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Chapter 2

Bodleian MS Digby 23

In 1835 a young philologist named Francisque Michel was commissioned by the minister of public instruction, François Guizot, to visit England and transcribe a number of ancient works, including a poem on the Battle of Roncevaux that was known to exist in the Bodleian Library. Two years later Michel published La Chanson de Roland ou de Roncevaux du Xlle siècle publiée pour la premiére fois d’aprés le manuscrit de la Bibliothèque Bodléienne à Oxford, and the poem entered French literary history.¹ Henceforth the standard version of the poem would be the text of the Oxford manuscript, and it would bear the title Michel had given it. The Song of Roland had been born.

Of course, the history of Roland’s death had never been entirely forgotten, especially in France. It was known through Dante, Ariosto, and Cervantes and through a popular tradition still potent enough for Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, author of the “Marseillaise,” to draw on it for another revolutionary song, “Roland à Ronceveaux,” which had the defiant refrain “Mourons pour la patrie.”² Scholars knew of the account of the Pseudo-Turpin, the twelfth-century Latin chronicle allegedly composed by Charlemagne’s heroic archbishop, and of numerous other medieval references to the exploits of Roland, Oliver, and Charlemagne, and they knew that these exploits had been the subject of chansons de geste, including one version allegedly sung at the Battle of Hastings by a member of Duke William’s household, sometimes identified by the name Taillefer.³ The best-known account was that offered by the Anglo-Norman chronicler Wace in his Roman de Rou, composed sometime between 1160 and 1174. Wace describes Taillefer leading the Normans into Battle with his song:

Taillefer, qui mult bien chantout,

sor un cheval qui tost alout,

devant le duc alout chantant

de Karlemaigne e de Rollant,

e d’Oliver e des vassals

qui morurent en Rencevals.⁴

Taillefer, who sang very well, was mounted on a horse that raced along, and he went in front of the duke singing of Charlemagne, Roland, and Oliver and the knights who died at Roncevaux.

Wace’s story was noted by Claude Fauchet in his influential Recueil de l’origine de la langue et poésie françoise of 1581, by Voltaire, and by the British antiquarians Thomas Percy and Joseph Ritson, for whom it evoked the power and fascination of a lost oral tradition.⁵ Voltaire is perhaps the first to refer to Taillefer’s performance as a single song: “The old histories tell us that in the front rank of the Norman army, a squire named Taillefer, mounted on an armoured horse, sang the song of Roland, that has been for so long in the mouths of the French without the slightest trace remaining”⁶ This lost work was what so many early scholars hoped to find, not just another poem about Charlemagne and his twelve peers, but the very song of Taillefer.

By Michel’s day, the search for this work had been going on for some time. In 1777 the Marquis de Paulmy, chief editor of the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, a popular series devoted to summaries of “romances,” published an account of the stories of Charlemagne and Roland based on the Pseudo-Turpin. In his account Paulmy speculated that French troops going into battle might have sung the lost Chanson de Roland, and he actually went so far as to offer a possible reconstruction. As Paulmy explained, the Chanson de Roland could scarcely deal with all of Roland’s great deeds, and it therefore chose to present him as a model to imitate.⁷ The poem continues for eleven stanzas, praising Roland as a paragon: brave, modest, obedient, a good Christian, a moderate drinker, reluctant to seek a quarrel but a terror to his enemies—all in all, a perfect officer and gentleman (“Roland fut d’abord Officier, / Car il étoit bon Gentilhomme”).⁸ For the most part “Soldats François” won little praise; however, it may have provided inspiration for Rouget de Lisle when he composed his anthem “Roland à Roncevaux,” and it certainly drew renewed attention to the story.⁹ In 1814 Charles Nodier speculated in the Journal des débats about the possible survival of a fragment of the epic in some library, and in 1831 Chateaubriand suggested more specifically that fragments might survive in one of the former royal libraries.¹⁰ The search to recover the work had begun in earnest.

The earliest account of the story of Roland based on a specific medieval manuscript is that offered by Louis de Musset, marquis de Cogners, granduncle of the poet Alfred Musset, in his “Légende du bienheureux Roland, prince français” of 1817. Musset had access to what is now known as the Châteauroux manuscript and drew on it to retell the story of Charlemagne, Roland, and the Battle of Roncevaux.¹¹ Guyot des Herbiers, a family relation, began to prepare an edition of this manuscript, but died in 1828 without having finished.¹² It was not until 1832, however, when Louis-Henri Monin, a student at the Ecole Normale, published his Dissertation sur le roman de Roncevaux that a full version of the poem at last appeared in print. Monin based his edition on the Paris text (now Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 860), which he compared with the Châteauroux manuscript, using the transcription of Herbiers.

For some time, scholars had also been aware of the existence of an earlier version of a poem about Charlemagne and Roland in a manuscript in the Bodleian, although they were not quite sure what this poem was. It was known to Thomas Tyrwhitt, who appears to have read the entire work and mentions it in one of the notes to his Canterbury Tales of 1778; to Abbé Gervais de la Rue, who had worked in the Bodleian while in exile in England during the Terror; and to John Josias Conybeare, formerly professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.¹³ De la Rue classified it as “un Roman de la bataille de Roncevaux qu’on appelle encore le Roman des douze pairs de France” and found it not without its interest, primarily because of its age. He even published a few excerpts in his Essais historiques sur les bardes, les jongleurs et les trouvères, and it is here that the famous opening lines first appear in print, although publication was delayed until 1834, years after de la Rue had examined the manuscript.¹⁴ But de la Rue never connected the Oxford poem to Taillefer; indeed, he lamented that he had never been able to find even a fragment of Taillefer’s song and poured scorn on those like Paulmy who claimed to have found traces of it in later romances.¹⁵ In short, when Michel came to Britain in 1835, both French and British scholars had been dreaming of discovering Taillefer’s lost performance for at least half a century, but nobody yet believed he had found it.

Guizot sent Michel to Britain as part of an extensive cultural mission to recuperate fragments of early French literature and history.¹⁶ As one of the many treatments of Charlemagne, the Oxford poem was numbered among these desired fragments and thus justified a trip up from London, where Michel was copying Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis and Benoît de Sainte-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie.¹⁷ On 13 July Michel announced the discovery that would eclipse the rest of his voyage in a triumphant letter to one of his patrons, Louis-Jean-Nicolas Monmerqué, a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, and Monmerqué quotes from this “cry of exultation that burst out at the moment of a discovery” in his own letter to Guizot a week later. Michel believed he had found not just a poem about Roland that was older than any of the others that had survived but something far more precious, a copy of the great lost chanson de geste of Taillefer itself:

I am writing to you from Alfred’s city, a few steps away from the Bodleian, where I have just found … what? Guess! … The Song of Roland!! It was almost like squaring the circle.

It is nothing less than the Roman de Roncevaux, rhyming through assonance, as marches, corages, vaille, homme.… etc. but it is the Roman de Roncevaux in a manuscript from the beginning of the twelfth century, and each couplet ends with aoi, which you will explain for me; might it not be the cry away a fervent battle cry (cri d’élan sur l’ennemi)?¹⁸

This letter was soon followed by a more cautious report to Guizot.¹⁹ Here, too, Michel suggested the “AOI” “might be a kind of battle cry, and in the title he adopted for his edition—a title that appears nowhere in the manuscript—he made the connection to Taillefer’s lost battle song explicit: “One might also believe from the words Chanson de Roland that I wanted to create the impression that I think of the poem of Turold as being the one from which Taillefer sang fragments at the Battle of Hastings. I will not conceal that I am fully persuaded that the Norman minstrel’s song was taken from a chanson de geste; I would even say that this song could well be that of Turold.”²⁰

Over the years the fascination with Taillefer and his performance has faded or lost much of its scholarly credibility, but in its broad outlines, Michel’s understanding of the poem in the Oxford manuscript remains in force to this day. This particular version of the poem, in its entirety, is imagined as a song, something that a minstrel might sing, chant, or recite. As Michel noted when queried on his imposition of the title, the work is clearly a chanson de geste and Roland its chief hero; the title is his addition but it fits.²¹

Michel realized that he had made an important discovery, but his scholarly edition was not intended for a general readership and gives little sense of the widespread excitement the Roland would generate or the role it would soon play in the canon of French literature. Others made the larger claims for it. The Roland was hailed both by scholars and by the popular press as a national epic—“perhaps our oldest, our true national epic.”²² As such, the Roland filled a major lacuna: without its own epic, French literature could never match the classical tradition; with the publication of the Roland, it could. The need to reach a broader public was soon recognized, and in 1850 François Génin published a popular edition with a translation, the first major step toward enshrining the poem as a literary classic.²³ As Génin declared, “Henceforth people will not reproach French literature for lacking a national epic: here is the Roland of Turold.”²⁴

The search for Taillefer’s song was not just about establishing a literary canon; it was part of a broader quest for a national literature to renew a languishing France. The social conflict of the Revolution and the demise of the First Empire brought a strong demand, often explicitly articulated, for poetry that would revitalize the country, restoring political harmony by evoking the lost glories and the nobler conduct of earlier times.²⁵ Most nineteenth-century philologists, conservative Catholics and staunch Republicans alike, saw the Middle Ages as a period of simpler, nobler virtues. For them, the vigor of the simple, youthful age was matched by the vigor of a simple, youthful language, French before it became sophisticated. They extolled Old French poetry as a kind of folk art, a direct expression of the national spirit in a pure and original state, free of the corrupting influence of later civilization.²⁶ The Chanson de Roland would offer the preeminent example of such simplicity. In his edition of 1850, Génin expressed openly the qualities both critics and philologists were seeking: “The essential character of the epic is grandeur combined with naïveté, virility, the energy of a man united with simplicity and the graceful ingenuity of a child: it is Homer.”²⁷

The Chanson de Roland was, then, more than just a literary monument. Its editorial construction was part of the quest for national origins that dominated French Romantic philology; its subject, as Génin put it, “touches the very heart of the fatherland.”²⁸ Gaston Paris insisted that while Old French literature could appeal to readers of the most diverse political temperaments, its recovery was nonetheless a unifying project inspired by piety toward the tradition of one’s ancestors.²⁹ For Gautier, “True epic poems do not always treat of the struggle between two races, but they do always depend on the unity of the fatherland, above all its religious unity.”³⁰ The Roland soon became a symbol of the very spirit of France. For Ludovic Vitet, writing in 1852, “Roland is France, in its blind and impetuous courage.”³¹ As the century progressed, this totemic value increased. The threat of German scientific industrialism in both the military and scholarly fields, culminating in the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War, strengthened the tendency to see the Roland as an expression of the French genius for doomed gallantry.³² During the siege of Paris of 1870, Gaston Paris lectured on “La Chanson de Roland et la nationalité française” and called to his audience, “Let us make ourselves known as the sons of the men who died at Roncevaux and of those who avenged them.”³³ Gautier in his edition of 1872 called the poem “France made man.” Writing “in the midst of the fatherland’s sorrows,” he drew attention to the poem’s early patriotism as a direct rebuke to the Germans:

Never, never, has anyone so loved their native land. Listen carefully, ponder what I am about to say, you Germans who are listening. WE ARE TALKING ABOUT THE XIth CENTURY. I have the right to tell those who today are choking my poor France just how great she was some eight centuries ago.³⁴

The Roland was given the highest form of official sanction when in 1880 it was assigned to lycée students in seconde,³⁵ In 1900 a teacher from the prestigious Lycée Henri IV echoed the praise of three generations of French philologists when he told his audience at the academy for staff officers at Saint-Cyr, “La Chanson de Roland is our Iliad”³⁶

Sung Epic and the Séance Epique

From the moment of its rediscovery, the Song of Roland has been associated with minstrel performance; that is what it means to call it a song. Both its epic dignity as a French Iliad and its patriotic value as a repository of martial valor depend upon this classification. It has become an article of faith that the poem was recited by minstrels to largely illiterate knights in a series of linked sessions, so that over several days the audience might hear the poem in its entirety. Jean Rychner first suggested that these sessions might typically have extended for a thousand to two thousand lines, from dinner to dusk, and a figure in this range has been widely accepted.³⁷ Ian Short, in a popular edition, sums up the consensus:

Transmitted by singers who specialized in recitation (that is, by jongleurs) the epic poems were declaimed to musical accompaniment and before an audience, in sessions of about a thousand or 1300 lines. They were jongleurs’ epics (épopées jongleresques) and intended to be heard, not epic poems for reading.³⁸

This epic dignity was closely associated with a vision of what the poem was, how it was received, and by whom. In his edition of 1872, Gautier described a wandering minstrel reciting a heroic epic at length while the isolated baron, a man of simple faith, and his knights listen enthralled:

They saw themselves in these lines. This poetry was made in their image. It had the same passion for the Crusades, the same ideal or memory of French and Christian royalty, the same love for spilling blood and for a good thrust of a lance. Roland is nothing more, so to speak, than a sublime thrust of a lance (un coup de lance sublime) … in four thousand lines.³⁹

Edmond Faral echoes the association of epic simplicity with oral delivery, describing the jongleur as a wandering light that illuminates the monotonous life of the knights.⁴⁰ Faral recognizes that the jongleurs performed not just for knights but before all classes. He insists, however, that for that very reason they were obliged to stick to healthy old traditions and could not embellish, as later court-based minstrels could, so that their art retained its elemental simplicity.⁴¹ Later scholars such as Rychner, drawing on the work of Milman Parry, insist on the complexity of oral poetry rather than its simplicity but still maintain the connection between orality and epic.

A major shift in the attitude to the poem comes with the work of Joseph Bédier and his insistence that the poem is primarily the work of a single artistic genius rather than the amalgamation of earlier materials. For Bédier, the beauty of the Chanson de Roland, like the beauty of Racine’s Iphigénie, lies in its unity, and this unity came from the poet, Turold, who in a flash of genius discovered the central theme of the conflict between Roland and Oliver.⁴² Bédier envisaged Turold as a man of letters, one who writes “at his work bench,” but his reassessment of the poem’s composition did not cause him to reassess how it might have been delivered, a subject on which he is distressingly vague.⁴³ No one seems to have directly challenged the notion that the Chanson de Roland was performed by jongleurs, although some may have harbored suspicions. Eugene Vance, for example, has shown how the figure of Charlemagne embodies textual attitudes and argued that the final poem documents “a historical transition from an oral épistémè to one of writing.”⁴⁴ Hans-Erich Keller and Gabrielle Spiegel have argued persuasively that the latter part of the poem, especially the trial of Ganelon, reflects the ideology of the Capetian monarchs as formulated by Abbot Suger of Saint Denis, thus providing a possible milieu for a clerical writer.⁴⁵ All this might raise questions about how the final work would have been delivered, but the prevailing assumption that as a chanson de geste, it was actually sung remains in force. The oral performance of the text is central in Paul Zumthor’s account of mouvance, in which the regular alternation between oral performances and free copyings and reworkings produces the flowing tradition and “the text is but the moment of an act of the voice” (le texte n’est que l’occasion du geste vocal).⁴⁶ For Peter Haidu, Digby 23 “freezes one instant of a fluid, ongoing oral tradition.”⁴⁷

For many modern readers the vision of the chanting minstrel is a crucial part of the experience of reading the poem. Zumthor’s account of his own response brings this out clearly:

I take down from my library an edition of the Song of Roland. I know (or assume) that in the twelfth century this poem was sung to a tune that, for all intents and purposes, I have no means of reproducing. I read it. What I have before my eyes, printed or (in other situations) handwritten, is only a scrap of the past, immobilized in a space that is reduced to the page or the book.⁴⁸

Here Zumthor acknowledges the unavoidable role that a highly speculative history plays in our appreciation of a medieval poem. We are “forced to come up with an event—a text event—and to perform the text-in-action, and integrate this representation with the pleasure that we experience in reading—and take this into account, if the need arises, in our study of the text.”⁴⁹ We hold a book in our hand, but we listen for a lost song.

The reconstruction of this surmised oral tradition formed a crucial part in the early construction of the poem. In Les Epopées françaises, for example, Gautier describes in some detail the life of a jongleur, who sings a chanson de geste in the square in front of the town church. Gautier speculates freely on how the jongleur might have played his audience, modifying his repertoire to win their attention.⁵⁰ But it is in his 1895 study La Chevalerie that Gautier offers his fullest account of minstrel recitation. He describes a wedding feast:

Three jongleurs who specialized in singing had been invited to the wedding feast, but on this day only one will perform. Admittedly, he is the best in the land and in his singing, as in his life, he is not like the others. He is a Christian (this word alone is the highest praise), and he looks on his profession as a kind of lower order of priesthood, still dignified and almost sacred.… “What would you like me to sing this evening?” he says, striking a vigorous and resonant chord with his bow. The host thinks for a moment and replies, “I have an idea, which I’ll propose to you. Instead of reciting a single song for us (which sometimes seems to go on a little long) I would ask you sing us the finest passages from our finest poems.”⁵¹

Responding to this request, the jongleur works through a series of great moments in French epic. Finally, for the day is passing, he offers one last song, a song about Ogier the Dane recapturing Rome, but as the minstrel reaches the end and recounts the pope’s triumphal entry, the barons are reminded of the religious politics of their own day. A voice cries out that Philip does not love Pope Innocent so well, the host speaks of their reconciliation, and this response brings the performance to a close:

These words bring the long afternoon to an end. The lord gives the jongleur a mule from Arragon and a surcoat of red striped silk.

The epic session (séance épique) is completed; night falls.⁵²

Gautier’s imagination conjures up a lengthy recitation, one that continues throughout the afternoon until dusk. Admittedly, Gautier sees this recitation as exceptional, but his account presupposes two situations as norms: the performance of the less exalted “others,” who presumably offer more vulgar entertainment, command less strict attention, and play to humbler audiences, and whom Gautier’s jongleur in no way resembles, and the performance of the normal “séance épique,” in which a single jongleur would recite or sing a single epic in the great hall to an audience that might grow a little restless but would nonetheless provide him a reasonable chance to complete his song.

Gautier draws support from references to performance in the chansons de geste themselves, but his “séance épique” is actually modeled upon an eighteenth-century work, André Chénier’s L’Aveugle, and its account of an extended performance by Homer in which the blind bard sings in succession the great moments of Hellenic epic. “I do not think that the French language, in all its rich treasury, has finer verses; they are the despair of anyone who tries to imitate them,” writes Gautier of L’Aveugle, “Nevertheless, this is the moment to remind ourselves of them, and repeat here the songs of our jongleur in a language worthy of the heroes it celebrates.”⁵³ Then, before returning to his account of the Middle Ages, Gautier quotes from the beginning of Homer’s song. The simple shepherds welcome the stranger, and he repays their charity by singing while they listen rapt:

Commençons par les Dieux: Souverain Jupiter;

Soleil, qui vois, entends, connais tout; et toi, mer,

Fleuves, terre, et noirs Dieux des vengeances trop lentes,

Salut! Venez à moi, de l’Olympe habitantes,

Muses; vous savez tout, vous déesses, et nous,

Mortels, ne savons rien qui ne vienne de vous.⁵⁴

Let us begin with the Gods: Sovereign Jupiter, and you, O Sun, who see, hear, and know all; and you, sea, rivers, and dark Gods with your creeping vengeance. Hail! Come to me, you Muses, from your home in Olympus; you know all, you goddesses, and we mortals know nothing except what comes from you.

Gautier quotes Chénier no further, but the lines that immediately follow illustrate even more fully the Orphic power that Chénier attributes to Homer as he stills nature and unites man with his song. Gautier objects only to Chénier’s underlying paganism and so casts himself as Chénier’s Christian surrogate and offers an elaborate fantasy of an honored minstrel’s sustained performance. Echoing Homer’s opening prayer to Jupiter and his stilling of nature, Gautier’s minstrel begins, after a short exposition, with Charlemagne praying to God to stop the sun. In the 1895 edition of La Chevalerie, the lines from Chénier appear directly beneath an engraving of this very scene, further emphasizing the parallel Gautier draws between the medieval and Homeric invocations (fig. 1).

Figure 1. Léon Gautier, La Chevalerie, 3rd ed. (Paris, 1895), 658.

Like Chènier, Gautier offers a vision of social and spiritual integration in which audience, song, and singer become one. In the chivalric tradition this unity is achieved when the knights’ valiant deeds are re-embodied in the poet’s words, so that the two are “simultaneously reborn together, thanks to the memory and voice of the poet,” to borrow the words of Eugene Vance.⁵⁵ This continual cycle of chivalric narrative is figured in the Oxford poem itself when Roland says to his men:

“Or guart chascuns que granz colps [i] empleit,

Que malvaise caiçun de nus chanteit ne seit!” (fol. 19r, lines 1013–14)⁵⁶

“Now let each man take care to deal great blows,

Lest a bad song be sung of us!”

But even before these lines were recovered from the Bodleian manuscript and brought into wider circulation, the image of the unified band of warriors linked in song was powerful. As we have seen, Paulmy, in one of the earliest modern evocations of the lost Song of Roland, imagined it as the marching song of the Norman soldiers. The image remains strong through the nineteenth century and beyond. It is not just Gautier who sees the Roland as “a sublime lance thrust” In numerous accounts the epic material merges with the warrior class it celebrates in the full embodiment of oral tradition.

In this vision of medieval culture, the orality of the epic is crucial. Gautier’s baron, with his “simple, vigorous, almost brutal” faith and his simple pleasures, untainted by gallantry, cannot read. The epic, as Gautier understands it, matches its audience in the purity of its primitivism:

The age that suits these works is exclusively that of primitive times, when Science and Critical Thinking do not yet exist, and an entire nation naively confuses History and Legend. Some sort of nebulous credulity permeates the atmosphere of the time, and encourages the development of this poetry that has not yet been examined by science or taken over by sophistry. The later centuries of writing are not made for these poetic narratives that circulate invisibly on the lips of a few popular singers.… One does not read these epics, one sings them.⁵⁷

The grandeur of oral epic is thus part of the long history in which writing marks a fall from some lost state of primal unity. In the jongleur’s song the national and spiritual body of early France is reconstituted.⁵⁸ The epic is not read, it is sung.

