except those who led her away, as it was necessary to guide her. There was no friend so dear that she said goodbye at parting. The snow was thick, but the ice beneath the snow aided her. She covered herself with a sheet; she deceived her enemies. She came to Wallingford where Brian received her. Stephen never had peace; nor should he have had it; for he believed had advice; and bad advice hurt him. The king harassed Matilda until she recognized his right. She put him in possession of the kingdom, which enriched him greatly, whom war pleased and whom peace pleased. He was king nineteen years, and at that time, he died.]

Wace's initial explanation of Matilda and her significance to her son merely notes that he received England as part of his inheritance from her, among all his other lands. This version of the escape by night differs from earlier accounts, especially in its omission of military reasons for the siege and the escape, and in its omission of the attribution of the success to God. Matilda is not too masculine or too bold, and while portraying Matilda as any kind of helpless woman is misogynist, the specific and historically credible instances of excessive power have disappeared. Wace creates a lady to be rescued by her protector (Chron. Ascend., 118-19), mixing romance conventions of despairing laments by ladies and catalogues of extreme emotions with the transgressive individual escape across the snow while dressed in a sheet. The romance coloring which Wace adds to this episode as a whole places Matilda and her actions firmly within the romance genre. For example, Matilda suffers “torment,” she “never eats or drinks in safety,” which exaggerates the danger, she is surrounded by “fine nobles,” and undertakes a dangerous escape, where the author uses the fact that she cannot part from her “ami” as an indication of her desperation (Chron. Ascend., 111, 114, 116, 125). Wace orders Matilda's experience in space, specifying castles and missed farewells. By giving it a location and a specificity, however spurious, Wace controls the range of possible behavior available to the empress. She is no “virago” here because there is no activity within which she can display that quality in Wace's account of events. In a sense, this scene is recounted, and given romance details, such as the improbable forty days, as a narrative strategy that places her in the realm of courtly feminine behavior, even if some of her independence lies at the very edge of that ideology. This allows Wace to omit altogether the really transgressive military ruthlessness Matilda displayed in her campaigns, and to elide her responsibility for the anarchic mess she created. In Chronique Ascendante, Stephen started it all (109). Apart from the contradictory claim that Matilda both “recognized” his right (132), and that she “put Stephen in possession of the kingdom” (132-33), which implies that she had the right to dispose of it, there is no extended discussion of her right to the throne at all, and mutual recognition of reality is presented as the reason the two parties agreed to eventual peace (133-34).

The text focuses at length on the violence of all previous Norman generations, representing Norman male leaders as restorers of order and protectors of settled claims to land under their sole control. Wace can negotiate between regretting the uncontrolled violence and land disputes of the past, deploring or approving his king's ruthless imposition of order on rebellious barons, and reducing the civil war to an anomalous and barely mentioned incident. He can endorse the concept of settled inheritance as a matter of legal right, and even primogeniture as a necessary element of order, by ignoring Henry II's actual relation to Matilda and her problematic claim to inheritance as the daughter of a king.

Instead, Wace's text focuses on the successful domination of land as the sole recommending criterion for a ruler. Since Matilda was not ultimately victorious in her own person, her failure renders her inappropriate as an exemplum for her son, who deliberately proclaims that he will emulate his grandfather, Henry I, who differed from Matilda in his record of eventual success as a ruler. The omission and revision of Matilda's actions and character effectively removes a failure from the Norman family business of dominating everyone and everything in sight. The “aviditas dominationis [greed for domination],” noticed and represented in eleventh-century writers, such as Geoffrey Malaterra, who focused on Italian and Sicilian Normans, is part of the standard narrative about these families.¹⁴ William of Malmesbury called the Normans “a people … scarcely knowing how to live without warfare” (De Gestis Regum, ii, 306). One of the ways Matilda's ineffective power can be rendered acceptable is to excuse her on misogynistic grounds. But the desire for land and the domination that possession of it represents underlie Wace's text.

The acknowledgment of Duke Rollo, the founder of the Norman line and therefore a success, at the beginning and at the end of the Chronique Ascendante, asserts his importance and his implicitly necessary inclusion in the Plantagenet line. He is enclosed by this and by the description itself:

Guillaume fu fiz Rou, au bon conquereour,
au vassal, au hardi, au bon combateour
qui fist mainte bataille et souffri maint estour;
du lignage le claimment et le chief et la flour.
tant guerrea Franchoiz et tant lor fist poour
que il s'entracorderent, paiz pristrent et amour;
le roi qu'il tenoit li fist si grant honour,
Gille, une soue fille li donna a oisor,
et toute Normendie et dedenz et entour.
Rou fu de grant noblece et de moult grant vallor,
Plusors de sez voisinz le tindrent pour seignor;
trente anz tint Normendie en sa bonne vigor.

