THE idealized figure of Charlemagne (742–814), ‘Christian Emperor, mighty conqueror and patron of learning’, has long been associated with a European sense of identity. A succession of recent scholarly and popular histories of Charlemagne stress this concern in their subtitles – ‘Father of a Continent’, ‘The Formation of a European Identity’ – or make it explicit in their introductory pages. Charlemagne's modern role as embodying the idea of European integration is seen in diverse invocations, from the name of the building that houses the European Commission (the Charlemagne building) to the prize awarded for ‘distinguished service in the cause of Europe and European unification’ (the International Charlemagne Prize), though behind this focus on Charlemagne as icon of Europeanness is a history of conflicting attempts to appropriate his founding status for both German and French national identities. Charlemagne's relation to England has seemed less obvious: indeed, on 9 July 1960, contemplating the reasons for a possible British application to join the Common Market, Harold Macmillan confided to his diary his fear of a future ‘caught between a hostile (or at least less and less friendly) America and a boastful, powerful “Empire of Charlemagne” – now under French but later bound to come under German control’. Here the exclusively continental identity of a political alliance imagined in terms of Charlemagne's empire seems logically opposed to British involvement. Half a millennium earlier, Caxton, though celebrating both as Christian Worthies, set the native Englishness of Arthur, ‘kyng and Emperour of the same [royame of Englond]’, against the alterity of Charlemagne's identity as ‘kyng of fraunce & emperour of Rome’; and one modern scholar has noted as an ‘amusing irony’ (in view of ‘the age-old and perennial animosity between France and its cross-Channel neighbours’) the fact that the most famous literary Charlemagne text, ‘the French national epic’, is known from its English provenance as ‘the Oxford Song of Roland’, while another ponders the ‘paradox’ inherent in ‘the production of the Middle English Charlemagne romances … during a period of prolonged Anglo-French hostility’. However, this sense of strangeness fluctuates according to historical distance and political perspective. Fifty-odd years earlier than Caxton, Lydgate, in his ‘Ballade to King Henry VI upon his Coronation’, addressed Henry as a descendant of both St Edward and St Louis, and immediately invoked the parallel paired kings, ‘knightly’ Arthur and ‘Charlles of gret prys’ (l. 13), as his twin secular patrons.

The Circulation of French-Language Charlemagne Material in England

Reception of the Chanson de geste

THE Matter of France entered insular literary consciousness largely through two genres: the chanson de geste and the chronicle, or rather the pseudo-chronicle in the text of the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle. If the latter apparently brought a respectable clerical imprimatur, the former might be expected to have had more popular appeal. While only a restricted group of texts became fully appropriated into Middle English popular culture through translation into Middle English, there is evidence of much wider dissemination of the legends of Charlemagne in French-language texts.

The chansons de geste are more distinct by form than any other French narrative genre. After some early experimentation in versification, by the middle of the twelfth century most French narratives were written in rhyming couplets. The chansons de geste, however, retained the verse form of the earliest surviving examples of the genre, namely the laisse, a strophe of variable length united by assonance or rhyme and with a line length of ten or twelve syllables. The basic unit of meaning is the hemistich. The narrative is related using an episodic structure. With these formal features we find a characteristic discourse related to the oral origins and dissemination of the chanson de geste. This discourse can be epitomised as using different forms of repetition: formulaic lines and half-lines, different patterns of repetition to link the laisses (including reprise, picking up some of the sense of one laisse in the following one), and different forms of parallelism.

Some aspects of the reception of the chanson de geste in the insular context, and in particular in England, have long puzzled critics. All of the oldest chansons de geste survive only in Anglo-Norman manuscripts. The Chanson de Roland, the iconic text of French nationalism, and in particular of nineteenth-century French nationalism,3 survives in its oldest known form in an Anglo-Norman manuscript, as noted above; this version of the text is known as ‘the Oxford Roland’, because of its modern resting place, the Bodleian Library. Almost as venerable (but set in the reign of Charlemagne's son Louis), the only complete text of the non-cyclical version of the Chanson de Guillaume is an Anglo- Norman manuscript (BL MS Add. 38663); a further fragment discovered in St Andrews University is also Anglo-Norman.

THE insular tradition of Charlemagne is concentrated in a small number of related core texts, repeatedly reworked in both languages. The theory that so few chansons de geste were translated into English during the Middle Ages because only certain texts were circulating in England in French is difficult to sustain, as noted in Chapter 1, for while fewer manuscript witnesses to the genre survive in insular than continental manuscripts, it is clear that other texts were known that have not survived or survive only in fragmentary form. At the very least we must admit to uncertainty; we cannot argue from an absence of surviving texts that a particular narrative was not known in England. Yet it remains striking that we have Middle English translations of only three chansons de geste: Fierabras, Otinel and the Chanson de Roland. This chapter is largely concerned with the engagement of the insular French versions of these narratives in their particular cultural and political milieux, including the manuscript contexts in which they are found.