The Manuscript and Its Anglo-Norman Readers

The simplest means of connecting the 4,002 verses preserved in Digby 23 to this putative performance history is to claim that Digby 23 itself once belonged to a minstrel or jongleur.⁵⁹ This is exactly what Léon Gautier did when he distinguished between the great illuminated manuscripts of the late Middle Ages and the earlier and simpler ones of the twelfth century, which he called “manuscrits de jongleur,” a category in which he included Digby 23. The manuscript was thus classified as a reference tool for a professional performer of some kind.

What is striking about this classification is how widely it has been accepted when even a cursory examination of the codex raises the gravest doubts. The classification of Digby 23 as a “manuscrit de jongleur” went unchallenged until 1932, when Charles Samaran, in his introduction to the facsimile edition, offered the first full codicological description of the manuscript, in the process raising grave doubts about Gautier’s identification. Samaran agreed with Gautier that Digby 23 is a cheap and somewhat worn manuscript, composed of poorly prepared parchment that was carelessly ruled, but he also pointed out that careless compilation, small size, and the wear and tear that suggests widespread circulation are not sufficient grounds on their own for associating a manuscript with a jongleur. There are numerous Latin manuscripts that are equally carelessly executed and equally battered. Samaran noted as well that the Digby copyist shows little familiarity with French epic material, frequently confusing the names of the great heroes, and that the unknown reviser shows even less, which tends to suggest that neither the copyist nor the reviser was a jongleur.⁶⁰

This leaves the possibility that the book was written by a cleric for the use of a jongleur. The difficulty here is that Digby 23 is in fact a composite volume; the second half is the Roland but the first half is a glossed copy of Calcidius’s translation of the Timaeus. Since the Timaeus scarcely seems likely reading material for a jongleur, it is of some importance to establish when the two sections were brought together. Both date from roughly the same period, sometime in the twelfth century, but earlier commentators believed that the two had circulated separately until they came into the possession of Sir Kenneth Digby in the seventeenth century.⁶¹ Samaran, however, noted the presence on the last page of the Roland of what he believed to be the word “Chalcidius” in a thirteenth-century hand on folio [72] r. The same hand also adds several verses from Juvenal’s eighth satire to one of the flyleaves (folio [74]r).⁶² The implication is that at this point in its history, the Roland was in the hands of someone who could read and write Latin and this person also owned the Timaeus. As Samaran points out, Juvenal’s Satires and the Timaeus are hardly the reading material one would expect of a jongleur. The possibility that at some point the manuscript might have belonged to a jongleur cannot be entirely ruled out, of course. The first century or more of the manuscript’s history is unaccounted for, and it is possible that during this time it passed into the hands of a jongleur, as Maurice Delbouille has suggested.⁶³ But there is nothing about the manuscript to encourage such a speculation. It is a cheap, portable volume; jongleurs were itinerant and were not wealthy—those circumstances, and the prevailing assumption that the poem must be associated with a jongleur are all the basis there has ever been for Gautier’s classification of Digby 23 as a jongleur’s manuscript. In comparison to many of the richly illuminated romances of later centuries, the Digby Roland is plain and humble, but considerable care has been taken to ensure that the manuscript is agreeable to the eye. It is ruled (although not always entirely consistently), and the margins are generous. The initial letter of each line is offset and there is at least one colored initial for each page; corrections are few and neat. Digby 23(2) was not just a rough draft or private copybook. It has been quite heavily used, and the ink is badly faded in places. The first and last folios are dog-eared, and half a quire is discolored at the beginning and the end, suggesting that it lay for a while unbound, but otherwise the Roland is in reasonable condition. It has not been folded, torn, stained, or scribbled in. The classification “minstrel manuscript” cannot be disproved, but it is based not on a consideration, but on an almost willful dismissal, of the codicological evidence.

A closer investigation of the manuscript can provide glimpses of the world in which the poem probably circulated and can suggest some of the ways in which it might have been enjoyed. It will also illustrate the sophistication of at least one baron and the interpenetration of clerical and chivalric culture—all points the traditional understanding of the poem tends to deny or at least to minimize.

The first approach is through the copyist, who writes a hand that has often been criticized for its awkwardness (fig. 2). Earlier readers, such as Gautier, took this awkwardness as a sign of the copy’s low social status and therefore of its association with a jongleur. But it might also be seen as a sign that the copyist was engaged in cultural negotiation, modifying a traditional script to meet new demands. This suggestion might seem highly speculative, but it is advanced by no less an authority than M. B. Parkes, who attributes the awkwardness to the scribe’s attempts to modify a large bookhand, of the kind used for Bibles and Psalters, to the demands of the smaller reading text. Parkes provides other examples of comparable hands in small single-column manuscripts, many of which seem to have emanated from the Norman or Anglo-Norman schools. On this basis, Parkes suggests the scribe may well have been “someone trained in the schools, who found service as chaplain or clerk in a bishop’s familia or a baronial household.”⁶⁴ The conjunction of “worldly oriented clerics and a sophisticated urbane baronry” that was particularly marked in England and has been offered as one reason for the strength of the Anglo-Norman hagiographic tradition ensured that there were households where the Roland might have found an audience.⁶⁵

Orderic Vitalis has left us a picture of one such household, that of Hugh of Avranches, earl of Chester and one of William the Conqueror’s chief supporters, who surrounded himself with “swarms of boys of both high and humble birth.”⁶⁶ At many of these courts it was the custom when the knights and squires were gathered to have selected members read aloud from some suitable and improving book. At Hugh’s court this was the responsibility of the chaplain, Gerold:

To great lords, simple knights, and noble boys alike he gave salutary counsel; and he made a great collection of tales of the combats of holy knights, drawn from the Old Testament and more recent records of Christian achievements, for them to imitate. He told them vivid stories of the conflicts of Demetrius and George, of Theodore and Sebastian, of the Theban legion and Maurice its leader, and of Eustace, supreme commander of the army and his companions, who won the crown of martyrdom in heaven. He also told them of the holy champion, William, who after long service in war renounced the world and fought gloriously for the Lord under the monastic rule. And many profited from his exhortations, for he brought them from the wide ocean of the world to the safe harbour of life under the Rule.⁶⁷

Figure 2. MS Bodleian Digby 23 (2), fol. 24V (with permission of the Bodleian Library).

As Marjorie Chibnall notes, these legends represent “a point in eleventh-century culture where hagiography shaded into epic and even romance.”⁶⁸ Numerous legends circulated about the deeds of the warrior saints Demetrius, George, and Theodore, and there was a chanson de geste of the life of St. Eustace.⁶⁹ The “holy champion William” can only be Guillaume d’Orange, also known as Guillaume Courtnez, second only to Charlemagne and Roland among the heroes of Old French epic. The story of Roland would have suited a similar collection admirably. Roland, too, was a “holy champion,” implacable in his hostility to pagans and often regarded as a saint.⁷⁰ He dies for his faith willingly, telling his companions “Ci recevrums ma[r]tyrie” (Here we will receive martyrdom, fol. 35r, line 1922). If the twelfth-century Digby copyist was indeed “someone trained in the schools, who found service as chaplain or clerk in a bishop’s familia or a baronial household,” his career would have been very similar to that of Gerold, and he might well have used the Digby Roland to entertain and improve his own patron’s household, just as Gerold used his “great collection of tales” to entertain and improve Hugh’s knights and squires.

Certainly there are numerous passages in the poem that deliver an emphatic moral, like Archbishop Turpin’s address to the knights before their last battle, which the poet appropriately enough calls a sermon:

Franceis apelet, un sermun lur ad dit.

“Seignurs baruns, Carles nus laissat ci

Pur nostre rei devum nus ben murir.

Chrestïentèt aidez a sustenir.

MS Xpientet

Bataille avrez, vos en estes tuz fiz,

Kar a voz oilz vëez les Sarrazins.

MS auoz

Clamez voz culpes, si preiez Deu mercit.

Asoldrai vos pur voz anmes guarir

Se vos murez, esterez seinz martirs,

Sieges avrez el greignor pareïs”

MS averrez (fol. 21r, lines 1126–35)

Turpin addressed the Franks and gave them a sermon. “Charles has placed us here. It is our duty to die well for our king. Help Christianity to survive! There will be a battle, you may be sure, for you can see the Saracens with your own eyes. Confess your sins and call on God for mercy! I will absolve you to save your souls. If you die, you will be holy martyrs and will have a seat in paradise.”

Here the poem might present the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman baronial household—lords, knights, and boys alike—with an exalted vision of those who fight while ensuring that religious counsel was incorporated into this vision in the figure of Turpin, a prince of the church who was also a mighty warrior and combined the two roles with absolute moral certainty.

There are numerous other passages in which one can easily hear a chaplain’s voice ringing out with moral conviction, reciting lines that tell of the triumph of militant Christianity and attribute the final defeat of the Saracens to divine intervention: “Pur Karlemagne fist Deus vertuz mult granz / Car li soleilz est remés en estant” (For Charlemagne God performed a great deed, for he stopped the sun, fol. 44V, lines 2458–59). Like the saints’ lives, the Roland tells of miracles, faith tested through violence, and the triumph of bellicose Christianity over its opponents. What is harder to imagine is a chaplain delivering one of the innumerable blow-by-blow descriptions of slaughter, such as laisse 104, in which Roland finally draws Durendal:

La bataille est merveilluse e cumune.

Li quens Rollant mie ne s’asoüret.

Fiert de l’espiét tant cum hanste li duret,

A XV. cols l’ad fraitë e perdue

Segre emends to rumpue;

Trait Durendal, sa bone espee, nue,

Sun cheval brochet, si vait ferir Chernuble:

L’elme li freint u li carbuncle luisent

Trenchet le chef e la cheveleüre,

Si li trenchat les oilz e la faiture,

Le blac osberc dunt la maile est menue,

En tut le cors tresqu’en la furcheüre.

Enz en la sele, ki est a or batue,

El cheval est l’espee aresteüe:

Trenchet l’eschine, une n’i out quis [joi]nture,

Tut abat mort el préd sur l’erbe drue.

Après li dist: “Culvert, mar i moüstes!

De Mahumet ja n’i avrez aiüde.

MS auerez?

Par tel glutun n’ert bataille oi vencue.”

(fol. 24V, lines 1320–37, see fig. 2)

The battle was fierce, and all were engaged. Count Roland did not hold back. He struck with his spear as long as its shaft remained, but he broke it completely by the fifteenth blow. He drew out the naked blade of Durendal, his good sword, spurred on his horse, and struck Chernuble. He cut through his helmet, where the carbuncles shone, and through his head and his hair. Cut through his eyes and his face, his shining mail hauberk, and all his body, to the trunk, and then into his saddle, which was decorated with gold, and into his horse and through its spine, without looking for the joints. He left both dead in the thick grass. Then he said, “Wretch, you did wrong to come. You will never have aid from Mohammed. Battle will never be won by such a coward.”

