Abstract
To say that the imperial figure of Charlemagne loomed large in the consciousness of post-Carolingian peoples on both sides of the Channel risks stating the obvious. In the centuries after his death, his persona took on a foundational value that is difficult to surpass, and many studies have shown the lasting impact of Carolingian policy and reform in tenth- and eleventh-century art, government, and religion.1 There remains, however, a large gap in our understanding of the multifaceted inheritance of the legendary Charlemagne on the culture and policies of the twelfth century, especially among the Anglo-Normans, for whom Carolingian practices were an ideal, civilized approach to the practical world of governing disparate peoples, a notion reinforced by their practices as Norman dukes before the Conquest. The legend of Charlemagne as the epitome of kingship, both politically and morally, is reflected in many examples from the vast corpus of literature, including law codes and histories, which the Anglo-Normans produced in the twelfth century. It is their interpretation in this context of the viae regiae (the royal roads) that merits attention because of its unique evolution from a Carolingian political model, a symbol of Charlemagne’s sacral kingship, to a tangible manifestation of Anglo-Norman imperium throughout the British Isles. Consequently, the goals and ideals of Anglo-Norman dominion, represented physically by the royal roads, are legitimized by the echoing symbol of Charlemagne’s imperial leadership as a unifier, lawgiver, and peacemaker.
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Notes
More recent scholarly interest, especially in cross-channel relations, has resulted in Joanna Story, Carolingian Connections: Anglo-Saxon England and Carolingian Francia, c.750–870 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003);
Carolingian Culture: Emulation and Innovation, ed. Rosamond McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
and Charlemagne: Empire and Society, ed. Joanna Story (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005); among others.
Henry wrote six different versions of his chronicle, with endings at 1129, 1138, 1146, 1149, and 1154, which represent his complex process of composition and revision. According to Diana Greenway, about forty-five manuscripts preserve for the most part the whole of these six versions and show that his work was being copied well into the sixteenth century. Two manuscripts from the seventeenth century, currently at the Vatican Library, belonged to Queen Christina of Sweden. Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 66–77, 117–60, hereafter cited as HA.
John Howe, “Medieval Development of Sacred Space,” in Inventing Medieval Landscapes: Senses of Places in Medieval Europe, ed. John Howe and Michael Wolfe (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2002), pp. 212–13.
Clarence J. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 144–9.
Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), §8: “Est autem Walonia terra siluestris et pascuosa …, ceruorum quidem et piscium, lactis et armentorum uberrima; sed hominem nutrix bestialium, natura uelocium, consuetudine bellantium, fide semper et locis instabilium.”
Historiae Ecclesiasticae Gentis Auglorum Libri Quinque, ed. John Smith (Cambridge: typis academicis, 1722), §1: “Hibernia autem & latitudine sui status, & salubritate, ac serenitate aerum multum Brittaniae praestat.” Furthermore, “The island abounds in milk and honey, nor is there any lack of vines, fish, or fowl” (“Dives lactis ac mellis insula, nec vinearum expers, piscium volucrumque”; see below for Henry’s use of Bede’s statements in a praise-poem for England).
The Leis Willelme also record four roads upon which travelers can expect to have the benefit of the king’s special peace. Although generally attributed to the late eleventh century, Patrick Wormald tentatively dates this French law-book to the mid-twelfth century, in The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Centuryb, vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), pp. 408–9. He claims that its reference to the peace of the four great roads is an overlap with Leges Edwardi Confessoris. Alan Cooper traces the Leges Edwardi’s usage to Henry of Huntingdon and concludes that Henry invented the idea in “The King’s Four Highways: Legal Fiction meets Fictional Law,” Journal of Medieval History 26 (2000): 351–70.
Robert Allen Rouse, The Idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2005), p. 109.
Janet L. Nelson, “Aachen as a Place of Power,” in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong and Frans Theuws (Leiden: Brill, 2001), p. 237.
See Bruce O’Brien, God’s Peace and King’s Peace: The Laws of Edward the Confessor (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), esp. p. 210 n. 22: “That the reality of Norman rule differed in degree from the Carolingian ideal of governance, as preserved in formularies and capitularies, is no surprise and should not lead to a rejection of the influence or attractiveness of that ideal to, for example, late-tenth- or eleventh-century Norman counts and dukes.”
John Le Patourel, The Norman Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 261.
G. O. Sayles, The Medieval Foundations of England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), p. 276.
For example, Rouse erroneously claims that Henry II named one of his sons Arthur to lend “a royal seal of approval to an English Arthurian history.” Idea of Anglo-Saxon England, 12. According to William of Newburgh, Brittany’s barons named Geoffrey of Brittany’s son (born 1187, after Henry II’s death) Arthur to defy Henry II. For an alternative view of Arthur’s influence in the course of the twelfth century, see John Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2000), esp. pp. 22–3;
and Gillingham, “The Cultivation of History, Legend, and Courtesy at the Court of Henry II,” in Writers of the Reign of Henry II, ed. Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), pp. 36–9.
