King Richard II would not be considered a widely popular king. Coming to power in 1377 when he was ten years old, advised by councils though influenced most notably by his uncle John of Gaunt with whom he later had a falling out, the king’s power and ability to rule remained suspect throughout his reign. What power he did wield was often put to the test by such events as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the threat of plague, and political upheaval, all of which led to frequent characterizations as a boy hampered by his youth and unfit to rule effectively.[1] Medieval depictions and illustrations of the king demonstrate how many people after his reign may have seen him: young, naïve, unmanly, and stupid. And after Richard II was eventually deposed in 1399 when he was 32 years old, a certain amount of relish and schadenfreude seeped into illustrated post facto portrayals of the king.
A quick survey of these depictions reflects the king’s public image as it was held after his deposition. Images of a young Richard II characterized him in keeping with the knowledge of the coming debacles that England was to experience during his reign.
Historiated initial ‘R’ with Richard II, combined with a full foliate bar border, at the beginning of his statutes; England, c. 1436; BL, Harley 5233, f. 141r
Seen here, the king peers over his own statutes with droopy, disinterested eyes, perhaps with a hint of uncertainty. A large forehead, exaggerated ears, a sallow face, and a weak chin each underlines the not-so-subtle caveat to these statutes: take them with a grain of salt, and proceed with caution.
Detail of a miniature of King Richard II of England banishing the Earl Marshall and the Earl of Derby; Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Bruges, c. 1470-1472; BL, Harley 4380, f. 148r
The second image portrays the young king banishing two earls, and we observe his features – a round face, slight frame, dull eyes – set against the prominent features of the earls, seen here to have more pronounced jawlines and chins. Though the eyes of the court are fixed on the king, the faces register blank expressions; the scribes, on the other hand, look dreadfully miserable.
Such characterizations carry over to scenes of the king in action as well.
Detail of a miniature of Richard II knighting Henry of Monmouth in Ireland; Jean Creton, La Prinse et mort du roy Richart, Paris, c. 1401 – c. 1405; BL, Harley 1319, f. 5r
As Richard knights Henry of Monmouth of Ireland, the king’s regal attire and armor dwarf his frame, his protruding lips frown, and though the new knight leans respectfully over his horse, the horse itself glares obstinately at Richard’s horse, who has adopted a pose of weakness or subservience with eyes closed and knee bowed.
Miniature of Richard II giving instruction to the earl Marshal and another man, with a partial border; Jean Froissart, Chroniques, the Netherlands, last quarter of the 15th century; BL, Royal 14 D VI, f. 303r
We see the king’s slight frame again when he instructs an earl and another man, two figures who side with one another, one firmly clutching a staff between them and the king, and the other with hands raised in a possible protest or confrontation.
The next three images depict Richard II in disguise and captivity, his power wrenched away from him.
Detail of a miniature of Richard II at Conway, disguised in a priest’s cowl; Jean Creton, La Prinse et mort du roy Richart, Paris, c. 1401 – c. 1405; BL, Harley 1319, f. 19vMiniature of Richard II being delivered to the citizens of London; Jean Creton, La Prinse et mort du roy Richart, Paris, c. 1401 – c. 1405; BL, Harley 1319, f. 53vDetail of a miniature of Richard II being placed in the Tower of London; Jean Froissart, Chroniques, Bruges, c. 1470 – 1472; BL, Harley 4380, f. 181v
In each scene here, the king’s head is hanging low, bowed down and resigned to the fate that had befallen him. Though every illustration in this post date after Richard II’s deposition, these last three portrayals of the king carry a hint of gravitas to color these images. Although the king’s poor reputation held a long legacy, the images of his fall from the throne perhaps indicate that, regardless of his disastrous reign, public opinion of what befell him took into account his misfortune with at least a small amount of empathy–not as a king but as another mere mortal, subject to the same bad strokes of chance or fate as those he ruled, incompetence and all.
[1] Christopher Fletcher. Richard II: Manhood, Youth, and Politics 1377-99. (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 2.
Jacob Schepers
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
Phoenix; bestiary, England, 2nd quarter of the 13th century; BL Harley MS 4751, f. 45r
Few mythological creatures have remained as present in Western cultural imagination as the fabulous and fiery phoenix. Phoenix mythology quickly became a poetic muse for classical authors from Ovid (Metamorphoses 15) to Lactantius (De ave phoenice). This mythographic and poetic tradition is later adapted in the Old English Phoenix, a poem found in the Exeter Book (Exeter Cathedral Library MS 3501). For my contribution to The Chequered Board’s ongoing series on Anglo-Saxon poetry in translation, I selected to translate a section from the Exeter Book Phoenixpoem (lines 1-49), which I have titled “Æþelast Lond,” and which describes the heavenly home of the mythological phoenix.