(Chron. Ascend., 304-15)

[William was the son of Rollo, the good conqueror, the fighter, the bold man, the good warrior, who fought many a battle and suffered many a skirmish. They claim him as the leader and the flower of their lineage. He made war upon the French and frightened them until they were at peace among themselves; they established peace and good friendship. The king, from whom he held his land, paid him so great an honor that he gave him his daughter, Gille, for his wife, and all Normandy, both inside and out. Rollo was of great nobility and very valorous. Many of his neighbors took him as their lord. He held Normandy for thirty years with his fine strength.]

This description encapsulates many of Wace's efforts to include Rollo in the cultural space of a twelfth-century Norman: he is “the good conqueror, the fighter, the bold man, the good warrior,” whom the Normans claim as their ancestor, “their leader and the flower of their lineage,” who imposes peace on the French (Chron. Ascend., 304-5, 307, 308-9). This reading of history presents Rollo as a peacemaker, and as the founder of a race separate from, and superior to, the disorderly and warlike French. Rollo duplicates himself in his son, William Long-Sword, and in all his descendants who are implied in the “lineage” he heads (Chron. Ascend., 307). He has all the correct military qualities, being not only enduring in battle, but also victorious.

The desire for victorious combat which will ensure land is so strong that brothers compete to the point of death. For example, Richard I of Normandy had two sons, the elder of whom received “his heritage” (III.2250). According to his wishes, the elder son gave specific lands to his younger brother. The two sons fight in and around castles, with sizable forces, and the younger mysteriously dies, of no mentioned disease or wound, and the text wonders that “men did not know whom to hate or to blame” (III.2273-74). As Eleanor Searle points out, Normans would dispose of inconvenient claimants or rivals for lands and titles, and they were not fastidious about whether this was achieved by declaring sons illegitimate, making them ecclesiastics, or even killing them (246).

Both Norman dukes and French kings tried to reconsolidate powers lost or weakened during the civil war in England and continuing ducal hostilities on the continent.¹⁵ As the number of English earldoms increased through the grants of lands and revenues to opposing forces during Stephen's reign, so Stephen's successor, Henry II, had to contend with magnates whose interest had been opposed to his.¹⁶ The creation of smaller centers of power, run by independent men who feared the loss of lands and feudal tenure, threatened Henry throughout his reign.¹⁷ Henry II prohibited trial by combat, and ruthlessly expanded the “king's justice” into all of his domains, especially after the rebellion against him in 1175, by interposing another and superior inquisitorial system over the previously supreme baronial courts, which had allowed trials by combat and ordeal.¹⁸ Dilution of power was dangerous. Each Norman duke in this romance is responsible in his royal person for deciding the enforcement of law, the dispensation of lands, and the right of feudal tenure and inheritance.

Wace systematically shows Henry II's ancestors winning sufficient land to command loyalty, just as Henry II's barons fought for feudal tenure and titles. In the Rou, this process of conquest continues until leaders, ranging from William the Conqueror to Richard I of Normandy, can assign land and titles to all those who fought, despite military opposition—and they have simpler tasks than Henry, who must deal with confused, alienated, and dual land claims. The legal language listing the rewards granted to Rollo's supporters is manifestly not tenth-century in origin or sentiment. The following passage describes the process of enfeoffment (a gift or grant of land by which the recipient acquires a freehold to the land in return for service to the tenant-in-chief), which has a particular legal burden, and betrays the concerns of the dispossessed land-owning class of the twelfth century.

a plusors donna villes et chasteax et citez,
donna champs, donna rentes, donna mollinz et prez,
donna boiz, donna terres, donna granz heritez;
solonc lor gent service et solonc lor bontez,
et solonc lor gentile et solonc lor aez
a touz en Normandie retenuz et fieuffez;

(II.1180-85)¹⁹

[To many he gave towns and castles and cities; he gave fields, incomes, mills, and meadows; he gave woods, lands, and great inheritances; according to their noble service and valor, and according to their nobility and their age, he gave them legal title to fiefs and kept them all in Normandy.]

Wace expands on the theme of feudal obedience in the following lines, and then goes on to rebuke civil disorder:

Pais ama et pais quist et pais fist establir;
par toute Normendie fist crier et banir
qu'il n'y ait tant hardi qui ost autre assaillir,
maison ne ville ardoir ne rober ne tollir,
n'a homme faire sanc ne tuer ne multrir,
en estant ne a tere ne batre ne ferir,
agait a porpense faire ne homme autre trair;
n'i ait qui ost embler ne autre consentir,
que le consentant doit o le larron patir,
le jugement de l'un doit li autre souffrir;
qui fera felonnie, se on le peut tenir,
ja n'iert si gentil homme qu'il ne face honnir,
ou en feu ou en forche le mal espenoir.

