Verbatim et literatim: oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain Au cours du XII e siècle, l’anglo-normand, langue de colonisation, de communication et de culture, voit s’accroître son statut linguistique. Des témoignages contemporains invitent à voir se développer des rapports de plus en plus complexes entre le français et le latin, l’oral et l’écrit, la composition et la traduction, le roman et l’hagiographie. Avant la fin du siècle, le français utilisé en Grande-Bretagne commence à acquérir un statut textuel et documentaire réservé jusqu’alors au latin. The word that has, apparently, been with us since the very beginning of time - in principio erat verbum - is of course the spoken word of God - or the Big Bang, as certain more modern theologians prefer to call it. On the other hand, when, aeons later, God had finished speaking with Moses on the mountain (completis . . . sermonibus), the tablets of stone proved to be inscribed with God’s written word (scriptas digito Dei), with what we know, since St Paul, as the letter of the law 1 . This distinction between, on the one hand, verbum and sermo, and, on the other hand, littera and scripta, is the one that is reflected in my title and underpins my reflections here on the status and functions of the Anglo-Norman vernacular in 12 th -century Britain. I shall confine myself, as I always do, to the evidence of primary sources. These tend, however, to have two disadvantages in addition to their obvious value as first-hand eye-witness testimony: they are few and far between, and invariably incidental and indirect. They are also not always easy to interpret, hence their abiding interest. It is a shame, for example, that the different voices taken on by Gerald de Barri (better known, still today, as Giraldus Cambrensis or Gerald of Wales) are so consistently inconsistent as to undermine his credibility as a witness, for he has many interesting and informative things to say about language. He tells us, for example, that his Expugnatio Hibernica, which he had first completed in 1189 and then revised in 1210, had been extremely badly received by the public, or, to quote his own words, had been barely understood by a few barely literate members of the high aristocracy (principes minus litterati). His only hope of success, he continues, would be to find some linguistic and literary scholar able and willing to translate his book into French, even though (he plaintively adds) a translation never has the same flavour as the original and never remains so firmly imprinted on the mind (animo sedet): fructum laboris . . . quem nos quidem, minus intellecti quia principes minus litterati, hactenus obtinere non valuimus. (Expugnatio Hibernica, ed. Scott/ Martin 1978: 264-65) 2 . 1 John 1, 1; Exodus 31, 18; 2 Corinthians 3, 1-6. 2 Same text in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera (ed. Brewer 1861-91: v. 410-11); cf. Zimmer 2003: 131-52. Vox Romanica 68 (2009): 156-168 Oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain 157 Now, to someone like myself who spends his time trying to map the interface between Latin and the vernacular as it evolves in 12 th -century Britain, this is potentially a highly revealing nugget of information, since it could be seen as implying that the French imported by the Conqueror was already well on the way to becoming a viable alternative to Latin, in the eyes of intellectuals, at the end of the century. But is that what Gerald is actually saying - or meaning? Let us see how he continues: Vir ille eloquio clarus W. Map, Oxoniensis archidiaconus, cuius animae propitietur Deus, solita verborum facecia et urbanitate praecipua dicere pluries, et nos in hunc modum convenire solebat: «Multa, Magister Giralde, scripsistis, et multum ahduc scribitis, et nos multa diximus. Vos scripta dedistis, et nos verba. Et quanquam scripta vestra longe laudabiliora sint et longaeviora quam dicta nostra, quia tamen haec aperta, communi quippe idiomate prolata, illa vero, quia latina, paucioribus evidencia, nos de dictis nostris fructum aliquem reportavimus, vos autem de scriptis egregiis, principibus litteratis nimirum et largis obsoletis olim et ab orbe sublatis, dignam minime retribucionem consequi potuistis.» (loc. cit.) 3 . Needless to add, Gerald did not find his imaginary translator, or at least no trace of a French