It is much easier to imagine these lines being delivered by a minstrel or jongleur, who could supply appropriately histrionic gestures and perhaps even go so far as to twirl a sword (as Taillefer is said to have done in one account).⁷¹ As we shall see, however, there are grounds for serious doubt about whether minstrels or jongleurs ever had much opportunity to deliver more than short fragments, while there are lines written by clerics, and even by a canon at Oseney, that have something of this brutality. If we are trying to imagine the conditions under which the poem might have been delivered more or less in its entirety, we must think in terms of someone like the chaplain Gerold, however much this may clash with the clichés of medieval culture we have inherited.

So far, we have been considering how the poem might have been delivered during the period when it was copied. At least a century must pass, however, until we get evidence that allows us to link the manuscript to a specific owner. On an opening leaf of the Timaeus, folio [2]r, there is an inscription in what appears to be at least a late thirteenth-century, or more likely a fourteenth-century, hand informing us that one Master Henry of Langley bequeathed it to the Augustinian canons of St. Mary of Oseney (“liber ecckesie sancte marie de osenya ex le/gato magistri henrici de langelya”).⁷² Master Henry is in all probability the Henry Langley who was a canon and prebendary of the king’s free chapel in Bridgnorth Castle, Shropshire, and is last mentioned in a record of 1263.⁷³ Admittedly, the lapse of time between the last reference to Henry and the probable date of the inscription is a little troubling. Abbeys were generally expected to keep track of donations. At Barnwell Priory, for example, which happens to be the one Augustinian house whose custumal survives, all the books were laid out at the beginning of every Lent so that the brothers might pray for the benefactors.⁷⁴ At Oseney donations to the abbey were sometimes even noted in its chronicle or in its cartulary, and presumably the books were supposed to be inscribed at the same time, but one simply has to compare the chronicle to the Ker’s list of surviving books from the abbey to see that the record keeping was not perfect.⁷⁵ If the owner of the Digby Timaeus was this Henry Langley, he was a lucky man. The prebends of Bridgnorth were worth in the neighborhood of twelve pounds a year and were often used for rewarding valued royal servants such as the king’s physician or the clerks of the Wardrobe, who held at least five of them during the mid-thirteenth century. This attractive sinecure was one that Henry would have acquired through the influence of his father, Geoffrey.⁷⁶

While Henry remains largely a cipher, his father was notorious. Geoffrey Langley was chief justice of the King’s Forest, one of the king’s most trusted counsellors, an infamous purchaser of land, and at one point possibly the most hated man in England. According to Matthew Paris, he was stingy and “lessened as far as possible the bounty and accustomed generosity (dapsilitatem et consuetam curialitatem) of the royal table.”⁷⁷ Geoffrey fought in the campaign in Gascony in 1242–43 and was promoted on his return, rising to chief justice of the forest in the year 1250. In this position he enforced the harsh forest laws with unusual vigor⁷⁸ In 1254, as a senior member of the king’s council, he was put in charge of the English and Welsh lands of Prince Edward. His high-handed treatment of the Welsh has often been cited as one of the causes of the rebellion of 1256.⁷⁹ It would have been Geoffrey’s influence that would have won his son the lucrative prebendary.

There is no direct connection between Geoffrey Langley and the Digby manuscript (and even his son probably owned only the Timaeus), but Geoffrey is an interesting figure in his own right, in part because he stands in such stark contrast to the recurring image of the medieval baron as a semiliterate noble savage. Geoffrey was skilled not just in political and legal machinations but also in the business of land speculation in an inflationary economy. He was one of those larger landholders who made a fortune by lending money to lesser knights who were living off fixed rents and then acquiring their lands through foreclosure, a practice that led to increased social tensions culminating in the Barons’ Revolt of 1263, when Langley’s lands were among the first to be pillaged.⁸⁰ The money generated by this aggressive speculation was presumably part of what supported his son in his comfortable prebendary at Bridgnorth, where he could read of the celestial harmonies described in the Timaeus.

What do we know about the first half of this manuscript, Digby 23(1)? The first question to consider is where it came from. One might suppose, as J. H. Waszink did, that a text that at one point belonged to an Oxford scholar had originally been copied there, but O. Pacht and J. J. G. Alexander listed Digby 23(1) among French manuscripts on the basis of its decoration. Their account, however, is summary (“Good initials, diagrams”), and in their introduction they draw attention to the difficulty of distinguishing Norman from Anglo-Norman manuscripts.⁸¹ It would seem, then, that the manuscript could have been copied on either side of the Channel. More important is the intellectual milieu in which Digby 23(1) was first copied and read, particularly its relation to the School of Chartres. It is possible that some of the glossators had actually studied there, taking lessons from the great Bernard of Chartres himself (probably d. 1124) or from masters such as Gilbert of Poitiers (d. 1154) or Ivo of Chartres (d. 1165), although they might also have been from some other center, such as Orléans, or from one of the schools in Paris, which by the end of the century were beginning to coalesce into the university.⁸² At least one of the glossators draws heavily on the work of William of Conches (d. ca. 1154), who studied at Chartres and taught at Paris.⁸³ Oxford, too, was flourishing as a university by the 1180s, and the manuscript could conceivably have been copied there or brought back to Oxford by a wandering scholar soon after it was copied.⁸⁴

Pächt and Alexander date the core text to the first half of the twelfth century, an opinion seconded by Malcolm Parkes, but this may be a little early.⁸⁵ The script resembles that found in some English documents from about 1140 to 1160, while Paul Dutton has suggested that it might date from the third quarter of the century.⁸⁶ The entire text has been carefully glossed over many years. A full account of these glosses would be of great value to literary scholars, who regularly invoke “glossing” as a theoretical model but have had relatively few opportunities to observe the practice up close and in the flesh of the medieval page.⁸⁷ We need a better sense of how glossing worked, not just as an intellectual tradition but as a material practice, and of what we might call the time of the manuscript, that is, the rhythms of its commentary. It would require a better knowledge of medieval philosophy and twelfth-century paleography than mine, however, to offer a proper account. The glosses do not yield easily to the casual passerby. The modern scholars who have transcribed them, Tullio Gregory, Edouard Jeauneau, and Paul Dutton, are steeped in Chartrian commentary. What I hope to offer is a point of interdisciplinary contact to the labor of scholars who have made the Digby glosses the subject of years of careful study.

Unlike the Roland, which attracted only a few brief jottings, many of them no more than pen tests, Digby 23(1) was glossed carefully and extensively, especially during the first two or three generations of its copying. At least four principal hands contribute numerous glosses, both interlinear and marginal, many of them of considerable length. Some of the glosses are early, and one of them has been identified by Dutton as the work of the main scribe.⁸⁸ Others, on both paleographical grounds and because of their more elaborate content, would seem to date from later in the twelfth century or even from early in the thirteenth century, and there are other glosses that are later still. The glosses range in complexity. Many are brief and relatively straightforward, but others take advantage of the space in the margins and explore at considerable length crucial interpretive issues of the period, such as Plato’s use of myth. The early marginal glosses are written as well-spaced text blocks and are what we would now call left and right justified, with regular margins on both sides. The later ones are longer and more cramped and zigzag in and out as they follow the edge of the text. The growth of commentary is straining the limits of the page, but the overall appearance of the pages is still quite elegant. These are not just hasty notes. It would seem, at first glance, that Digby 23(1) was not just a scholar’s book but a master’s book, or at the very least the book of a student who aspired to be master, and that it was passed from one serious commentator to another, who might have used it for the duration of his teaching career.⁸⁹

In reconciling the elaborate cosmology and mythology of the Timaeus, “the most important philosophical text of the early twelfth century,” with Christianity the glossators confronted a formidable intellectual task.⁹⁰ The central points of the text, as understood in the twelfth century, are well summarized by M. D. Chenu:

The world was order and beauty; in all its multiplicity and for all successive generations, it constituted a whole.… The world was necessarily patterned upon a model, a changeless and eternal exemplar, a self-subsistent Living Being, comprehending in itself the natures of all things.… The world’s construction (its creation, as Christian commentators called it) was the work of an Artisan, Efficient Cause, or Demiurge, who acted out of self-diffusing goodness.… The world had a soul, the ordered principle of its movements and cause of life. Underlying the organization of the world was matter (itself also created, said Christian commentators). Man, center of this universe, reflected in himself all its elements and was a “microcosm” in order that he might dominate it all by his intelligence Finally the Timaeus furnished twelfth-century authors with assorted elements of physics—the heavenly spheres, the elements, the concept of space—which provided competition for the Ptolemaic ideas that translators had been bringing into circulation since the beginning of the century.⁹¹

But this cosmic vision had been given the most perplexing form. As Winthrop Wetherbee notes, to “read the Timaeus as philosophy or science requires that one should come to terms with its surface of literary myth.”⁹² Unless one did so, it could easily seem a tissue of lies. For the twelfth century, the mythical surface of the Timaeus was an incentive to glossing perhaps second only to the erotic surface of the Song of Songs, and glossing the Timaeus would be one of the School of Chartres’s great intellectual accomplishments.⁹³ Key terms in this reclamation were involucrum or integumentum, a wrapping or veiling that concealed a deeper meaning under a mythological narrative or literary fiction. Bernard of Chartres writes that “Plato per inuolucrum cuiusdam conuiuii tractat praedictam materiam” (Plato treats the aforementioned material through the involucrum of a certain gathering), while William of Conches refers to “Plato more suo per integumenta loquens” (Plato, in his usual manner, speaking through integumenta).⁹⁴ Both Bernard and William respected Plato’s wisdom, however, despite the anxieties many of their contemporaries felt at deferring to a pagan author. As Dutton argues, “Bernard tended to remain fairly faithful to what he took to be the meaning of Plato, refusing, for instance, to Christianize the Timaeus. The Bible is virtually absent from Bernard’s sources, and he did not associate the world soul with the Holy Spirit, as even Abelard had done.”⁹⁵

At the same time, glossing provided a relatively straightforward exposition of the text’s grammatical meaning, ensuring that the students could actually read the text at more elementary levels. The first great practitioner of this method was Bernard of Chartres, whose teaching style is described, probably with some nostalgia, by John of Salisbury:

Bernard of Chartres, the greatest font of literary learning in Gaul in recent times, used to teach grammar in the following way. He would point out, in reading the authors, what was simple and according to rule. On the other hand, he would explain grammatical figures, rhetorical embellishments, and sophistical quibbling, as well as the relation of given passages to other studies. He would do so, however, without trying to teach everything at one time. On the contrary, he would dispense his instruction to his hearers gradually, in a manner commensurate with their powers of assimilation.… And since memory is strengthened and the mind sharpened by practice, Bernard would bend every effort to bring his students to imitate what they were hearing. In some cases he would rely on exhortation, in others he would resort to punishments, such as flogging. Each student was daily required to recite part of what he had heard on the previous day. Some would recite more, others less. Each succeeding day thus became the disciple of its predecessor. The evening exercise, known as the “declination,” was so replete with grammatical instruction that if anyone were to take part in it for an entire year, provided he were not a dullard, he would become thoroughly familiar with the [correct] method of speaking and writing.⁹⁶