(II.1193-1205)

[He loved peace and sought peace and had peace established. Through all Normandy he had it cried and proclaimed that no one should be bold enough to dare to attack another, burn a house or village, rob or steal, or make an attack on any man, or kill or murder, or beat or strike a man either standing or lying upon the ground, or set an ambush or shoot another man. There should be no one who dared to steal, or be an accomplice to another: for the accomplice would suffer with the thief; the one must undergo the same punishment as the other. Whoever should commit a crime, if he could be taken, there would never be a man so noble that Rollo would not shame him to atone for the crime either in the fire or on the gallows.]

Wace's account of the various proscribed methods of killing and maiming people rehearses the vicious new practices to be found all over England during the civil war, according to William of Malmesbury, and the Gesta Stephani. Both authors are especially horrified at what they regard as the imitative and entrepreneurial spirit of minor nobility, renegade churchmen, and outlaws, who regard the lax control of civic order as opportunities to advance their own cause. For example, William notes the blurring of boundaries between acceptable and prohibited objects of violence and theft:

Currebatur ad eum ab omnium generum militibus. … erat genus hominum rapacissismum et violentissimum, qui nichil pensi haberent vel cimiteria frangere vel ecclesias expoliare.

(HN, 463)

[knights of all kinds made a rush to him … they were of the most rapacious kind and the most violent, who care nothing for either breaking into cemeteries or for robbing churches.]

Men without lineage attack and conquer castles, hinting that military success is available to all, regardless of nobility.

Robertus quidem … immanis ac barbarus, castellum Melmesberie … furtim noctu ingressus, combustoque vico, quasi mangno triumpho gloriatus est.

(HN, 479)

[A certain Robert … cruel and savage, entered the castle of Malmesbury stealthily at night, and after burning the village, boasted of it as if it were a great victory.]

The effects of an inflated coinage, a disputed throne, and contradictory controls where any existed led to random and arbitrary predation.

Totus annus ille asperitate guerre inhorruit. … Milites abdeducant ab agris et pecora et pecudes … Erant igitur Anglie cuncta venalia.

(HN, 483)

[That whole year was troubled by the brutalities of war. Knights carried off livestock … Everything in England was now up for sale.]

However, it is not the brutality and poverty of the civil war that really offends William or Wace. It is the uncertainty created by such action when carried out by men of no particular name or station that causes anxiety. In Wace, the Norman dukes establish order every generation, asserting their new rights and power, along with their sovereignty. The imposition of order runs across all three estates, and various of Henry II's ancestors had to deal with unrest or outright rebellion from different sectors. As in Henry's time, peasants do not usually present the problem, and when they do, even such rulers as Robert the Good react with brutality. That savagery is accepted as a necessary element of conquest because men who keep their lands through armed force can then reward those same men with land they can steal from the weak. While Wace seems to share blame for a peasants' revolt under Robert the Good between the peasants, the barons who made oppressive new laws, and the peasants' “leaders,” who gave them “foolish” advice, the severity of the penalties is accepted as necessary.²⁰ The punishments meted out to the rebels, as reported in Wace (III.936-44), ranging from dismemberment to death, were notably savage, and accorded with Wace's version of the historically earlier prescriptions for all classes. By Henry II's time, the peasants were weary of baronial unrest and unlikely to act: consequently, the subtext of this warning to all classes is that barons are subject to the crown, whatever their degree of nobility (II.1201-5).

The poet displays his interest in law and civic peace at the baronial and dynastic level throughout the romance, mostly focusing on the barons, who are in fact the most likely to be disorderly to such an extent that their actions threaten the crown. For example, early in the poem, Wace announces his reasons for writing, and they include yet another warning about traitors and the consequences of unwise alliances.

Pur remembrer des ancesurs
les feiz e les diz e les murs,
les felunies des feluns
e les barnages des baruns,
deit l'um les livres e les gestes
e les estoires lire a festes.

(III.1-6)

[To remember the customs, deeds, and sayings of our ancestors, the treacheries of traitors, and the noble deeds of knights, books and histories and chronicles should be read at our festivals.]

A wise king controls alliances, and so one of the reverses Henry instituted was the Inquest of Sherrifs in 1170, which removed lands granted to barons by Stephen, without actually restoring them to anyone necessarily connected with them before the civil war. Despite Henry II's declaration that, “when by God's favor I attained the kingdom of England, I resumed many things which had been dispersed and alienated from the royal demesne in the time of Stephen my usurper,”²¹ his reign established entirely new legal proceedings to ensure monarchical control over land.

