At times, King Arthur has seemed to scholars to be notably underrepresented in the literature of late-medieval England, particularly in light of the chivalric pageantry of the court of Edward III. Christopher Dean, for example, declared in 1987 that Arthur ‘is not the major character of medieval English fiction that manuals of Middle English literature with their inevitable chapter on Arthurian romance might suggest’. If this is so, it does not mean that Arthur was unpopular or unimportant in late-medieval written culture: it means that ‘fiction’ is not the best place to find him. The prose Brut chronicle made the literally prosaic Arthur more popular than ever before.

Arthur is the central figure of the Oldest Version of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut, and his reign constitutes its single longest episode. At 418 lines, it is about a tenth of the whole Oldest Version, or as much space as all the kings from Aethelred the Unready to Edward the Confessor, and it is twice as long as the life of Brut. In the later Anglo-Norman and Middle English Bruts, Arthur's story remains largely unchanged except for the eventual addition of prophecies of Merlin.

The audiences of the Oldest Version knew a very different Arthurian story from the one most familiar to audiences after Malory. Gunnore (Guinevere) appears in two sentences, to marry Arthur and to retire to a convent; there is no Grail quest, no Morgan le Fay, no Galahad, and no Lancelot. Here as elsewhere the Brut's account follows the Galfridian plot, conventionally labeled the ‘chronicle’, or English, tradition. The other branch of Arthurian literature, the so-called ‘romance’, or French, tradition epitomized in the poetry of Chrétien de Troyes, offers the erotic intrigues, tournaments, adventures in trackless forests, women in distress, and mystical quests associated with Arthur's court, as well as the adultery of Lancelot and Guinevere. Chrétien's romances and the later French prose Vulgate Cycle were both known in England, but aside from the account of Arthur's fall in the stanzaic Morte Arthur, relatively little of their plots entered the English language until Malory assimilated the matter of both traditions into his massive work.

The Anglo-Norman prose Brut is a substantial but not enormous work, long enough to be the only work in a codex, but not so long that it demands to be the only work in a codex, nor so dauntingly long that it may repel copying at all, as Mannyng's massive Story of England may have done. It is also highly supplementable, easy to expand with supporting material or material broadening its range of subject matter and time. Just such additions at beginning and end with material that proved durable gave rise to what are now considered the Short and Long Versions of the Anglo-Norman prose Brut. The process of expansion through continuation went on into the fifteenth century with the Middle English versions. The Latin genealogical charts and poems found at the beginning of RD329 and the brief Anglocentric chronicle of Scottish affairs found at its end represent another variety of expansion, with complementary material that might aid in the reading of the main text or flesh out areas given less attention in it.

In roughly 40 percent of its manuscripts, the Anglo-Norman prose Brut is the only work in the codex as it currently stands. These manuscripts tend to make for portable and not terribly expensive books, and it is easy to imagine these qualities as attractive to the people paying for them. They certainly seem to confirm Connolly's view that ‘the market for English books may have been moving towards the production of single texts before printing’. Of these manuscripts, however, not a single one is in an original or even early binding, and just over half are fragmentary or imperfect at beginning and/or end. Only a few are in volumes that begin and end so tidily as to give one every reason to think that they are complete and intact. With the manuscripts that begin or end incomplete, although it may be possible to estimate the amount of material missing from the prose Brut itself, there is generally no indication – like contemporary page numbers or quire markings – of what else might be missing. It would be rash to presume that all of them always contained only a prose Brut.

Produced in Britain from the early fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries, and on the Continent during the later fifteenth century, the surviving corpus of more than fifty Anglo-Norman prose Brut manuscripts clearly served a variety of audiences, both before and after its Long Version was translated into English. Extant manuscripts range widely in script, context, and size: the smallest, Add. 35092, a nicely produced later fourteenth century copy of the Oldest Version, could fit in a pocket, while the largest, Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève (hereafter BSG) 935, a lavish fifteenth-century Continental text with a program of illustrations, would require a support of some sort to be read. Some manuscripts are the work of many hands; some seem likely to have been written entirely by one person, in some haste, perhaps for personal use. It would do violence to the tradition to try to identify one kind of Anglo- Norman prose Brut, or one course of production, as normative.

The manuscripts themselves provide little information as to their origin and early provenance – another factor that may have contributed to neglect of the corpus, since manuscripts with identifiable origins often attract more scholarly attention. When present at all, the earliest inscriptions of ownership tend to begin with very late fifteenth century and sixteenth century owners. Especially in the earlier manuscripts, less formal, more documentary scripts are common: the Anglo-Norman prose Brut bears witness to the rise of highly current scripts, as well as other economizing measures, in fourteenth-century bookwriting. How, by whom, where, and in how organized a way the Anglo- Norman texts were produced remains an open question.

Mooney and Matheson have found evidence for the existence of a fifteenthcentury secular work-group responsible for the production of multiple copies of the Middle English prose Brut from a single exemplar, possibly mass-producing an extremely popular text on spec rather than awaiting a commission. Although their findings so far apply to only a handful of the extant manuscripts of the English Brut, they are a reminder of just how much stands to be learned through deeper study of the corpus.

Illustration is another kind of supplementation that is difficult to appreciate outside the physical context of the manuscript. Like apparatus and annotation, it resists simple definition. Illustrations may provide decoration, ways of demonstrating the status of the work – iconographically and/or economically – and pointers towards interpretation. They may do as much to test or question the text they accompany as they do to repeat its content in another form, as a variety of apparatus that helps guide readers through the work in question and assigns extra significance to particular moments by singling them out for attention. They are limited to manuscripts with some space to spare and, for the most part, commissioners with money to spare. In addition to serving the function of apparatus, they of course constitute works in their own right: such study as Anglo-Norman prose Brut illustrations have received has generally been in isolation from the textual context. They are found rarely throughout the prose Brut tradition, and among Anglo- Norman prose Brut manuscripts only in a very few insular manuscripts and the three late luxury manuscripts produced on the Continent. Although, as Martha Driver and Michael Orr note, there appears to have been a drive towards standardization of illustrative matter in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the surviving illuminations in Anglo-Norman prose Brut manuscripts do not suggest much in the way of a iconographic tradition.

Insular Illustrations

The manuscripts with illustrations are among the most highly decorated of the insular Anglo-Norman prose Bruts, although not themselves particularly fine or lavish productions. Unsurprisingly, their illustrations appear at the beginning of the chronicle and are the manuscripts’ most extravagant feature. In the two manuscripts with the Latin poem encapsulating the post- Conquest kings’ reigns, one (RD329) has a completed, colorful set of king portraits and genealogies and the other (P511/19) space for such portraits; after this emphatic triple gesture directing the reader – via words, images, and diagrams – to think of British history as a series of genealogically linked portraits, an approach much akin to that of the Oldest Version's narrative, the Albine prologue and Brut chronicle are marked only with nicely made large initials.

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).

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’).