H. Koeppler, “Frederick Barbarossa and the Schools of Bologna,” English Historical Review 54 (1939): 578. Barbarossa’s imperial decree, dated 8 January 1166 (the canonization was actually celebrated 29 December 1165), reads in part: “This is why, having been so confidently disposed on account of the merits and glorious deeds of this most saintly emperor Charles, and having been persuaded by the earnest appeal of our very dear friend Henry, the illustrious king of England, we celebrated a solemn feast at Aachen at Christmastime for the purpose of exhibiting, consecrating, and canonizing his most blessed body, with the approval and the authority of the lord pope Paschal and with the universal consent of all the princes, both secular and ecclesiastical alike.” (“Inde est quod nos gloriosis factis et meritis tam sanctissimi imperatoris Karoli confidenter animati et sedula petitione carissimi amici nostri Heinrici illustris regis Anglie inducti, assensu et auctoritate domini pape Paschalis et ex consilio principum universorum tam saecularium quam ecclesiasticorum pro revelatione, exaltatione atque canonizatione sanctissimi corporis eius sollempnem curiam in natali domini aput Aquisgranum celebravimus”) Cf. James Cain, “Charlemagne in the 1170’s: Reading the Oxford Roland in the Context of the Becket Controversy,” http://www.bu.edu/english/levine/cain.htm (accessed 6 March 2007). It is also important to note here that Henry II had Edward the Confessor, not Arthur, canonized for purposes of enhancing the prestige of the English crown.
See Bernhard W. Scholz, “The Canonization of Edward the Confessor,” Speculum 36 (1961): 38–60. In essence, Henry II’s participation in Charlemagne’s canonization would have secured his imperial legitimacy on both sides of the Channel.
La Chanson de Roland, ed. and trans. Gerard J. Brault (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984), 11. 3993–4001.
Early medieval writers used Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies as a guide to classical culture, in which he observes that the title of imperator originally referred to a general in command, but became a title that the senate bestowed on Augustus to distinguish him from other, ordinary, kings. See Julia M. H. Smith, Europe after Rome: A New Cultural History, 500–1000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), esp. pp. 273–7.
“Roma, caput mundi, mundi decus, aurea Roma,/ Nunc remanet tantum saeva ruina tibi,” 11. 37–8, in Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, ed. and trans. Peter Godman (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1985), pp. 128–9.
See Robert Deshman, “Christus rex et magi regis: Kingship and Christology in Ottonian and Anglo-Saxon Art,” Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976): 401–2,
and Janet L. Nelson, “The Second English Ordo,” Politics and Ritual in Early Medieval Europe (London: Hambledon Press, 1986), pp. 361–74.
The earliest manuscript of La Chanson de Roland is from the mid-twelfth century, Oxford, Bodleian MS Digby 23. For a recent study of the manuscript in its Anglo-Norman context, see Andrew Taylor, Textual Situations: Three Medieval Manuscripts and Their Readers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 26–70. The Voyage de Charlemagne, once preserved in a now-lost manuscript in the British Museum, was a fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman copy of an earlier exemplar.
For a recent edition with translation, see Glyn S. Burgess Pèlerinage de Charlemagne (Edinburgh, UK: Société Rencesvals British Branch, 1998).
D. W. Meinig, The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 165.
Nicholas Howe, “Anglo-Saxon England and the Postcolonial Void,” in Postcolonial Approaches to the Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 39.
Matthew Innes, “Danelaw Identities: Ethnicity, Regionalism, and Political Allegiance,” in Cultures in Contact: Scandinavian Settlement in England in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries, ed. Dawn M. Hadley and Julian D. Richards (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000), p. 85.
“Tu es in vice illius (Dei regis tui).” Cathwulf, Ad Karolum, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1895), p. 503.
See also Joanna Story, “Cathwulf, Kingship, and the Royal Abbey of Saint Denis,” Speculum 74 (1999): 1–21.
J. Den Boeft, “Some Etymologies in Augustine’s De Civitate Dei X,” Vigiliae Christianae 33 (1979): 255.
Luitpold Wallach, Alcuin and Charlemagne: Studies in Carolingian History and Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1959), p. 69. In this vein, Smaragdus of St. Mihiel called his treatise on kingship Via Regia.
Alcuin, Ad Karolum, ed. Ernst Dümmler, MGH Epistolae, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1895), pp. 292–3.
Felice Lifshitz, “La Normandie carolingienne: essai sur la continuité, avec utilization de sources negligees,” Annales de Normandie 48 (1998): 505–24.
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), p. 96.
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© 2008 Matthew Gabriele and Jace Stuckey
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Hoofnagle, W.M. (2008). Charlemagne’s Legacy and Anglo-Norman Imperium in Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum. In: Gabriele, M., Stuckey, J. (eds) The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230615441_5
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