THE heroic literature of medieval England celebrates the acts of three groups of characters: English legendary heroes, King Arthur and his knights, and the Emperor Charlemagne and his Twelve Peers. The first two groups have received major recent scholarly attention, but the texts in the last group have been comparatively neglected, though a series of editions of the Middle English texts for the Early English Text Society in the late nineteenth century gave them a prominent identity as ‘The English Charlemagne Romances’. French-language Charlemagne texts continued to be produced for English readers well into the fifteenth century, and from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth century Middle English verse romances of Charlemagne were composed and copied. Caxton printed a prose life of Charles the Great as well as the Morte Darthur. However, while Arthurian themes persisted in English literature and culture, those of Charlemagne did not. This might seem explicable if he is viewed as the national hero of the French. Yet, to the puzzlement of some critics, the production of most English Charlemagne texts coincided with the Hundred Years’ War. Is it significant, therefore, that the original French texts already existed in Anglo-Norman form? In what sense might Charlemagne have had an established insular identity?

The texts traditionally named the ‘Matter of France’ deal with the legendary history of the Emperor Charlemagne, who is presented defending Christendom in campaigns against the Saracens with his Twelve Peers. In Old French the cycle du roi material extends to over fifty chansons de geste, but in the insular tradition, in both Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions, the focus is restricted to a few central, original narratives: the matter of Roncevaux (La Chanson de Roland and the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle), the Fierabras material (La Destruction de Rome, Fierabras), and Otinel. A chapter of this book is devoted to each of these traditions, but first we put this in a wider context of reception, with discussion of the circulation of the material in England and an examination of the texts in their manuscript contexts.

The aim of this study of ‘Charlemagne in England’ is to explore the insular literary tradition with equal focus on the Anglo-Norman and Middle English texts, examining the textual relations between them and the correspondences in narrative form and generic expectations.