version of the Expugnatio survives today - and had one actually been made between 1189 and 1210, it would have been, chronologically speaking, the very first in an entirely new literary genre. In any event, I am not at all convinced that what is at issue here is the status of the vernacular, and I hesitate to subscribe to the view that Gerald is telling us that «the spoken vernacular brought greater prestige than written Latin» (Clanchy 2 1993: 266). Gerald, it seems to me, is really in reactionary mode and indulging in the age-old «censure of the times» topos. By establishing an opposition between the written and the oral, between Latin as an elitist, minority mode of expression, and French as a more universally comprehensible vehicle of social communication, he is not vaunting the virtues of French as much as deploring contemporary standards of Latinity, and the diminishing patronage and dwindling audiences for literature in Latin. Complaining about contemporary standards of Latinity is, in fact, something of a hobby horse for 3 «Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford and famous for his eloquence (may God have mercy on his soul), and whose wont it was to make facetious comments and tell all sorts of particularly urbane jokes, often spoke in the following terms to me: ‹You, Master Gerald, have written, and will continue to write, a great deal, whereas I have done a great deal of talking. You have expressed yourself in writing, I have used the spoken word. Yet although your writing is by a long chalk more praiseworthy than my talk, and is destined to last considerably longer, whereas my words could be understood by everyone indiscriminately since I spoke in common parlance (communi idiomate), yours, being in Latin, were accessible to a much smaller number of people. And while I have been in a position to derive some benefit from my talking, you have not been able to reap the reward that your excellent writing has deserved from members of the nobility who in the past might well have been both literate and generous but whose numbers have long since been declining and who are dying out.›». Ian Short 158 Gerald, and his works are peppered with patronisingly disparaging remarks about the supposed illiteracy of the times 4 . The name of Walter Map is also invoked by the vernacular poet Hue de Rotelande, Gerald’s contemporary and neighbour and the author of the Anglo-Norman Ipomedon from about 1180. In a spirited defence of his own veracity, Hue sets up Walter’s no doubt notorious reputation as some sort of yardstick of mendacity and describes him as a past master in the art of lying 5 . This is a somewhat curious remark coming from a writer who invents a wholly spurious Latin source for his romance - a source, he proceeds to tell us, that has been strangely overlooked up until now by learned multilingual clerics: Ne di pas qe il bien ne dit cil qi en latin l’ad descrit, mes plus i ad leis ke lettrez; si li latin n’est translatez, gaires n’i erent entendanz. (Ipomedon, ed. Holden 1979: l. 25-29) 6 Although he is making more or less the same point of literary accessibility as Gerald, Hue has a different agenda: he is seeking to justify his own use of French, whereas Gerald is merely toying for rhetorical effect with the possibility of using the vernacular as he censures the same lack of Latin readership that enables Hue to find a new audience, of listeners this time, for his works. Hue de Rotelande, incidentally, occupies a significant place in the history of 12 th century French literature in that he seems to provide some extremely early, perhaps even unique, evidence for the existence of a secular library before 1191. His patron, he tells us in his second romance Protheselaus, was Gilbert fitz Baderon, a marcher lord of Breton descent and the owner of a library «well supplied with books both in Latin and in French» at his castle in Monmouth: Cest lyvre me comaunda faire e de latin translater d’un livre q’il me fist moustrer dount sis chastels est mult manaunz e de latyn e de romnaunz. (Protheselaus, ed. Holden 1991-93, vol. 2: l. 12706-10) 4 For example, Gemma Ecclesiastica in Opera, vol. 2: 43, 120, 343-45. On Simund de Freine, a canon of Hereford cathedral, author of the Anglo-Norman Roman de Philosophie (based on Boethius) and a Vie de saint Georges, who was a friend of Gerald and exchanged some Latin poems with him, see Opera, vol. 1: 382-85. Cf. Legge 1963: 183-87, and Bourgain 1982: 769-70. 