Before turning to the major thematic concerns shared by the insular texts it is worth noting that there are also particularly strong thematic and narrative links connecting the original Old French texts which lie behind the insular narratives: Fierabras, Otinel, and both the chanson de geste and chronicle versions of the Roland narrative. Clear intertextual allusions invite us to read the Fierabras and Otinel material together, and both in conjunction with the matter of Roncevaux. Intertextual dialogue works in a complex way in the chanson de geste, as these narratives continue to be disseminated, at least in part, through oral performance as well as in manuscript; the written texts would continue to be received aurally. The texts are also particularly unstable and subject to remaniement, as noted in the Introduction. This allows ongoing debate and reconsideration of the themes raised by the narratives. As the texts are adapted and reinterpreted, the connections between them become more complex. In the continental tradition, the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle draws on the narrative found in the Chanson de Roland, while Otinel is best understood as a response to Fierabras.

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.

THE best-known narrative of the Charlemagne tradition in the whole of Europe was undoubtedly the material connected with the defeat at Roncevaux, the only defeat the historical Charlemagne suffered during his illustrious career. The chanson de geste celebrating the heroic defence of Roland and his companions and the revenge executed by the emperor has dominated critical study of the genre and, since the nineteenth century, has enjoyed particular acclaim as a kind of ‘national’ epic in France itself, appropriated in the early years of modern criticism for a political agenda related to tensions within Europe and specifically between France and Germany. Such political appropriation of this material was not new in the nineteenth century, as we shall demonstrate in this chapter. While there was undoubtedly an older oral tradition relating these events, the oldest extant written version of the chanson de geste is an insular one. The narrative, as noted above in our discussion of the insular reception of the genre, is found in two main strands derived from the chanson de geste and from the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle, itself an early appropriation of the Roland material, where it is given a particularly religious import and semi-hagiographic tone.

La Chanson de Roland

The best known of the all the chansons de geste is often referred to as the Chanson de Roland, the Song of Roland, although it might be more accurate to think in terms of a number of Chansons de Roland. The fundamentals of the narrative in all versions are the same: Charlemagne has been in Spain for seven years and conquered the whole land except Saragossa, which is ruled by the Saracen Marsile, who sends a false message of submission; Charlemagne consequently begins to return to France, leaving his nephew, Roland, in charge of the rearguard. However, Roland's stepfather, Ganelon, has betrayed them and the rearguard is attacked by a large force, in two waves; only when almost everyone has died does Roland blow his horn to alert Charlemagne, who returns, finds the rearguard destroyed, and avenges his nephew's death, defeating first Marsile's army and then that of Marsile's overlord, Baligant.

THE narrative of the chanson de geste Fierabras, in continental and Anglo-Norman versions, is focused on the recovery of relics of the Passion, stolen by the Saracen emir Balan from Rome when his army sacked the imperial city. The infidel attack on the Holy City itself, though only referred to briefly in the extant Fierabras, is the cataclysmic event which triggers the whole action. The conflict between the Christian leader Charlemagne and the Saracen emir Balan is prefigured by a single combat between Fierabras and Oliver, which contains echoes of Roland and Vernagu's conflict in the Pseudo-Turpin Chronicle and of Charlemagne and Baligant's fight in the Chanson de Roland. Such ‘trials by combat’ were something of a rhetorical set piece in the chanson de geste and, as we have noted, a significant narrative meme in all the insular Charlemagne texts. In Fierabras the emir's son, Fierabras, challenges the French and Oliver responds; they engage in a single combat which represents the wider battle between Saracen and Christian. Oliver vanquishes Fierabras, who is converted to Christianity. However, before Oliver can get back to safety, he is captured by the Saracen army and, in company with others from among the peers, is taken to Balan's stronghold of Aigremore. Charlemagne sends the remaining peers with a threatening message demanding the release of the prisoners and the return of the relics. Instead, all the peers are taken prisoner by Balan, but then released by Balan's daughter, Floripas. The peers take over Aigremore, evicting the Saracens before being themselves besieged therein. After various adventures and sorties they are able to send a message to Charlemagne, who comes to their rescue and defeats Balan in a combat which is based on the ideological assumptions that ‘right is might’ and that the representative of God will always win. The narrative ends with the baptism of Floripas and her marriage to Gui de Bourgogne and the distribution of the relics to various churches in France; a coda looks forward briefly to the events of La Chanson de Roland.

Fierabras texts can be divided into two traditions: the Vulgate tradition, also named by Marc Le Person, the most recent editor of the continental chanson de geste, the ‘version longue’, and the non-Vulgate or abbreviating tradition, the ‘version courte’ according to Le Person's classification.