Wace's Rou insists on the blood relationship between men of military success, listing rulers whose behavior mirrors the deeds of their ancestors, and then spares only fifty lines for his patron's mother, and the civil war. Henry I had the last clear title to the English throne, as far as the text and Henry II were concerned, despite the probable fratricide Henry I undertook to obtain that throne. For Henry II, he was a model to imitate, because he was successful in expanding his land holdings, and so his grandson proclaims that his reign will be a restoration of that world, now fragmented by war. Thus, it is not so much that Matilda is female that makes her transformable, removable, and an object of cultural and specific misogyny as criticism of her manlike behavior, but that she represents the instability of insufficiently enduring rule. She is a figure associated with compromise and messy alliances, which might dilute name and identity, and so Wace focuses on a paternal figure, whose actions he criticizes,²² who was even more ruthlessly successful than either Stephen or his cousin.

Notes

1. References are to Robert Wace's Le Roman de Rou, 3 vols., ed. A. J. Holden (Paris: Editions A. and J. Picard et fils, 1970-1973) providing part number of the poem and line number parenthetically. Holden numbers the Chronique Ascendante as part I, the Alexandrine couplets as part II, and the octosyllabic lines as part III. Holden considers the section of text previously considered as part I as a draft, and consequently places it in an appendix. Holden's edition of the Roman de Rou supersedes those of Frédèric Pluquet, La Chronique Ascendante des Ducs de Normandie par Maistre Wace (Paris: Mémoires Société Antiquaires Normandie I, 1824); and his Roman de Rou et des Ducs de Normandie par Robert Wace, poète normand du XIIe siecle, I-II (Rouen: Chez J. Frere, Libraire-Editeur, 1827-1829); and that of H. Andresen, Maistre Wace's Roman de Rou et des Ducs de Normandie, I-II (Heilbronn, 1877-1879). I will abbreviate the Chronique Ascendante as Chron. Ascend. in the text. Translations of these texts are mine. I am grateful to Susan Aronstein, Susan Frye, Bob Torry, and Cedric Reverand at the University of Wyoming English Department for their help and advice as I was writing this article.

2. See H. A. Crone and R. H. C. Davis, eds., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066-1154, Regesta Regis Stephani Ac Mathildis Imperatricis Ac Gaufridi Et Henrici Ducum Normannorum 1135-1154, vol. 3 (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968). Translations are mine.

3. William of Malmesbury, De Regum Gestis Anglorum, ed. W. Stubbs, Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi, Rolls Series, XC (London: H. M. Stationer's Office, 1887-1889), vol. 1, 401-2, and William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, trans. with notes, K. R. Potter, (London: Thomas Nelson, 1955). William sought the patronage of Robert of Gloucester in the dedication of his Historia Novella. See R. B. Patterson, “William of Malmesbury's Robert of Gloucester: A Re-Evaluation of the Historia Novella,” American Historical Review 70 (1965): 983-97. References to William's text are drawn from the Historia Novella (abbreviated as HN) except where specified. Translations are from the text, except changes necessary to fit the Latin quotations for grammatical citation are mine.

4. Gesta Stephani Regis Anglorum, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter, with new intro. and notes R. H. C. Davis, (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1976). Translations are from the text, except changes necessary to fit the Latin quotations for grammatical citation are mine.

5. Wace, Rou, (III.936-44). See also Richard W. Kaeuper, War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the Later Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1988), 12-20 on Henry II's institution of itinerant justices holding the king's pleas and assizes, and his discussion of Henry's legal advances (150-56).

6. For an analysis of the complex and often contradictory political shifts and motivations and compromises between the crown and the aristocracy in the tenth-twelfth centuries in France, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature and the Law (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), chap. 3, “The Inquest.” On medieval legal developments, see Georges Duby, “The Evolution of Judicial Institutions: Burgundy in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries,” in The Chivalrous Society, trans. C. Postan (Berkeley: U of California P, 1977), 15-58; René Louis, “Les Ducs de Normandie dans les chansons de geste,” Byzantion 28 (1948): 391-419.

7. Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship and the Creation of Norman Power 840-1066 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988). For another view of the Normans, see Ordericus Vitalis, The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, General Introduction, books 1 and 2, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1980).

8. Marjorie Chibnall, The Empress Matilda: Queen Consort, Queen Mother and Lady of the English (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 1.