5 Ipomedon, ed. Holden 1979: l. 7185-86. 6 «I do not say that the person responsible for composing it in Latin was not a skilful writer, but since there are more secular people around than there are learned, there will be hardly anyone who understands it unless the Latin is translated». Oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain 159 The only problem with this promising piece of evidence is that Hue, who has a particularly well developed sense of literary irony, claims that this library houses the actual book from which he has translated his second romance, a source which, like the one he had already claimed for Ipomedon, turns out to be no more than a figment of his literary imagination. We can, however, take consolation from the fact that Gilbert fitz Baderon’s library, even if it existed only in the poet’s mind, must clearly have been a credible possibility for Hue’s audience, for there would, surely, otherwise be no point in his mentioning it 7 . The common ground between Gerald and Hue lies, then, in the distinction they draw between the spoken and the written languages, and in the priority which they seem to accord to the former. That the primary function of Anglo-Norman was, indeed, to serve as the idiolect or aristocratic vernacular of the newcomers and their descendants is too obvious to need illustration. At the very end of the 12 th century, Gervase of Canterbury was still describing the Conquest in terms of the invaders introducing into Britain «a new way of life and a new way of speaking» (novam vivendi formam et loquendi) 8 . One of the earliest self-referential mentions we have of Anglo-Norman comes from the pen of Philippe de Thaon who, between 1113 and 1119, describes it as the raisun mustree de la nostre cuntree, «our country’s spoken discourse» 9 . Towards the end of the century, Walter Map’s categorisation of Anglo-Norman as Marlborough French makes clear that he also is still considering it as an oral rather than a written medium: according to Walter, it is said of someone speaking this corrupt language (vitiose quis illa lingua loquitur) that he Gallice barbarizat, that is, speaks garbled French like a foreigner. Not to be outdone, Gerald de Barri goes one better: whereas the French of France is elegant and refined, its bastardised Insular counterpart is rudis et feculentus, that is, uncouth and inferior 10 . Behind the thinly veiled social and linguistic snobbery which inspires both of these descriptions lies the same conviction that the function of French is first and foremost to serve as a vernacular 11 . One of its oral functions had always been, naturally, to serve as a means of access to the written word, an intermediary language of performance for seculars without sufficient mastery of Latin as the language of record. In 1164, Henry II’s mother, to take one illustrious example (she was, after all, an empress, if also «a 7 Andres Kristol reminds me of the parallel with Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich: «ein ritter so geleret . . . », and to the possibility that we could be dealing in both contexts with a humorous allusion to their patrons’ illiteracy. 8 Stubbs 1879-80, vol. 2: 60 (the Gesta Regum dates from 1199-1210). 9 Philippe de Thaon, Comput, ed. Short, 1984: l. 101-2. Cf. Roland, v. 3325: Une raisun lur ad dite e mustree; T-L, AW 8: 210-12, 6: 338. 10 Cf. Short 1979-80: 470-73; Richter 1979: 88-89; Schulze-Busacker 1987-88: 24-47. 11 Walter’s other reference to the French vernacular concerns its literary use in chansons de geste: «Nobis divinam Karolorum et Pepinorum nobilitatem vulgaribus ritmis scola mimorum concelebrat» (De Nugis Curialium, ed. James et al., 1983: 404). Gerald refers to the French epic poem Raoul de Cambrai in his De Principis Instructione (Opera, ed. Brewer 1861-91, vol. 8: 258). Ian Short 160 woman of the stock of tyrants», according to one contemporary) admitted one of her clerics into her private chamber in order to have him first read the Constitutions of Clarendon out loud in Latin and then to explain the text to her in French 12 . When Anglo-Norman happens to be written down, it is also as an adjunct to Latin or as a substitute for it. The earliest Anglo-Norman poems are transpositions of