My translation of the Exeter Book Phoenix is—first and foremost—a “creative” adaption of the Old English original. As a translation, “Æþelast Lond” is an interpretive rendition of the Exeter Book poem and should not be taken as a literal translation of the Old English, but rather as an experiment with artistic translation as a means of interpreting Anglo-Saxon verse. Throughout the piece I try to remember the certain poetics specific to the Exeter Phoenix, in addition to the literary traditions of phoenix mythology and the mysterious paradise in which the phoenix bird lives.
Hæbbe ic gefrugnen þætte is feor heonan eastdælum on æþelast londa,
firum gefræge. Nis se foldan sceat
ofer middangeard mongum gefere
folcagendra, ac he afyrred is
þurh meotudes meaht manfremmendum.
Wlitig is se wong eall, wynnum geblissad
mid þam fægrestum foldan stencum.
I have heard that hence in faroff dales
Are Eastern fabled fields,
A fay realm known yet impossible and impassible
To human folk of earthen mold,
Guarded and disguised and determined,
Purged of evil and impurity.
A place of winsome wonder, blessed with edenic bliss
And the fairest fragrance of paradise. (“Æþelast Lond,” ll. 1-8)
The Exeter Book Phoenix is itself a translation of Lactantius’ De ave phoenice—from Latin hexameter into Old English alliterative verse—which I have here translated into modern English free verse. Anglo-Saxon poetic and homiletic styles work in tandem throughout the Exeter Book poem, as Janie Steen and others have long noticed. It can be noted that the first line of my translation “I have heard that hence in faroff dales” (1), metrically echoes, even mimics, the Old English alliterative verse structure. While there is a somewhat contrived, mechanical quality to this line, I wanted to begin by paying metrical homage to the original poetics, before swiftly departing from any strict metrical parameters. However, despite that only this line attempts to slavishly resurrect Old English metrics, alliterative adornment remains a consistent stylistic feature throughout “Æþelast Lond”.
I attempt to resurrect the homiletic style of the Exeter Book Phoenix in my rather literal rendition of the ne…ne formulaic sections of this Old English “translation” (such as lines 15-19 and 22-25), which is in part an expansion on the nec…nec formula from Lactantius’ De ave phoenice. These formulae, Latin and Old English, are also popular in contemporaneous Old English and Anglo-Latin homilies. The cadence of this section in the original produces a masterful blend of Old English homiletic style and alliterative verse. For this reason, I felt this section deserved a more literal translation, with as much attention and adherence to metrics, style and diction as possible, in order to reproduce the rhythm and rhetorical effect produced by this simple, formulaic repetition.
Moreover, diction—for any poet or translator—is a point that merits some brief discussion. Again, I begin with a higher frequency of words etymologically derived from Old English, such as “hence” (1), “folk” (4), “mold” (4), “winsome” (7), etc. However, by the ninth line of the poem, my diction shifts toward the Latinate and ecclesiastical, and terms such as “celestial” (9), “creation” (11), revelation” 12), “angelic” (13), etc., in order to reflect the spiritual concerns and homiletic tone of the Exeter Book original poem.
The eastern wong or “plain” where the phoenix lives is heofon “heaven” in the Old English original, and thus in my translation, I focus my attention on the mystical space and mysterious home of the phoenix, central to this section of the poem. In the Exeter poem, two traditions of phoenix lore come together regarding where this mythical bird originates. The classical description of the phoenix as coming from the East (usually Egypt—at times India or Arabia) derives from Herodotus’ famous Greek account in his Histories, which lays the foundation for much of classical phoenix mythography. The Old English echoes this origin for the bird’s home: Hæbbe ic gefrugnen þætte is feor heonan/ eastdælum on æþelast londa (1-2) “I have heard that there is the best of lands far hence in the eastern parts.” The other tradition, which becomes syncretized with the classical accounts, comes from the Abrahamic tradition, and describes the phoenix as a bird of paradise.