Bernard was obviously offering instruction to a class of various levels, whose more junior members needed basic grammatical and rhetorical instruction, line by line and word by word.⁹⁷ This was glossing. As Jeauneau puts it, “While the commentary only shows the ideas in the text, the gloss, without losing sight of the ideas, also concerns itself with the letter of the text. To gloss a text is to follow the letter, sentence by sentence and even word by word, and it is also to show the chain of expressions and of ideas (continuatio litterae) in such a way that the analysis of the most minute details does not cause the reader to lose sight of the overall picture.”⁹⁸ Jeaneau’s definition echoes that of Bernard’s famous pupil, William of Conches, whose commentary on the Timaeus dates from the 1140s.⁹⁹ Glossing, in other words, was initially an oral practice, although masters preparing their lectures would write key glosses in the margins and students listening to them would copy key points down, so that there must have been a large number of informal or partially glossed texts in circulation. From this extensive classroom instruction, a master might compile a set of written glosses, first as “a kind of ‘work in progress’ on a particular text,” which would not circulate widely, and then as a more polished composition that would.¹⁰⁰ This comprehensive gloss would still follow the pattern of the lectures, working through the text phrase by phrase, as does the gloss of Bernard on the Timaeus, identified by Dutton in 1984, which explores the mysteries of philosophical mythology but also comments on the text’s grammatical structure. As Dutton puts it, “the comprehensive gloss pioneered by Bernard wedded the best features of the soaring commentary with the chief virtues of the grounded gloss, providing a middle way of steady progress in the critical study of philosophical texts.”¹⁰¹ The glosses on the Timaeus normally circulated independently from the text so that a scholar who wished to use them would normally need to compare two books. A book like Digby 23(1) would provide assistance at crucial points for those who did not have access to the full glosses or did not want to carry them around.

Digby 23(1) begins with Calcidius’s introduction, its initial letter “I” set out as a greyhound whose tongue flowers out onto a field of blue speckled in red: “Isocrates in exhortationibus/ suis uirtutem laudans; cum omnium bonorum tociusque prosperita/tis consistere causam penes eam dice/ret; addidit solam eam esse que/ res inpossibiles redigeret ad possibi/lem facilitatem” (Isocrates, in his speeches, praises virtue, since he says that it is the cause of almost all good things and all fortunate conditions, and adds that it alone is what makes impossible things possible and even easy, fol. 3r, fig. 3).¹⁰² Various interlinear glosses have been added. Since the form “Isocrates” was not that familiar, one gloss clarifies that he was a certain philosopher. The first large marginal gloss is on the right-hand column and explains the identity of Calcidius, archdeacon of Cordova.¹⁰³

Many of the glosses are marked by sigla. It appears that each glossator uses a different one: a diagonal line with two dots, a small triangle that suggests a harp, two parallel check marks, a wavy line with three dots, and a squiggly line rather like a pothook. In some cases these function as insertion marks or signes de renvoi, indicating where in the main text the gloss should be applied. In other cases, where there is no corresponding siglum in the text, they might be interpreted as versions of paraph signs, marking the beginning of the gloss. Since each glossator appears to uses a single distinctive mark, they also can serve to distinguish the glossators, marking each man’s individual contribution to the ongoing tradition.¹⁰⁴ Some of the glosses have no siglum, however, and a few, bafflingly, have two.¹⁰⁵ The earliest glosses are generally less ambitious and less heavily abbreviated. On folio 14V, for example, a glossator whose hand Dutton has identified as that of the main scribe explains the associations of Pallas Athena: “Vere bellicosa pallas dicitur Cum dea ra/tionis et etiam discret/ionis sit; que considerari oportet. et enim maxi/me necessarie sunt in / bellicis negotiis” (Truly Pallas is said to be warlike since she is the goddess of reason and discretion, which ought to be considered, and indeed are essential, in the business of war). Similarly, on folio 5V, there is a gloss marked by a harp and two check marks that provides a simple summary of a key point: “Duo ornamenta assigaui/mus militibus scilicet forti/tudinem et mansuetudinem/ fortitudinem contra aduersarios man/suetudinem contra obedientes” (We assign two distinctions to soldiers: strength and mildness: strength against enemies and mildness for those they govern). In comparison, the pothook glossator, whose hand dates from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, makes longer and more complex contributions.¹⁰⁶

Figure 3. MS Bodleian Digby 23(1), fol. 3r (with permission of the Bodleian Library).

The dialogue proper begins on folio 4v (fig. 4), with Socrates counting the number who come together to continue the previous day’s discussion: “Vnus, duo, tres; quartum enumero/ vestro thimee requiro, qui hesterni quidem/epuli conuiue fueritis; hodierni praebi/tores inuitatoresque ex condicto residea/tis” (One, two, three, but I ask you, Timaeus, where is the fourth who had agreed yesterday to be part of our banquet? You don’t make up the agreed upon number of guests or providers).¹⁰⁷ On this page there are two large glosses, one across the top and one on the left-hand column. The latter gloss, by the same man who on the previous folio tells us who Calcidius was, here gives a good sense of the allegoresis that could be brought to bear on the text.

Vtitur dialogo et ponit sena/rium numerum ut operis de/signet perfectionem que sicut/ille numerus est perfectus/ et constat ex suis partibus ita/hoc opus perfectum est et sic con/stat ex suis partibus ut nichil infra sit quod non sit necessarium/ nec aliquid excrescat quod non sit su/perfluum. In primis praemittit quasi quedam ludicra quedam ficticia quedam leuiora ut quodam modo assuefaciant animum audito/ris ad suscipienda graviora

[Plato] uses the form of a dialogue and he inserts the number six so that the work will represent perfection, for just as this number is perfect and is made up of its parts, so this work is perfect and is made up of its parts, so that there is nothing below that is not necessary nor does he remove anything that is not superfluous. First of all, he sets things out, as if they were jokes, or a fiction, or something casually amusing, as if in a certain way they were to prepare the mind of his listener to take up heavier matters.

Figure 4. MS Bodleian Digby 23(1), fol. 4V (with permission of the Bodleian Library).

Why one, two, three, and four should make up six, or why six should be considered perfect may not be immediately apparent. Here the glosses of Bernard are helpful: “Socrates … requirit unum quem sentit abesse, non forsitan realiter, sed sub significatione. Nam subtracto quarto, remanent partes quae coniunctae faciunt primum perfectum numerum, id est sex, et ideo a perfecto incipit” (Socrates … asks after one whom he feels is missing, not perhaps realistically, but under a deeper meaning. For if you take away four, the parts that remain together make the first perfect number, that is, six, and therefore the work starts from a perfect number).¹⁰⁸ In other words, if, having removed four, we add one plus two plus three, we get six, which is a perfect number because it combines the first three prime numbers. It is because the gloss is so succinct that it is slightly cryptic. It assumes familiarity with a tradition of mathematical commentary and would make sense to another master who was equally familiar both with the text and with certain approaches to its interpretation.

One of the most striking contributions of the pothook glossator comes on folio 5r. The gloss begins “Socrates tracturus de positiva iusticia. non inuenit regnum nec rem publicam aliquam dispositiam secundum rationem/ positive iusticie. Proposuit ergo rem publicam/ quamdam et eam ordinauit secundum dispositionem quam considerauerat in macroscosmo et microcos/mo” (Socrates, when he was going to discuss positive justice, did not see any state ordered according to the logic of positive justice, and therefore proposed a certain [hypothetical] state and arranged it according to a certain plan which he considered in light of the macrocosm and the microcosm, fig. 5).¹⁰⁹ The remainder of the gloss, which has been transcribed and translated by Dutton, compares three hierarchies: that of the macrocosm, from God to devils; that within man himself, from wisdom, located in the head, down through the heart to the feet and hands; and that in the state, from the senators, down through the soldiers, to those working in the mechanical arts such as skinners, cobblers, tanners, and farmers, who are outside the city. Dutton has argued persuasively that this gloss draws heavily either on the glosses of William of Conches or on glosses that are very similar to them.¹¹⁰ As Dutton notes, the Digby glossator’s account differs in a few details. The glossator includes farmers among those men living outside the city walls, for example, whereas William makes no mention of them.¹¹¹ The most striking difference, however, is that William does not explicitly use the terms “microcosm” or “macrocosm.” Since the pothook glossator follows William so closely in other respects, it is tempting to think that this innovation may be his own. We may never know who this Digby glossator was, who his teachers were, or even where he taught, because at this stage the manuscript might still have been on the Continent. He remains for the moment an anonymous but judicious reader. Whoever he was, his gloss touches the very heart of the anthropological implication of the Timaeus that “man is himself a universe” and that cosmic order is reflected in human life.¹¹²

Figure 5. MS Bodleian Digby 23(1), fo. 5r (with permission of the Bodleian Library).

One of the central concerns for the masters commenting on the Timaeus was its use of myth, a problem that the reader first encounters when Critias begins his account of what his grandfather, Critias the elder, heard from Solon about Atlantis. While in Egypt, Solon discussed the earliest times with the priests, and told them how Deucalion and Pyrrha survived the flood. But the priests were not impressed, and one said, “O Solo, Graeci pueri semper estis nec quisquam e graecia senex” (O Solon, you Greeks are all children and none of you is old, fol. IIV).¹¹³ Then the priest went on to explain that the Greek story of Phaethon, the child of the sun, who harnessed his father’s chariot and then burned the earth when he could not control it, insisting that “fabulosa quidem putatur, sed est vera” (it is considered by some to be a fable, but is true). The priest explains that the story refers to long-term variations in the climate that produce floods or droughts. It is a passage carefully noted by William of Conches as an integumentum with a moral truth:

Huius rei talis est veritas. Pheton interpretatur ardor. Qui filius solis esse dictur quia ex sole calor procedit. Qui filius Climenes esse dicitur id est humoris quia sine humore fervor esse non potest. Hic currus solis ducit. Sol dicitur habere currum propter circuitionem circa terram. Hunc quatuor equi trahunt quia quatuor sunt diei proprietates: in mane enim rubet, deinde splendet, postea calet, ad ultimum descendit et tepet. Quibus nomina equorum conveniunt. Primus enim dicitur Eritheus id est rubens, secundus Acteon id est splendens, tercius Lampos id est ardens, quartus Philogeus id est amans terram.¹¹⁴

The truth of this matter is as follows. Phaethon means heat, and he is said to be the son of the sun since heat comes from the sun. He is said to be the son of Climene, that is, of moisture, since without moisture there can be no heat. Phaethon guides the chariot of the sun. The sun is said to have a chariot because it goes around the earth. Four horses draw this chariot since the day has four properties: it is red in the morning, then it shines brightly, then it provides clear light, and then at the last it fades. The names of the four horses match these four stages: the first is called Eritheus, that is, ruddy; the second Acteon, that is, shining; the third Lampos, that is burning, and the fourth Philogeus, that is, loving the land.