Latin originals (I deliberately avoid the term «translations»), while the bilingual psalters, the miracles of the Virgin, the rhymed gloss on the Book of Proverbs, the vernacular drama, all go back to Latin originals (only the Leis Willelme stands out as a possible exception). Also derivative from Latin are the first vernacular hagiographies, of which one of the earliest in date has a woman author with views on the language she uses which are well worth quoting. The anonymous nun of Barking who composed her rhymed Vie d’Edouard le Confesseur sometime in the 1160s, probably, stigmatises her Anglo-Norman as «un faus franceis . . . d’Angletere» 13 : Si joe l’ordre des cas ne gart ne ne juigne part a sa part, certes n’en dei estre reprise ke nel puis faire en nule guise: qu’en latin est nominatif ço frai romanz acusatif. Un faus franceis sai d’Angletere ke ne l’alai ailurs [re]quere. Vus ki ailurs apris l’avez la u mester iert, l’amendez! 14 As it happens, the nun’s defensiveness about the French she acquired exclusively in England is quite unfounded, as she writes a perfectly competent and fluent Anglo-Norman. She might well, in this prologue, be echoing a similar modesty topos from Gregory of Tours, as M. D. Legge (1963: 63-64) suggested, but what is particularly interesting from our point of view are her observations on the Latin- French interface and the problematics of translating from Latin into the vernacular. Latin, presumably as the language of literacy, is clearly paradigmatic for her, a linguistic norm from which the slightest deviation needs to be fully justified. Her 12 Robertson et al. 1875-85: v. 148: «Die sequenti omnibus ejectis a thalamo suo, praecepit nobis [sc. Nicholas of Mont-Saint-Jacques] eas latine legere et exponere gallice.» R. M. Wilson 1943: 45 misattributes this to Matilda wife of Henry I (cf. Marjorie Chibnall 1991: 170). 13 Baker 1907-8: 374-75 [rejected ms. readings: 1 cases, 8 quere, 9 Mais vus]. The standard edition, whose base ms. lacks this prologue, is by Södergård 1948: l. 1-10 (cf. Dean/ Boulton 1999: n° 523; Legge 1963: 60-66; Spetia 1999: 129-47). 14 «If I do not observe the order of the cases or construe clauses together, I should certainly not be criticised because it is quite impossible for me to do so. What is nominative in Latin, I shall translate as accusative in French. My French is a false French of England, for I have not been anywhere else to acquire it. Those of you, however, who have learnt your French elsewhere should correct mine where it is necessary.» Oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain 161 inability as a translator strictly to adhere to Latin morphological and syntactic models may strike a modern reader as pretty obvious, and certainly not something to be apologised for. She explains it, however, not in terms of any inherent linguistic alterity, but as a function of her own poor command of French. Using the vernacular as a written literary medium is very much a second best to Latin, the nun seems to be saying, and if you then perceive your own French to be inferior, you are further disparaging your efforts and relegating them to third best. This is modesty taken to the point of self-denigration. When Hue de Roteland, in the prologue to Ipomedon, makes a strikingly similar point, even to the extent of repeating the same linguistic image, one immediately suspects some sort of ironic plagiarism: Hue de Rotelande vus dit, qui cest’ estorie vous descrit, ki de latin velt romanz faire ne lui deit l’em a mal retrere s’il ne poet tuz les cas garder, de tut en tut les tens former. Mes pur hastiver la matire nos estovra par biau motz dire; fors la verrour n’y acrestrai: dirai brefment ceo qe jeo en sai. (Ipomedon, ed. Holden 1991-93: l. 33-42) 15 The irony is, of course, that whereas the nun of Barking’s Latin original actually existed, and her translation problems were real, Hue was not translating at all, his alleged source being nothing more than a rhetorical invention aimed at investing his text with a false authority. Launching a romance of over 10-and-a-half thousand lines with a brevity topos is, moreover, typical of Hue’s particular brand of humour. His equally conventional truth claim, and his mention of embellishing his socalled source with biau motz, are reminiscent of another, and more famous, contemporary of his, Benoît