M. R. Niehoff has noted commentaries on the Midrash and Talmud, which describe the phoenix (chol) as refusing to eat the forbidden fruit and thereafter gaining everlasting life along with the chance to remain in paradise. The paradisal quality is present also in the Old English, as the phoenix’s home is a place not of this world: wlitig is se wong eall, wynnum geblissad/ mid þam fægrestum foldan stencum. “The plain is all shimmering, blessed with joys and with the fairest smells of the earth” (7-8). As Christianity developed during the late classical and early medieval periods, phoenix mythology became assimilated into Christianity, often recast in allegorical association with Christ and his resurrection. These allegories are often coupled with the Abrahamic interpretation of the phoenix as a bird of paradise, featured prominently in the Old English Phoenix.
“Æþelast Lond” highlights Old English homiletic and poetic styles, combines Abrahamic and classical traditions of phoenix mythography, and raises questions about semantical versus literal translation. It is my hope that, rather than simply offering another slavish translation of the Old English, “Æþelast Lond” encourages others to engage their creativity when reading and translating Anglo-Saxon poetry.
Stay tuned for additional forthcoming translations from the Exeter Book Phoenix, reborn as modern English poems!
Richard Fahey
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
Works Cited
Hill, John Spencer. “The Phoenix.” Religion and Literature 16.2 (1994): 61-66.
Niehoff, M. R. “The Phoenix in Rabbinic Literature” The Harvard Theological Review 89.3 (1996).]: 245-265.
Petersen, Helle Falcher. “The Phoenix: The Art of Literary Recycling” NM 101 (2000): 375–386.
Steen, Janie. Verseand Virtuosity: the adaptation of Latin rhetoric in Old English poetry. University of Toronto Press Inc.: Toronto, ON, 2008.
In one of the most moving additions to the C-text of Piers Plowman, Langland highlights the plight of impoverished mothers, who are some of the most vulnerable and underrepresented figures of his society:
And hemsulue also soffre muche hunger
And wo in wynter-tymes and wakynge on nyhtes
To rise to the reule to rokke the cradel,
Bothe to carde and to kembe, to cloute and to wasche. [1] (77-80)
Though these lines form only a part of Langland’s snapshot of working-class women, they poignantly convey the life of a working mother as she sacrifices her own well-being to feed her children, obeys the regulation of an infant’s nocturnal feeding schedule, and takes in domestic labour to make ends meet.
The passage excerpted above has been passed down through the Pearsall edition of the C-Text, but a little digging into the scribal variants across different manuscripts opens up a realm of possibilities for additional layers of meaning that could be added to the text. The scribe of the Cambridge University Library Dd. 3. 13 manuscript invokes a particularly intriguing possibility when he writes that these women were not “wakynge on nyhtes,” but “walkynge on nyhtes.”
‘Walking at night’ was associated with all sorts of immorality in medieval England, summed up in Chester Mystery Cycle when Jesus declares that “whosoever walketh abowte in night, hee tresspasseth all agaynst the right.”[2] Night-walking is specifically associated with sexual immorality by the Wife of Bath when she excuses her own desire to walk at night by saying that she is doing so to see the “wenches”[3] that her husband sleeps with (III l.397-398). Religious and secular legal discourses indicate that there was little distinction made in medieval England between women of “loose morals” and those who were involved in prostitution.[4]
In the Cambridge manuscript, then, there is a possibility that at least one scribe allowed for a moving portrayal of women forced by economic necessity into prostitution, even if he retain associations of immorality. Canon law made no allowances for such a thing, as the church viewed extreme poverty as a condition that led a woman into a life of prostitution, but not a mitigating factor.[5] On the level of the particular scribe, however, the addition of a single letter pushes us to consider the possibility that at least some readers could understand shades of complexity in a practice that is otherwise condemned, even by Langland himself.
When it comes to a poem with such a complex and enigmatic textual tradition as Piers Plowman, each manuscript bears an important witness to the text. Each scribal variant might get us a little closer to an authorial reading, but it also might give us insight into the ways the text could be misread or misunderstood by scribes and readers. Even if the reading in the manuscript bears little or no resemblance to Langland’s poetry, it may be the product of a scribe “elucidating the sense and significance in a text according to the priorities of their own period and culture.”[6] Even when a misreading is simply an error on the scribe’s part, it provides an example of how some medieval readers might have encountered and interpreted the text in ways that complement or contradict the authorial sense of a passage.
Leanne MacDonald
PhD Candidate
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
References:
[1] William Langland, Piers Plowman: A New Annotated Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2008)
[2] “The Glovers Playe” from The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R.M. Lumiansky and David Mills (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 244.
[3] From The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1987). Ruth Mazo Karras argues that though Alysoun is not a prostitute per se, she uses language of commerce to talk about her sexuality and the practicalities of marriage. See Karras, “Sex, Money, and Prostitution in Medieval English Culture” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 202.