9. The misogyny of the texts differs from the cultural bias of female hagiographies, which praise women when they are especially like men. In his Historia Novella, trans. with notes K. R. Potter (London: Thomas Nelson, 1955), William of Malmesbury specifically criticizes Matilda as a “virago” (66) and claims that her “improperly unfeminine behavior” causes Londoners to reject her (497). All further references to this work will be made parenthetically.

10. H. A. Cronne and R. H. C. Davis, eds., Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum 1066-1154, vol.3 Regesta Regis Stephani Ac Matildis Imperatricis Ac Gaufridi Et Henrici Ducum Normannorum 1135-1154, (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968), 343, 699.

11. Marjorie Chibnall, “Normandy,” in Edmund King, ed., The Anarchy of King Stephen's Reign (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994), 93-116.

12. John Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship in Anglo-Norman England (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1994), 134-48. King, Anarchy, 73f.

13. See C. Warren Hollister, Monarchy, Magnates and Institutions in the Anglo-Norman World (London and Ronceverte, W. Va.: Hambledon P, 1986), 18-19.

14. Geoffrey Malaterra, De Rebus Gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae Comitis, ed. F. Pontieri (Bologna: Rerum Italicarum Scriptores V (i), 1927-8), bk. 1, chap. 3, 8; Kenneth Baxter Wolf, Making History: The Normans and their Historians in Eleventh-Century Italy (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania, P, 1995), chap. 6.

15. For an account of Norman trade, interfamilial warfare, and war with France, see Eleanor Searle, Predatory Kinship, 68-93, 98-108, 159-93; John Le Patourel, “The Norman Succession 996-1135,” English Historical Review 86 (1971): 225-50; Ferdinand Lot, Fideles ou Vassaux? Essai sur la Royauté depuis le milieu du IXe jusquà la fin du XIIe siècle (Paris: Emile Bouillon, 1904). Lot emphasizes the Normans' subordinate relation to France, but Jean-François Lemarignier disputes this in Recherches sur l'hommage en marche et les frontières feodales (Lille: Bibliothèque U, 1945), stressing instead the ambiguity and reciprocity of the relationship. For a discussion of Norman property law and the development of Norman legal institutions, see Emily Zack Tabuteau, Transfers of Property in Eleventh-Century Norman Law (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1988).

16. See, for instance, C. Warren Hollister, Monarchy, 16-45; Henri Prentout, Étude Critique sur Dudon de Saint Quentin et son histoire des premiers ducs normands (Caen: Memoires de l'Academie Nationale des Sciences, Arts et Belles-lettres de Caen, 1915), 207-49, on Rollo's oath of vassalage to Charles and its implications.

17. R. Howard Bloch, Medieval French Literature, sees in this the simultaneous weakening of a central court (which acts to shore up a perceived loss of power to the dominant aristocracy), and the apparent or actual weakening of the aristocracy (which suffers the imposition of new courts by a crown which can subdue them militarily).

18. See Georges Duby, The Making of France in the Middle Ages, 987-1460, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 172-74.

19. For a discussion of the generosity of the later dukes of Normandy, see Matthew Bennett, “Poetry as History? The Roman de Rou as a Source for the Norman Conquest,” Proceedings of the Battle Conference: Anglo-Norman Studies 5 (1982): 21-39; René Louis, “Les Ducs de Normandie dans les chansons de geste,” Byzantion 28 (1948): 391-419.

20. See Dolores Buttry, “Contempt or Empathy? Master Wace's Depiction of a Peasant Revolt,” Romance Notes 37 (1996): 31-38.

21. See Edmund King, “Stephen and the Anglo-Norman Aristocracy,” History 59 (1974): 180-94, 181.

22. For discussions of Wace's relationship with his patron, Henry II, especially the suggestion that Henry II dismissed Wace because of his unflattering portrait of Henry I, and of patrons generally, see the following works: Jean Blacker Knight, “Wace's Craft and his Audience: Historical Truth, Bias, and Patronage in the Roman de Rou,” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 31 (1984): 355-62; Diane Tyson, “Patronage of French Vernacular History Writers in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Romania 100 (1979): 180-222; M. Dominica Legge, “The Influence of Patronage on Form in Medieval French Literature,” in Stil-und Formprobleme in der Literatur. Vorträge des VIII. Kongresses der Internationalen Vereinigung für Moderne Sprache und Literatur in Heidelberg (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1959); William Mathews, Medieval Secular Literature, Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (Los Angeles: U of California P, 1965), 55-67; Jean-Guy Gouttebroze, “Pourquoi Congédier Un Historiographe, Henri II Plantagenet Et Wace (1155-1174),” Romania 112 (1991): 289-311.