de Sainte-Maure from Touraine, author of the Roman de Troie and, as Henry II’s court historiographer, of the Histoire des ducs de Normandie. In the prologue to his Troie, usually dated to around 1165, Benoît, having discussed the comparative value of his two Latin sources, Dares and Homer, in terms of accuracy, turns to his technique of translation 16 : 15 «Hue de Rotelande, who is recounting this story for you, tells you that whoever wishes to translate from Latin into French should not be adversely criticised if he (or she) is unable to retain all the cases and conjugate the tenses entirely correctly. In order to expedite the subject matter, it will be necessary for us to add embellishments. I shall, however, amplify only with the truth, and I shall set forth with brevity as much as I know.» 16 Le Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, ed. Constans 1904-12: l. 139-44; same text in Baumgartner/ Vielliard 1998: 46. Prologue cit. in Mölk 1969: 24-28. Ian Short 162 Le latin sivrai e la letre, nule autre rien n’i voudrai metre s’ensi non com jol truis escrit. Ne di mie qu’aucun bon dit n’i mete, se faire le sais, mais la matiere en ensivrai 17 Benoît is here claiming the right to incorporate some embroidery or interpolation into his text on the assumption that this sort of literary enhancement does not necessarily compromise the essential accuracy and truth of his rendering. Form and content, he is saying, can legitimately diverge (Buda 1989: 3). Hue de Rotelande, who is known to have plundered Thebes, Eneas and Troie for his own romances (he even has the effrontery to claim that the romances of antiquity plagiarise his works rather than the reverse) 18 , has clearly taken over Benoît’s revealing observation on accuracy and literary creativity, and made it his own. Here, then, the vernacular can be seen consciously to be separating itself from its Latin infrastructure and to be claiming for itself some measure of creative autonomy. Within a decade or so, both the tone and the focus have shifted: from the apologetic nun of Barking’s acceptance of the absolute primacy of her Latin source and the need for no less absolute and literal fidelity to it, to Benoît’s confident claim that the accuracy of his vernacular text would not in any way be compromised by some measure of incidental authorial embroidery. Whereas previously the text had derived its authority from written sources external to itself, from its Latin pedigree, as it were, now the rights of the author to affect the presentation of the material from the inside are beginning to be asserted. These first glimmerings of what Michel Zink has called a mutation in literary consciousness he attributes to the authors of 12 th -century courtly romance, and more specifically to the canonical figure of Chrétien de Troyes, who wrote in Champagne during the 1170s and 1180s (cf. Zink 1981: 9-18; 1985: 31-37). But chronologically speaking, Insular French writers had already had an important and pioneering contribution to make, earlier in the century, to the emergence of French as a literary medium, to the process of breaking the literary monopoly of Latin, and to what can be called the 12 th -century vernacularisation of culture. It is all to easy to overlook the fact that Anglo-Norman claims the earliest appearance in French literature of the rhymed chronicle (Gaimar), of eyewitness historiography (Jordan Fantosme), of the Celtic-inspired narrative (Benedeit), of scientific (Philippe de Thaon) and scholastic (Sanson de Nantuil) texts, of Biblical and administrative prose, of monastic rules, the earliest named patrons of literature (queens Matilda and Adeliza, Constance, wife of Ralf fitz Gilbert, Alice de 17 «I shall follow the letter of the Latin text, and will not be willing to add anything else unless it is as I find it written down. I do not, however, exclude adding a certain amount of embellishment, if I have the skill, but in doing so I shall stay true to the content of my subject matter.» 