Adapting the Anglo-Norman Inheritance: Themes and Concerns

THE enhanced emphasis on religious warfare discerned in the insular French-language tradition is decidedly to the fore in the English Charlemagne romances, which often take the opportunity to sharpen the confrontation between two opposed faiths. In the Middle English Song of Roland, for example, Roland's first encounter on the battlefield, where he kills Amaris, is clearly figured as a stereotypical combat between Christian and heathen, by contrast with the French tradition, where the issue at this point is exclusively the honour of France and Charlemagne. In the English version, Amaris challenges Roland as representative both of Charlemagne and of Christianity: ‘wher art thou, Roulond, leder of charles? | thy lay is fals, and also thy lordes’ (655–56). Having felled ‘that fals kinge’, Roland responds: ‘thy soule … to satanas I beteche! | thou shalt neuer greve man þat to god will seche’ (663–64). Similarly, whereas the Egerton Destruction de Rome has the Roman leader Savari encourage his troops with conventional thoughts of their wives and heirs and the fear of shame (245–9), in the Sowdone of Babylone Duke Savaryz's speech focuses instead on the battle as a proxy war between the Christian and Saracen gods:

The earliest of the Middle English adaptations of Otinel, the Auchinleck Otuel, specifically represents the climactic single combat between the converted Otuel and the Saracen Clarel as a trial of strength between their respective deities (1265–70). In fact, the prologues in all three Otuel texts (Otuel, Otuel and Roland, and Roland and Otuel) stress the conflict between heathen and Christian as their central concern, whereas in the French Otinel, in both manuscript versions, the prologue ends with the promise of a hitherto untold adventure of renowned Charlemagne. The English poems promise ‘bolde batailles … Þat was sumtime bitwene | Cristine men & sarrazins kene’ (Otuel, 4–6), tales of the doughty douzeperes ‘Þat wele couthe feghte with a Saraȝene’ (Roland and Otuel, 17), and stories of Roland's achievements defeating infidel opponents (Otuel and Roland, 15–17, 24–5).

HELEN Cooper's observation that the Charlemagne romances in England ‘barely made the transition’ from the Middle Ages into post-medieval culture is, as far as can be judged from the extant evidence, an accurate diagnosis for the Middle English verse texts. Unlike Guy of Warwick or Sir Isumbras, both also notable warriors on behalf of Christendom, Roland and Oliver did not have their heroic victories over Saracen opponents perpetuated in print, either as romance narratives or in chapbook retellings. Even the protagonists of Caxton's prose romance The Four Sons of Aymon, which was well known in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and frequently reprinted, did not thereafter join King Arthur's knights and Robin Hood's men in the repertoire of popular heroes in English culture, although the lost play The Four Sons of Aymon (c. 1581) was apparently still being performed in 1624.

Stories of Charlemagne and Roland were re-presented to insular audiences in the form of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, translated by Sir John Harington (1591). The first stanza sets the familiar scene, ‘when the Moores transported all their might | On Affrick seas the force of France to breake’, seeking revenge against ‘the Romane Emperour Charlemaine’ (I, 3–4, 8). Harington's annotations on ‘The Historie’ of each book explain and comment on the connections to the ‘historical’ Charlemagne he discerns in Ariosto's highly complex romance, but the favourite insular stories of Roland and Otuel and of Oliver and Ferumbras do not feature (though there is a recollection of Roland's fight with Vernagu in the story of Orlando's protracted single combat against the almost-invincible Spanish knight Ferraw). Orlando Furioso, dramatized by Robert Greene (c. 1590), was possibly also one of the influences on Charlemagne, or The Distracted Emperor, an anonymous drama (c. 1604) preserved only in a seventeenth-century manuscript collection of plays (BL MS Egerton 1994), but which was apparently performed more than once. The play's prominent theme of corruption and treachery is staged through the actions of Ganelon, paralleling his heightened role in the Middle English retellings of the story of Roncevaux, while his ambition to supplant Charlemagne as king of France reflects the similar desire of Ganelon in the insular Fierabras tradition, though it is impossible to know how far, if at all, these insular developments influenced the play's adaptation of the Charlemagne legend.

THIS series of volumes examining the reception of the Charlemagne myth in different linguistic cultures of medieval Europe springs from ‘Charlemagne in England’, a project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council to study the literary presence of the emperor in medieval England, an area where the historical Charlemagne never set foot, let alone reigned.

The spread of Charlemagne's myth after his death was even more extensive than was his empire during his life. This larger enterprise, therefore, an investigation of the appropriation of the matter of Charlemagne across Europe, required a network of specialists working on texts written in different languages and different geographical areas. Yet these languages were culturally interdependent: it was largely through the medium of French, with its cultural hegemony, that the legend of Charlemagne spread widely, though Latin was also an important vehicle for texts perceived as historical truth. Furthermore, the same geographical area could also be the ‘host’ for more than one language, the literatures of which would draw upon each other.

One particular challenge for the project was thus the question of overlap between geographic areas and cultural or linguistic zones. This is exemplified by the original project focused on Charlemagne in England, a multilingual land of overlapping cultural zones in one geographic area, with Latin, French and English literary cultures and other languages operating in particular areas or social groups. The solution was to allow some overlap in coverage, with, for example, French texts written in England covered from different perspectives in both Charlemagne in England and Charlemagne in Medieval Francophonia, and with awareness that texts in Latin were circulating at the same time and in the same geographic areas as the vernacular narratives. Given the variety of material in different languages and the varying amounts of research that have been produced, the volumes do not all follow the same pattern. Some areas, notably France, have been the object of more than a century of study. Others, such as the Celtic narratives, have received far less critical attention; indeed, one of the aims of the project has been to stimulate research in these under-studied areas.