On folio 12r, the pothook glossator offers a long gloss on this passage, and as far as I am able to read it, he echoes William point for point, as he describes the etymology of the four horses of the sun and the four climatic zones they govern.

The priest then tells Solon that before the great flood Athens excelled all others in her morals and valor. Solon begs to hear more, and the priest says he is happy to continue, chiefly because of his gratitude to that goddess (Pallas Athena) who has founded and supported both states, Athens and, eight thousand years later, Egypt. She founded Athens first, “annis fere mille, ex indigete agro et uulcanio semine” (almost a thousand years after the time of the god-born or god-bearing field and seed of Vulcan, fol. 13V). Well versed in Greek mythology, the twelfth-century commentators recognized the deeper significance that lies behind the flowery but apparently innocuous reference to the date Athens was founded, for Vulcan spills his seed on the field when he attempts to rape Venus, and this gives birth to Ericthonius. The field, or the man from it, is “a diis genito” (from the gods born) as one of the later glossators helpfully explains in a supplementary gloss in the right margin. Here, too, Bernard provides the basic information,¹¹⁵ while William delves deeper:

Legitur in fabulis Vulcanum se Palladi voluisse commiscere. Qua repugnante, cecidit semen in terram ex quo natus est Erictonius habens draguntinos pedes. Unde ad celandam turpitudinem pedum usum curruum invenit.… Huius integumenti talis est veritas. Vulcanus aliquando dicitur ignis, et tunc dicitur vulcanus quasi volicanus id est volans candor quia volat in altum et canus est per favillas …. Hic Palladi se commiscere desiderat quando ex fervore ingenii aliquis perfecte sapientie aspirat. Sed Pallas reluctatur quia nullus in hac vita perfectam potest habere sapientiam. Sed quamvis Pallada non retineat, semen tamen elicit quia etsi perfectam non habeat sapientiam, aliquam tamen adquirit quia

“Est quodam prodire tenus si non datur ultra”

Sed semen illud cadit in terram quia ex fragili et terreno corpore gravatur.¹¹⁶

We read in fables that Vulcan wished to mate with Pallas. And when she refused, his semen fell to the ground from which Ericthonius was born, with serpentine feet. So, to hide the shame of his feet, he invented the chariot.… This is the truth of this integumentum. Fire is sometimes called Vulcan, in which case it is called “vulcan” as if it were “vol-can,” that is, flying whiteness, since it flies high and is white like glowing ashes.… Vulcan wishes to unite with Pallas when anyone, moved by his own fervor, aspires to perfect wisdom. But Pallas resists since no one in this life can attain perfect wisdom. But although Pallas does not retain the semen, she does draw it out because even if one cannot acquire perfect wisdom, one can acquire some, for

“It is something to go as far as one can, even if one cannot go any further.”

But that semen fell to the ground because it was weighed down by the fragile, earthly body.

Several of the Digby glossators tackle this passage, one that also attracted the attention of Bernard Silvestris.¹¹⁷ One of the earlier ones fills the left-hand column of folio 13 verso with shorter points that give the gist of what is going on, beginning “Hic ostendit ciuitatem atenien/sium ciuitatem egypcioruum esse priorem et hoc numero annonrum et quan/titate temporis” (Here he shows the city of Athens to be older than that of the Egyptians, and this by the number of years and length of time). Once again the pothook glossator goes much further, raising the same points made by William of Conches, often with similar phrasing. He notes the story of Erectheus and his dragon’s feet and the crucial allegorical point that perfect wisdom cannot be attained “quia in hacuita nulla est perfecta sapientia.”

After this, the glosses become less frequent for a while, and many pages are almost untouched, although there are a few doodles and nota bene hands. Once we come to the discussion of the composition of the world soul at folio 25V, however, the glosses resume in force, and they are often accompanied by diagrams. A very large part of the glossing, including the work of the pothook glossator, was completed within roughly half a century of the original copying, but the manuscript continued to attract some glosses for years to come, probably well into the fourteenth century. On folio 55V there are a series of notes in a thirteenth-century hand on Timaeus 35B to 36B, the discussion of the mathematical divisions that form the world soul.

While some of the glosses in Digby 23(1) may date from the fourteenth century, the bulk of them, and many of the most substantial ones, were completed within the first few generations. This pattern echoes that of other manuscripts of the Timaeus, where the glosses bridge the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and the status of the Timaeus in the schools at large, where it certainly declines from the position it held in the twelfth century but does not completely disappear.¹¹⁸ In Paris the Timaeus appears to have been part of the arts curriculum until about 1255, but no student work on the Timaeus has yet been identified nor have any student notes. Dutton concludes that the students of Paris in the first half of the thirteenth century were probably required to know the text only second hand, or in a cursory fashion, and were not forced “to engage with the Timaeus, explore its difficult design, unravel its account of early Greek history, or probe its deeper metaphysics.”¹¹⁹ Nor would the doctors of theology and philosophy have spent much time on a text that played little role in late scholastic debates (although Thomas Aquinas cited it on a few occasions and touched on some of its themes).¹²⁰ The situation at Oxford is less well documented but was probably somewhat similar. There are a number of thirteenth-and fourteenth-century copies of the Timaeus of English provenance, such as Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Digby 217, a late thirteenth-century copy that contains glosses that also draw heavily on William of Conches, and one manuscript was copied in Oxford in 1423.¹²¹ It seems that at both Paris and Oxford the Timaeus continued to be read but increasingly was relegated to the status of a familiar classic.¹²²

The preceding rough-and-ready account may provide some sense of the riches in the first half of this famous manuscript. But apart from being brought together as one book, how much do the two parts really have to do with each other?

It is not clear quite when the two parts of the manuscript were joined. Henry’s name appears only on the opening folios of the Timaeus, but this inscription appears on paleographical grounds to be much later than the word “Chalcidius” or the verses of Juvenal. This indicates his name was added after the two parts are thought to have been brought together but also some time after Henry’s death, leaving his ownership of the Roland moot. For what it is worth, Samaran dates the word “Chalcidius” and the verses from Juvenal to the thirteenth century, but with such short examples it is hard to be sure.¹²³ The joint manuscript might just possibly have belonged to Henry Langley, last heard of in 1263, but it could equally well have belonged to one of the Augustinian canons, possibly a friend of Henry’s, in which case the canons had kept Henry in remembrance for at least a few generations when they finally entered his name.

Later additions, doodles and pen tests, and the material copied into the opening leaves suggest that the book was still being consulted in the fourteenth century. The opening bifolium of Digby 23(1) includes an unidentified sermon on the Virgin that contains an echo of a sermon by Thomas de Cobham.¹²⁴ On the last page, folio 55V, the page with the thirteenth-century glosses on the proportions of the world soul, there is a memorandum in a fourteenth-century hand of a request for materials for illuminations: “mitte mihi per iohanem fratrem tuum dimidium centum/ de partie Gold videlicet quinquaginta folia/ Item dimidiam libram de vermelon Item dimidiam/ unciam de bona azura” (Send me by your Brother John a half hundred of Gold, that is, fifty sheets. Item a half pound of vermilion. Item a half ounce of good azure). These are most likely materials for illuminating manuscripts, although they could also serve for panel paintings. Ian Short argues that, since the middle of a bound volume would scarcely be a convenient place for such an order, the two parts must still have been separate at this point, but how then can we account for the appearance of the word “Chalcidius” in part two?¹²⁵ Turning to the second section, in addition to the verses from Juvenal and the reference to Chalcidius on the flyleaves, there are a variety of pen tests, usually confined to individual letters but once an entire phrase, “Domine, Dominus noster qui ad,” which runs across the top of folio 45V. In addition, on folio [73r] there are Middle English verses that have faded very badly and might date from the fourteenth or even fifteenth century. Samaran examined them under ultraviolet light, and transcribed them as follows:

… men among … he dos to wi ………

grene and gray … as sinful men w ……..

mykil wrong … mani …. at was ……

at maked his song of so ………..

all his ban …… say reant oym. W.….

him …. niht …. long for g …. was ….

allaye (?) to hurten we ……………..

long …………….. was ……..

…………. n…..es ful a songe ……

wryte…… s………………

Whenever it came to be bound with the Timaeus, it would seem that the Roland was still being read in the fourteenth century and read by clerics who also composed, or appreciated, lyrics in Middle English.

At first it might appear that the two halves of the manuscript have little in common and that their juxtaposition is of interest only as a reflection of the possibly idiosyncratic taste of an early reader. Indeed, some scholars have been at pains to disassociate the two even further, suggesting that the conjunction is largely accidental and that the canons kept the Roland out of respect for a donor or simply to add weight to the collection, rather than out of any desire to actually read the poem. Dominica Legge for one clearly believes that the Roland could have had no interest for the canons. She offers a number of reasons why they might have kept the book and bound it with the Timaeus. They might have meant to use it for flyleaves. It might have belonged to a patron, such as Sir Robert d’Oilli, founder of the collegiate chapel of St George, which was incorporated into Oseney in 1149. She even suggests they might have used it as a “makeweight,” as if padding one booklet with another in which one had no interest were an attested practice.¹²⁶ Like Delbouille’s suggestion that the manuscript might have fallen into the hands of a jongleur during the first century of its circulation, these explanations seem a desperate effort to avoid the possibility that the canons kept the Roland because they enjoyed reading it.

Yet the two parts are closer in spirit and form than they might seem. Both are scholars’ books, largely unadorned and affordable texts, and they belong to the same cultural milieu. The first part, the Timaeus, was probably copied by a northern French scribe, probably from the schools, and was intended for the use of a scholar. In the hands of this scholar, or one of his colleagues, the book made its way to England, where roughly a century later we find it in the hands of the prebendary, Master Henry Langley, who donated it to the Augustinian canons living on the outskirts of Oxford, who had regular dealings with students, renting them housing and possibly hearing their confessions.¹²⁷ The second part, the Roland, was copied by an Anglo-Norman scribe, who might well have received his training in the French schools. Its format is simpler than that of the Digby Timaeus, its script less elegant, its parchment of poorer quality. It too may have been intended for a scholar, however—in its rough script and simple format it resembles cheap copies of Boethius, Cicero, Seneca, and Juvenal, as well as other copies of the Timaeus. It is hardly surprising then to find that a century later this book is in the hands of the Augustinian canons of Oxford. The Timaens and the Roland might seem to belong to different worlds, but the Norman and Anglo-Norman scribes who copied them lived in the same one.