18 Ipomedon, l. 10541-44. Oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain 163 Condé). And in the rise of the named author (not forgetting Clemence of Barking, the Nun of Barking, and Marie, the first recorded women writers in Medieval French literature), and the evolution of literary subjectivity, the role played by vernacular hagiographers and historiographers writing in Britain (including Gaimar as well as Wace and Benoît) also needs to be acknowledged 19 . It has sometimes been argued that Anglo-Norman literature shows a strong bias in favour of religious and didactic texts, but the surviving evidence indicates that this was not necessarily true of the 12 th century 20 . Epic poems and love stories in French seem to have been the staple diet of vernacular literature in Britain since at least the middle of the 12 th century, if, that is, we are to believe what a certain Adgar (or William, to call him by his alternative French name) has to tell us. He it was who, sometime in the 1150s or the 1160s, translated a collection of miracles of the Virgin into Anglo-Norman verse, in the course of which he has this to say on his contemporaries’ literary tastes (and, of course, his own) 21 : Li home de jolifté, ki tant aiment lur volenté, amereient milz autre escrit ke cuntast amerus delit u bataille u altre aventure; en tels escriz mettent lur cure. Tes escriz ne sunt a defendre, kar grant sens i poet l’en aprendre de curtesie e de saveir. Mais sur tut deit l’en cher aveir les escriz de nostre Reïne . . . (Adgar, Le Gracial, ed. Kunstmann 1982: 123 [xvi, l. 1-11]) 22 Such, needless to add, is the perspective of a writer with one foot in traditional Latin culture and the other in the nascent vernacular culture. An even more interesting testimony, and one that is both datable and localisable, comes from another literate and articulate vernacular writer who this time has the additional advantage of professional qualifications on both sides of the literary divide. I am referring to the Bury-St-Edmund’s monk Denis Piramus who, he himself tells us, having wasted his youth as a frivolous court poet, became a monk later in life and 19 Cf. Short 1992: 229-49; Blacker 1994; Laurent 1998; Damian-Grint 1999; Crane, 1999: 35- 60. On manuscript survival, cf. Woledge/ Short 1981: 1-17 (currently under revision). 20 For example Walberg 1936: 39. Cf. Legge 1963: 363, 366. 21 For Adgar’s dual names, cf. Adgar, Le Gracial, ed. Kunstmann 1982: 97, xi, l. 25-34. Cf. Legge 1963: 187-91. 22 «Men who enjoy frivolity and are so fond of pursuing their own pleasure would prefer writings that tell delightful love stories or tales of war or other adventures, and they set great store by such writings. This sort of thing is not to be forbidden, since from it people are able to learn a great deal about how to be courtly and how to act wisely. Writings about Our Lady, however, are to be cherished over and above everything else . . . ». Ian Short 164 wrote a rhymed life of his monastery’s patron in Anglo-Norman. As I have attempted to show elsewhere, Denis was in all probability writing between 1190 and 1193, though the literary situation he describes could well go back to the 1160s (Short 2007: 326-28). Denis’s one claim to fame is his mention of Marie, universally but inaccurately known as Marie de France. Here is what he has to say about her and one of her contemporaries 23 : Cil ki Partonopé trova E ki les vers fist e ryma Mult se pena de bien dire Si dist il bien de cele matire Cum de fable e de menceonge. La matire resemble sunge, Kar ceo ne put unkes estre. Si est il tenu pur bon mestre, E les vers sunt mult amez E en ces riches curtes löez. E dame Marie autresi, Ki en ryme fist e basti E compensa les vers de lays Ke ne sunt pas de tut verais. E si en est ele mult loee, E la ryme partut amee, Kar mult l’ayment si l’unt mult cher Cunt, barun e chivaler; E si en ayment mult l’escrit, E lire le funt si unt delit, E si les funt sovent retreire. Les lays soleient as dames pleire, De joye les oyent e de gré Qu’il sunt sulum lur volenté. Li rey, li prince et li courtur, Cunt, barun e vavasur, Ayment cuntes, chanceuns e fables E bon diz qui sunt dilitables, Kar il hostent e gettent penser, Doel, enuy e travaile de quer, E si funt ires ublïer E del quer hostent le penser 24 23 L. 25-56 of the prologue which I re-edit in Short 2007; the standard edition is Kjellman 1935. Cf. Dean/ Boulton 1999: n° 520. 