Presenter: Jaclyn Rajsic, D.Phil. candidate in English, New College, University of Oxford
Title: British Kings in England: shaping Engletere in some short thirteenth-century genealogical
chronicles
Abstract:
This paper examines the construction of England and Englishness in a group of short AngloNorman prose chronicles written in England in latter half of the thirteenth century, especially
in relation to the mythical British past drawn ultimately from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia
regum Britanniae (c. 1136). These short genealogical chronicles begin with a description of
Anglo-Saxon England and then narrate the history of English rulers; however, a prologue about
selected Galfridian kings was added to the beginning of many copies of the chronicle in the last
quarter of the thirteenth century.
This paper considers how British history was re-shaped in order to fit into the very Anglocentric programme of these short genealogical texts. It argues that the prologue presents
British kings as the founders and builders of England – not Britain –, an Engletere that is very
carefully defined. It analyses how British kings gave shape to the English landscape and,
furthermore, to English lineage, which in these texts is anchored into a ‘map’ of Anglo-Saxon
England. It contends that these short chronicles provide important evidence of the belief in
medieval English culture that British kings were perceived as English by this point.
The strong association between British kings and England in these short histories, this paper
then argues, had an important influence on the longer and better-known Brut chronicles
written at the turn of the fourteenth century, especially the prose Brut chronicle (the most
popular secular vernacular text in later medieval England). This paper demonstrates some of
the ways in which this occurs by investigating representations of England in some Galfridian
sections of the Anglo-Norman and English prose Brut. It also makes reference to Le Petit Bruit
and the Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle. This paper thereby underscores the
development of English texts from Anglo-Norman ones, and highlights the influence of high
medieval literature on histories of England written in the later Middle Ages. At the same time, it
draws attention to a group of short histories which were widely read and disseminated within
England, but to which little critical attention has been paid.