The Digby scribe appears to have had at best a limited knowledge of epic material, judging by his misspellings of famous names, but many clerics were steeped in it, or so ran the complaint. John Mirk, the prior of an Augustinian house in about 1400, claims that “the bad old priest is garrulous, wrathful, full of proverbs and given to fables; sitting among his boon companions, he recites the wars of princes [bella principum], and instils into the ears of his juniors anecdotes of his early life, which he ought to weep for rather than repeat.”¹²⁸ The sharp-tongued Guibert de Nogent condemns the chancellor of Henry I, Gaudry, who became bishop of Laon, as “more of a soldier than a clerk … In word and manner he was remarkably unstable, remarkably lightweight. He took delight in talk about military affairs, dogs, and hawks, as he had learned to do among the English.”¹²⁹ Not everyone disapproved of this interest, however. According to his biographer, Abbot Suger kept his monks awake by telling them “stories, sometimes into the middle of the night, about the deeds of strong men (gesta virorum fortium), that he had either seen or learned about.”¹³⁰ Medieval preachers often referred to the epic heroes and their gesta to stir up their audience or drive home a point—thus providing one of the major sources of evidence for the circulation of these stories.¹³¹ Orderic Vitalis may have been shocked by the frivolities of jongleurs, but his work is filled with allusions to Charlemagne, Roland, and the legends of Troy and Thebes. Library catalogues suggest that monks often kept private volumes, including romances, which the monastery library would have inherited when they died. One of the best-documented cases is the early fifteenth-century Benedictine Thomas Arnold, of St. Augustine’s Canterbury, whose collection of French romances passed into the abbey library, but there are many others.¹³² One of their brothers also owned a copy of the chanson de geste Aspremont.¹³³ Most tellingly of all, the Benedictines of Peterborough owned a book “de bello Vallis Runcie cum aliis in gallice” (of the Battle of Roncevaux and other matters, in French).¹³⁴ The Augustinian canons were not the only English religious with some version of the Roland in their library.

But we can come a little closer still to the world of Digby 23 in the work of Thomas Wykes, the thirteenth-century chronicler of Oseney Abbey and a staunch royalist. Wykes thrills to the deeds of Prince Edward at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, which he celebrates both in the chronicle and in bellicose verses:

Concurrunt partes, quatiuntur tela, vigore

Militis Eduuardi madidantur rura cruore.

Occidt ense Comes, procerees mucrone necantur;

Sic vincunt victi, victores exsuperantur.¹³⁵

The parties meet; weapons are clashed; the fields are moistened with blood by the vigor of the soldier Edward. The earl is slain by the sword; the barons are put to death by the sword’s edge. Thus the vanquished conquer and the conquerors are overcome.

No doubt the canons did occasionally have books dumped upon them or accept them as pledges or out of pure courtesy.¹³⁶ But if they could write like this, surely they would also have enjoyed a chanson de geste.

Any effort to reconstruct medieval reading practice must be highly tentative, of course, but Digby 23 does suggest a coherent and plausible story of how the Roland might have been delivered. It suggests that the poem was never far from clerical hands, and it seems that by the end of the thirteenth century those were the hands of the Augustinian canons at Oseney. The book may have had something of the status of a saint’s life, serving as an inspirational moral poem to read aloud, or possibly even to chant, to the canons and their guests in the refectory. If, with Paul Zumthor, we hear the poem sung to a lost tune, the tune should be not a minstrel’s battle cry but a canon’s chanting. The Roland could, for example, have been sung after the fashion of a saint’s life, although quite how saints’ lives were sung is itself a tricky question.¹³⁷ Jacques Chailley found evidence for such singing in the formula “Tu Autem,” which occurs, with its melody, in a French strophe in the St. Martial MS, a major liturgical collection made in Limoges at the very end of the twelfth century, now Paris Bibliothèque Nationale MS lat. 1139. Chailley suggested that the “Tu Autem” might provide the last strophe for a sung saint’s life or for a romance because the formula also occurs at the end of the long Anglo-Norman epic Horn.¹³⁸ Joseph Duggan provides one example of what this might have sounded like in his performance of the Roland, delivering each line slowly and to the same basic tune, producing a hypnotic effect that to modern ears sounds more liturgical than jongleuresque.¹³⁹ Chailley also suggests that saints’ lives might have been sung after the manner of troped epistles, in which short passages, often two lines, from a vernacular life were inserted into the chanted Latin epistle. If this were the model, the story might follow a more complex musical structure.¹⁴⁰ In either case, liturgical chant provides the basic musical technique for the oral delivery of vernacular narrative. John Stevens takes us back once more into the world of the Augustinian canons when he notes that “the Tu autem formula was used at the end of mealtime readings in religious houses” and that “a very likely occasion for the recitation or chanting of a saint’s life would be when the monks were gathered in the refectory—in silence, be it remembered—for meals.”¹⁴¹

On the other hand, Digby 23 could equally well have been read by a solitary canon in his leisure hours. The canon might have borrowed it from the abbey library, or he might have regarded it as his own. The personal memorandum and the pen tests, the scraps of poetry, and the single sermon all tend to suggest that during its years at Oseney Digby 23 was frequently treated as a private book, both before and after it was officially noted in the abbey’s holdings. When Stengel examined Digby 23(2) in the 1870s, he even thought he saw grease stains in it, which suggests the book was being used familiarly, and its faded and rubbed quality tends to confirm this.¹⁴² We might then imagine Henry Langley’s friend retiring to his cell and dividing some of his leisure time between perusing first his copy of the Timaeus, then his copy of the Roland, and occasionally a copy of Juvenal.

As an Augustinian canon, this man would have been expected to negotiate between the life of the cloister and more public duties and would have participated in a community that valued both spirituality and intellectual accomplishment. The canons, while not monks in the strictest sense, followed a monastic rule and were regarded as “clerics with monastic characteristics,” aspiring to the monk’s stability.¹⁴³ As the great Augustinian educational theorist, Hugh of Saint Victor, noted, “A quiet life is just as important [as humility] for discipline, whether the quiet be interior, so that the mind is not distracted with illicit desires, or exterior, so that leisure and opportunity are provided for credible and useful studies.”¹⁴⁴ But the canons, living in cities, were also brought into daily contact with the world, and their rule provided for a civic function, including preaching and general education. According to the twelfth-century abbot Anselm of Havelburg, the Regular Canon “being generally sought out by rude people is chosen and accepted, and like a lantern lighting a dark place, teaching the world by word and example, is loved and honoured”¹⁴⁵ In the case of the canons of Oseney, however, the people seeking them out were scarcely rude. Many of them were students. The canons played an important role as landlords of student digs, renting whole blocks of rooms that would eventually become student halls, and the abbey “apparently permitted scholars and students who were not of the house or order to use the facilities of the convent, principally the refectory and the cloisters.”¹⁴⁶

The Augustinian order was known for its moderation, emphasizing learning, eschewing mortification, and deliberating rejecting the more austere practice of the Cistercians, which it considered ostentatious.¹⁴⁷ Many Augustinian convents served meat three times a week, and the canons wore linen garments, as opposed to the rougher woolen habits of monks. Moderate conversation was sometimes tolerated in refectory. There was considerable flexibility within the order, both from one house to another and within a house. Dickinson, a warm advocate of the twelfth-century order, notes that “the rule of St. Augustine affronted a powerful section of religious opinion in refusing to insist on complete uniformity of treatment within the convent—victus et tegumentum non aequaliter omnibus quia non aequaliter valetis omnes sed potius unicuique sicut cuique opus fuerit” (Food and clothing should not be allotted equally to everybody, since not everyone has the same state of health, but rather to each according to his need).¹⁴⁸ This moderation encouraged intellectual pursuits. More time was allotted to study than in other orders and the Augustinian rule stipulated that “manuscripts shall be sought at a fixed hour every day.”¹⁴⁹

What the canon made of the Roland is another matter. He could have approached the Roland, as some preachers apparently did, as a tale of militant Christianity and as suitable material to read or even chant in the refectory or to use to flesh out a popular sermon. Of course he might have been a frivolous and worldly man, given to talking about “military matters, dogs, and hawks,” like the scandalous Bishop Gaudry, in which case the volume would have been a private dissipation and perhaps also an imaginative release of suppressed violence. Guibert derides Gaudry because once, coming across a peasant carrying a lance, he snatched it up and “couched it as if to strike an opponent.”¹⁵⁰ Gaudry was playing at being a knight. A third possibility is that the canon read the text privately but seriously, bringing to it the glossator’s mentality that he applied to the Timaeus. This reading might have brought him close to some modern interpreters, who have pored over the text and extracted from it moral lessons that would have amazed Leon Gautier or Gaston Paris. Peter Haidu captures this shift from a text that is “heard” and sings praise to a text that is considered intellectually and raises troubling questions. As he suggests, the poem illustrates the central conundrum of chivalry, that the knightly class was seen as vital guarantor of social stability but was given over to internecine warfare:

The text sings the praises of force, of military display, the brilliance of armaments. It gives voice to the rhetoric of mutual dependency, vassalic duty and the lord’s protection, singing the virtues of the warrior and the social cohesiveness of men at war for common ideals according to a common code of value and behavior. It also depicts the specific mechanism by which these very virtues are turned into ghastly destructiveness, in which lived and sung ideals of courage, loyalty, and group identification turn into betrayal, somber death, and collective loss. The relations between the assertions of the dominant class ideology and the performance of its narrative program can only be termed tragically deconstructive.¹⁵¹

Haidu returns to the text to elicit deeper and more troubling readings. Transforming narrative into allegory and propagandistic simplicity into internal tensions, he finds in the poem moral ambivalence, abstraction (for the text deals “with a political system rather than just its actors”) and suggestions of an emerging guilt culture with its split subjectivities.¹⁵² Haidu is reading as a scholar and perhaps the Digby Roland’s first identifiable readers shared something of this frame of mind. At least one of the canons knew scraps of Juvenal by heart, and it was the lines from the ninth satire that he chose to write on the last leaf of the Roland:

Malo pater tibi sit Tersides dumodo tu sis

Eacide simil Uulcaniaque arma capessas

Quam te Terside similem producat Hachilles.

I would rather that Thersites were your father as long as you were like the grandson of Aecus (that is, Achilles) and could wield the arms of Vulcan, than that you should have Achilles as your father but be like Thersides.

Or, as Gilbert Highet puts it, “Better to be a hero born of a fool than a fool born of a hero.”¹⁵³ Why were these particular lines so close to the canon’s heart? Was he a man of humbler birth who aspired to be an Achilles, or was he reflecting cynically on the knights he knew who were closer to Thersites? Was he perhaps appalled by the endemic violence around him, the gang warfare and brawls between the northern and southern factions that plagued medieval Oxford?¹⁵⁴ It is, at any rate, an intriguing piece of marginalia, and unless we are to dismiss it as an idle doodle on the part of someone who happened to be holding the Roland in his hand but never read it, it becomes the poem’s first gloss.¹⁵⁵

A cleric chanting in the refectory or a cleric turning from the Timaeus to the Roland-these two scenes form the core of one possible history of the way Digby 23 was read in the Middle Ages, but it is one that has been almost systematically rejected, so that the Song of Roland can be preserved in all its martial and national purity as a French epic. The intellectual interests of the Augustinian canons have not received attention from the poem’s modern critics, nor have the reading customs of English baronial households or the political anxieties in England during the manuscript’s first two centuries, or anything to do with the communities where the manuscript first appears. In this regard, the attitude of Old French scholars to the Digby manuscript has been curiously conflicted. On the one hand, there has been a determined effort to preserve the classification of Digby 23 as a manuscrit de jongleur, because this preserves the text’s status as a close reflection of an oral performance for a chivalric audience. At the same time, the French poem must be extracted from the English manuscript and saved from its taint, which means that in practice scholars have ignored the manuscript as far as possible. As a result there are a large number of Old French scholars, from Leon Gautier to Paul Zumthor, who have pronounced on the status of the manuscript without ever examining it closely.