24 «The person who composed [the romance of] Partonopeu de Blois and put it into verse and rhyme took great pains over his poetry, and dealt with his subject matter well considering that it is fanciful and misleading, since it lacks substance (resemble sunge) and cannot possibly be considered as realistic (ne put unkes estre). He is nevertheless considered to be a past master of his art, and his verses are much appreciated and praised in the courts of the powerful. And Dame Marie likewise, who composed versified lays which she rhymed and turned into narratives, but which are not at all true (pas del tut verais). She is nevertheless much praised for Oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain 165 There is much of interest here in what is one of the earliest surviving examples of Medieval French literary criticism. What strikes one in the first place is a clear sense of literary community across the cultural divide. Denis does not disguise his admiration for either the author of Partonopeu or for Marie as fellow professionals, despite the moral distance which separates him, a monastic didact, and his excolleagues, popular entertainers. His contention is that Marie’s lays, by virtue of their being unrealistic, imaginative and subjective, are lacking any verifiable factual content. Unlike the text which he is about to translate, an authenticated, written, eye-witness document with multiple Latin sources, Marie’s vernacular lays, presumably because their basis is in creativity, orality and performance, lack credible authority, specifically textual authority. Absent from Denis’s prologue is any criticism of the popular poets’ use of language (indeed, he is lavish in his praise of their technical ability), or any sense that his own vernacular medium is in any way inferior to the Latin from which he is translating. Denis seems reluctant also to overplay the doctrinal superiority of his own work. Fully recognising the pleasure (deduit) that secular literature provides, he offers his listeners an alternative deduit of his own which is more worthwhile, even more enjoyable and more conducive to wise behaviour and good sense 25 . He does not, of course, omit to mention its utility as food for the soul and for living a life free from disgrace and dishonour, but God, we note, is not invoked, and the godlessness of his rivals remains unarticulated 26 : Jeo vus dirray par dreit fei Un deduit qui mielz valut asez Ke ces autres ke tant amez, E plus delitable a oÿr; Si purrez les almes garir E les cors garaunter de hunte. What Denis does emphasise is the veracity of his poem, how verrai it is, so very verrai in fact that it could not possibly be more so 27 : Un deduit par vers vus dirray Ke sunt de sen e si verray K’unkes rien ne pout plus veir estre, Kar bien le virent nostre ancestre . . . For him the difference between hagiography and romance seems to lie not so much in the inferior godlessness of the latter as in the superior textual authority of the them, and her poetry is universally popular. Earls, barons and knights love and greatly cherish it, and they particularly like having written copies of it which they take pleasure in having read out to them.» 25 Loc. cit., l. 58-68. 26 Loc. cit., l. 60-65. 27 Loc. cit., l. 69-72. Ian Short 166 former. In this he would no doubt have agreed with Guibert de Nogent when he argued that the only valid criterion for a saint’s cult was not hearsay (opinio), but an authentic tradition of verified written sources from the past (vetustatis aut scriptorum veracium traditio certa) 28 . Denis, however, juxtaposes rather than polarises the oral and the written, the popular and the learned. What his prologue can be seen as illustrating is the increasingly complex interrelationship between the secular and the religious in the literature of the last quarter of the 12 th century, and as marking a further stage in the progressive secularisation of culture. What we can also read behind Denis’s reference to Marie’s supposed lack of «veracity» are developing notions of vernacular textual authority at a time when translatio had already consolidated its position of intermediary between the learned and lay cultures. Patronage of French poetry had been a feature of literary culture in Britain since at least the first decades of the century. Writing in 1126, the monastic chronicler William of Malmesbury writes as follows in his obituary of queen Matilda, first wife of Henry I: . . . litteris quoque femineum pectus exercuit . . . Liberalitate ipsius per orbem sata, turmatim huc adventabant scolastici cum cantibus tum versibus famosi . . . Nec in his solum expensas conferebat sed etiam omni generi hominum, presertim advenarum, qui muneribus acceptis famam eius longe per terras venditarent . . . Eo effectum est ut prodige donantium non effugeret vitium (Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. Mynors et al. 1998-99, vol. 1: 754) 29 Benedeit, author of the Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, is one example of a poet who, at some unknown date before the queen’s death in 1118, took advantage of Matilda’s virtuous prodigality 30 . In dedicating his poem to her, Benedeit inaugurated, years before any comparable work appears on the French mainland, a tradition of enlightened secular patronage that successfully straddled the divide between Latin and the vernacular, between littera and verbum, scripta and sermo, between the learned written and the lay oral cultures. A generation later, Geoffrey of Monmouth made his own spectacular contribution to this same process of cross-cultural symbiosis. I happen to be one of those (and we are very much in a minority) who believe in the existence of Geoffrey’s «very ancient book» - less, though, as a tangible object than as a metaphorical one, not so much the ordered quires of written record as the disparate gatherings of collective memory. Why otherwise, I ask myself, would Geoffrey not use a word like 28 Cited by Stock 1983: 245. 29 «Despite being a woman, she took a keen interest in literature [literally «she exercised her intelligence, albeit a feminine one, in letters»] . . . News of her generosity spread throughout the world, and scholars who had made a name for themselves as singers or as poets came flocking . . . Her open-handedness benefited not only these but all sorts of other men, especially people from abroad, who, having taken her money, would then sing her praises far and wide in other countries . . . All of which resulted in her being unable to avoid the vice of prodigality.» 30 Benedeit, The Anglo-Norman Voyage of St Brendan, ed. Short/ Merrilees 1979; Benedeit, Le Voyage de saint Brendan, édition bilingue, Short/ Merrilees 2006. Oral and written French in 12 th -century Britain 167 scripta, or littera, or idioma, or eloquium, or even lingua, but specify instead that his book was Britannici sermonis, «in the British [that is, Welsh] vernacular or spoken language»? 31 The multiculturalism of 12 th -century Britain clearly had a major role to play in fostering literary innovation of this sort, as it did also in the early flowering of French vernacular literature on its soil. It is a truth now universally acknowledged, thanks in large measure to Michael Clanchy, that the 12 th century in Britain witnessed an evolution from a memorybased to a document-based culture. What it also saw, concomitantly, was the emergence of the French vernacular as a literary medium, an evolution of its oral into its written mode - not, however, in a straightforward linear development, but as part of a broader and more complex cultural shift. This saw the textual authority hitherto invested exclusively in Latin, as the unique language of learning, transferred to the demotic. What we today can see is the French vernacular slowly starting to come of age, though it was, of course, to take it some three centuries more finally to grow free of its Latin roots and reach its majority. London Ian Short Bibliography Text Editions Baumgartner, E./ Vielliard, F. (ed.) 1998: Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Le roman de Troie. Extraits du manuscrit Milan, Bibliothèque ambrosienne D 55, Paris Brewer, J. S. (ed.) 1861-91: Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, London Constans, L. (ed.) 1904-12: Le Roman de Troie de Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Paris Holden, A. J. (ed.) 1979: Ipomedon. 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M. 1943: «English and French in England: 1100-1300», History 23: 37-60 Woledge, B./ Short, I. 1981: «Liste provisoire de manuscrits du XII e siècle contenant des textes en langue française», R 102: 1-17 Zimmer, S. 2003: «A medieval linguist: Gerald de Barri», Études celtiques 35: 131-52 Zink, M. 1981: «Une mutation de la conscience littéraire: le langage romanesque à travers des exemples français du XII e siècle», CCM 24: 3-27 Zink, M. 1985: La subjectivité littéraire. Autour du siècle de saint Louis, Paris 168 Ian Short