With the Roland the taint of writing is compounded by the taint of the foreign and the provincial. It is a singular embarrassment that the earliest written version of France’s national epic survives in an manuscript copied by an Englishman in an Anglo-Norman dialect. It was imperative that the early editors distance the true, original, and national poem from this corrupt witness.¹⁵⁶ Gautier confronts the problem in his first edition, claiming that “the dialect of a manuscript comes from its copyist, and not all from its author. It is in the heart and not the form of the Song that we should seek some light.”¹⁵⁷ In his school edition of 1887, he takes a curiously convoluted path, insisting on his fidelity to the manuscript (“NOT A SINGLE WORD has ever been given an orthographical form THAT WAS NOT OFFERED BY THE OXFORD MANUSCRIPT”) while at the same time undertaking to restore more than five hundred lines to produce “a text that fits the rules of our dialect.”¹⁵⁸ L. Clédat “francisized’ the vowels in his edition of 1886 on the grounds that the Chanson de Roland was “d’origine française.”¹⁵⁹ Joseph Bédier, the poem’s most prolific editor and popularizer after Gautier, was highly critical of such normalization. He reproduced the text of the Oxford manuscript with only the most minor emendations, and subsequent editors have followed him in this regard. But for all this fidelity to the words preserved in the manuscript, Bedier, too, distinguished between the original poem and the actual written text that survives, “a late transposition in insular French of a work that was originally written in a different idiom.”¹⁶⁰ Thus the manuscript was effectively dismissed in favor of the pristine original. As one admirer put it, “After the work of Bedier no one again will surely ever dispute that the Chanson de Roland, French in language and French in spirit, was a product of the essential genius of France.”¹⁶¹

Samaran’s doubts that the Digby manuscript was ever associated with a jongleur have not prevailed. We call the poem it contains the Chanson de Roland, accepting the title Michel first provided, one that occurs nowhere in the manuscript. We refer to the words preserved in this specific manuscript, and we mean that these words, with some variation, were once sung, as Gautier’s minstrel sang them, in a great hall one long afternoon or through a series of repeated performances.

Was There Ever a “Song of Roland”?

Given the pressing need of postrevolutionary France for a national epic, had the Chanson de Roland not existed, it would have been necessary to invent it. And the Chanson de Roland was, if not invented, at the very least constructed. By supplying it with an appropriate epic title, isolating it from its original codicological context, and providing a general history of minstrel performance in which its pure origin could be located, the early editors presented the 4,002-line poem as sung French epic. They fashioned the poem they desired.

There is, then, an important sense in which if there ever was such a work as the Chanson de Roland it does not survive. If the 4,002 lines now preserved in the Digby manuscript ever were a minstrel’s song, that is not what they were in the manuscript during the twelfth century when they were copied, nor at some later date, when they came to rest alongside the Timaeus. If there ever was a Song of Roland, it was not the late Anglo-Norman transposition but an earlier poem in a slightly different dialect. But this raises a further question. Was there ever such a song, a song of 4,002 lines that was recited or sung by a minstrel and that more or less corresponded to the version preserved in the Digby manuscript? This in turn depends on whether there ever was a tradition of extended or serial recitation in which a work of this kind could have been performed. Here we will encounter another form of material support, that of the sung poem. Just as the material support of the written text is not confined to the physical stuff of ink, parchment, and paper, but must be extended to include the social conventions that govern a text’s circulation, so the material support of an oral poem is not just confined to the sounds of the voice, but must be extended to include the social conventions that govern performance. And just as the materiality of writing is often occluded, so too is the materiality of the voice. Gautier’s noble vision of a minstrel’s dignified and sustained performance bears little relation to what we actually know about medieval performance conditions.

Now there is no doubt that medieval minstrels performed poems about the deeds or gestes of epic heroes, including Roland, and that these performances, were often sung.¹⁶² What is troubling is that the numerous references to minstrel performance at secular festivities such as chivalric feasts never suggest that this singing lasted very long.¹⁶³ A case in point is the famous description of the wedding feast of the count of Archimbaud and a Flemish princess, Flamenca, in the Provençal romance that bears her name. After the second feast of the day is over and the tables have been cleared, the guests are brought fans and cushions. Now is the time for the fifteen hundred jongleurs to perform. They offer a full range of minstrelsy—singing, playing on almost every conceivable instrument, telling stories to musical accompaniment, tumbling, and juggling. They offer a wide choice of stories:

Qui volc ausir diverses comtes

de reis, de marques e de comtes,

auzir ne poc tan can si volc. (lines 617–19)

He who would hear diverse accounts of marquesses and kings and counts may hear as many as he wants.

It is possible that the jongleurs are conceived as reciting well-known passages from famous works, but equally possible that the songs they are singing would have borne only the most tangential connection to the famous poems about the same heroes that have survived. In either case, their performances do not appear to have been of any duration. Soon the king calls for the guests to join him in jousting and then dancing. The account in Flamenca is filled with names famous in French literature, including those of the heroes of Chrétien de Troyes, and Yvain is referred to by the title Chrétien gives him, the Knight of the Lion. Another work mentioned, the “lais de Cabrefoil,” might be Marie de France’s Chevrefoil.¹⁶⁴ Yet under these conditions, the jongleurs could not have expected to deliver even one of the longer Old French lais, let alone an Arthurian romance, or a large section from a chanson de geste. The time was too short and the status of any single performer too lowly. At such a feast, no single jongleur could expect to command the attention of any but a small group of guests and even that not for long. Nor are the circumstances depicted in Flamenca such as to permit the jongleur to work through a longer piece over a series of performances. The jongleurs and their audience were assembled to add dignity to a single ritual occasion; once the feast was completed, they dispersed. To the extent that Flamenca offers a credible depiction of the performance conditions at a royal feast, the implication is that minstrels rarely had the opportunity to perform lengthy pieces to their conclusion and hence that the minstrel versions of lais, chansons de geste, or romances differed radically from those that have been preserved in manuscript.

The example of Flamenca is telling because it does seem to reflect established chivalric ceremonial, albeit filtered through literary conventions of plenitude that exaggerate the numbers of minstrels. Accounts of historical feasts, when they survive, show that the number of minstrels was considered a reflection of the dignity of the occasion. The pay record for the feast held for the knighting of the English Prince Edward in 1306 shows 119 minstrels; of these, more than 80 are explicitly classified as musicians.¹⁶⁵ Few other feasts are as well documented, but large numbers of minstrels are recorded in many cases: 426 minstrels were paid for performing at the marriage of Princess Margaret to John of Brabant in 1290, for example.¹⁶⁶ Nor did the more exalted minstrels who attended the great feasts necessarily stay in the area much longer than those in Flamenca. The minstrels who helped celebrate Edward’s knighting on Whitsunday 1302 had to be up before dawn the next morning in order to collect their payment before prime.

In fact, a major feast was perhaps the least suited of all these occasions for extended recitation. The audience was often disruptive, and there was too much competition; the more prestigious the occasion, the more competition there would be.¹⁶⁷ Humbler situations might have been easier for the performer. At an isolated castle, monastery, or country house, or at a village gathering, a jongleur would have stood a better chance of holding the sustained attention of the entire audience, as he does in Gautier’s vision. Even here he would have been obliged to modify his performance to suit the occasion and retain interest. To do so, he would have needed to deliver short fragments and to modify them appropriately.

This, indeed, is a recurring accusation against jongleurs—that they distort the truth, singing whatever they think will please their listeners and offering biased and partial accounts. Peter the Chanter compares priests who change the form of the mass to increase the offerings they receive to jongleurs who switch stories to keep their audience’s interest: “Priests of this kind are like jongleurs or storytellers (fabulatori) who, when they see that the song of Landri does not please their audience, immediately begin to sing of Antioch. And if the audience is too demanding and is still not pleased by hearing of Alexander they switch to a song about Appollonius or to one about Charlemagne or about someone else.”¹⁶⁸ Chrétien de Troyes, similarly, in the introduction to Eric et Enide accuses “those who live by telling stories” of corrupting the story:

d’Erec, li fil Lac, est li contes,

que devant rois et devant contes

depecier et corronpre suelent

cil qui de conter vivre vuelent. (lines 19–22)¹⁶⁹

The tale is about Eric, the son of Lac [and it is one] that those who live by telling stories are accustomed to break apart and corrupt in front of kings and nobles.

The term “depecier” could be taken to mean no more than that the conteurs are accustomed to mangling a good story, but taken more literally, it accuses them of breaking the story into pieces, which is exactly what performers must often have been obliged to do as they anticipated and played upon their audience’s response. The story of Taillefer playing as he rode to his death at Hastings, however legendary it may be, provides a more plausible instance of what an actual performance might have been like than does Gautier’s vision of the dignified séance épique. Under these conditions, a jongleur might hope to sing fifty, or a hundred, or at best a few hundred lines, with little prospect of picking up where he left off. In short, the evidence suggests that sustained recitation of the kind that would have been needed to complete a poem the length of the Digby Roland was not common. The implication, and it is an alarming one, is that when minstrels recited chansons de geste these oral performances were significantly different from the written versions that have been passed down to us.

This is not to claim that the notion of sustained recitation or the séance épique is merely the product of the romantic imagination. The main source of evidence is the written chansons de geste themselves, which present themselves in a number of ways as oral performance. In Huon de Bordeaux, one of the most discussed examples, the narrator tells his listeners that it is growing dark and he is getting thirsty and will stop for the night, but that if they pay him well enough he will return on the morrow.¹⁷⁰ Apparently they do return, but not with quite enough money, for the narrator resumes the tale but after only five hundred lines stops to make his pitch again, this time threatening to use the power of Oberon, the fairy king, to excommunicate those who do not help fill his purse when his wife brings it around.¹⁷¹ Here would seem to be a persuasive example of sequential performance.¹⁷² But the example is not without difficulties. It is clearly impossible for a poet to predict in advance just when a jongleur might find it appropriate to appeal to his audience, so a jongleur would be singularly ill advised to attempt to deliver Huon de Bordeaux verbatim. If we are to read the appeals as strictly functional, therefore, the only plausible explanation seems to be that the lines were copied directly from a specific live performance in which a particular jongleur improvised them.¹⁷³ There is little evidence, however, to suggest that this kind of ethnographic reporting was at all common in the Middle Ages.¹⁷⁴ It was not that the technology was lacking: although full systems of shorthand were not developed until the sixteenth century, the combination of systems of heavy abbreviation, such as those first developed in Tironian notes, with a trained memory certainly allowed for detailed reportationes of sermons.¹⁷⁵ But the desire to reproduce an authentic transcription of a specific oral performance, down to its calls for drink and appeals for money, reflects concerns for ethnographic exactitude or for catching the true voice of folk culture that would be surprising in a medieval cleric.¹⁷⁶