April 4/4/24

I am delighted to say that I have just signed the contract with Witan Publishing LLC for the publication of my wholly revised translation and new commentary on Sir Bevis. It’s current title is The Romance of Sir Bevis of Hampton. The Commentary presents the results of my research into the story and its historical contexts over the last 9 years. My approach does not overlap with the work of my esteemed friend and colleague Dr. Jennifer Fellows, as we discovered during many long and enjoyable conversations about the story. Most fundamentally, I continue to work on the version of the story found in the 14th century Auchinleck MS. I do not venture into later texts, and certainly do not investigate the post seventeenth-century rewritings associated with Southampton and the south coast, which could easily provide the basis for a separate body of research. My Commentary does, however, notice the significance of the Bevis romance as an early paradigm for the tradition of adventure stories that emerges today in fantasy films and Computer games with medievalism as their framework. This could also form the basis of a line of research, if it has not already done so.

I have made a small contribution to research into the debt modern fantasy literature owes to its medieval ancestor with my recently published essay on ‘Tolkien, Medieval Romances and the Romantic Spirit’, in Will Sherwood and Julian Eilmann, eds, The Romantic Spirit in the Works of J.R.R Tolkien. The story of Bevis in the Auchinleck MS is, in so many respects a paradigm for Tolkien’s heroes of Men, but for now, my focus remains on firmly in the 14th century.

March winds

Enjoying the word play, what I mean is that March winds on in some unexpected directions as far as Bevis is concerned. The work I did on pilgrimage in and around Southampton was always part of an attempt to understand why the place name was used originally for Boeve/Bevis’s patrimony. Of course the answer is obvious when one thinks about it closely – Southampton had always been the major port on the central south coast, and the entrepôt for the Anglo-Saxon and early Norman English capital in Winchester. It’s fame was widespread because of its shipping trade, which benefitted from the unusual feature that it has 4 tides a day, and offers a large sheltered harbour, as well as access routes connecting throughout England and similarly established sea routes connecting with pilgrimage routes throughout Europe and beyond. Pilgrimage is only touched on briefly In the Boeve/Bevis stories, but the work on English routes has alerted me to geographical connections, and matters pertinent to Southampton’s Anglo-Norman burgesses, all of which will contribute to further establish the relevance of the port town as a location for our hero’s patrimony.

The result of all my pilgrimage research has just been published in the Southern History Society’s journal (vol. 44), and as a result Mike O’Leary, Southampton’s local storyteller, asked if a copy of the article was available as he is planning his own pilgrimage. I passed a copy of the paper on to him and in return he kindly gave me a copy of his book Hampshire: Folk Tales for Children, in which he retells the story of Bevis, based on my translation, but with suitably whimsical additions and variations, much in the tradition of the constant rewriting of the story.

This story for children contained a nugget of information that I have not come across until now, but it sent me excitedly reaching for my VCH volumes. But the information was not there. However, Judith Glover’s book Sussex Placenames confirmed the information in Mike’s book. There is a long barrow on the Hampshire/Sussex border rejoicing in the name ‘Bevis’s Thumb’. Its location in the parish of Compton is no accident, because Compton always belonged to the honour of Arundel, founded of course by Boeve/Bevis in tribute to his horse! The naming of the barrow undoubtedly belongs to that period of history that saw similar names give to prehistoric features in the landscape, such as the barrows on Portsdown hill above Portsmouth, and the assumption in Southampton that an ancient tomb discovered in the eighteenth century far beyond the town walls must have been that of Sir Bevis. In this case, the landowner was certainly buying into the familiar local story of a hero as it was then understood. In the case of the barrows, and from the evidence of the corbel heads at St Peter’s church in Curdridge, the impulse then appears to have spread across Hampshire during the nineteenth century, tracing a line eastwards, in the direction, eventually, of Arundel. Earlier, and more authoritative links were in place from around the time of the first version of the Boeve story, but they are the subject of my ongoing research and need further analysis. But Mike’s book illustrates the way the story moves from text into landscape in successive attempts to link people and places with this ancient story, which has its ultimate origin in the death of a 10th century Provençal warrior while on pilgrimage [explained in my essay in Notes and Queries vol 266, no 3 (2021).

Catching up in a new year

Time flies when Christmas and other matters intervene! But my work on Boeve and Bevis, not necessarily in that order, has continued, and the process of historicising the original story is slowly taking shape. As part of this process I have been reading texts relating to the story of Guillaume d’Orange, and these are indicating additional pathways by which the story of St Bovo may have become relevant to the Anglo-Norman inhabitants of Southampton, or their Angevin patrons.

This last element can be established by reference to contemporary chronicles, but other elements of Angevin/Plantagenet history confirm the viability the argument in favour of the original story of Boeve de Haumtone being slanted towards an audience with interests in the town, its history, and crusading.

Elements of this research provide the background for further work on Bevis, which I have been updating. The work on childbirth in Bevis, which I presented online at Kalamazoo last year has also informed my current work, to the extent that it sparked my interest in how some elements of the story were reiterated in specific forms, and some are reiterated in new, or more developed, ways.

Progress will unfortunately continue to be slower in both areas than I would wish, but it seems I am in much the same position as many colleagues in academic employment, as other matters continually demand attention.

A Possible Breakthrough

There have been a few times during my entire research career when something has emerged from a text that has hit me like a shower of cold water. It has just happened again, totally out of the blue.

While reading my way (again) through some of the historical records relevant to my current work on Boeve, and tracking back from one text to an earlier source cited there, I have just discovered that in 1130 the town of Arundel, with its castle, was assessed for tax purposes under Hamtescir (Hampshire).

I am going to have to go back and rethink and rewrite all the work I have done over the entire period of this research, but it could hardly be more exciting, so much so that I cannot at this moment face opening the current document. I am going to have to take a break and slowly think about how this discovery affects the structuring of my argument.

End of September: moving forward

After some weeks of distraction it is comforting to be able to open up the next phase in my Bevis research. I know now that there are at least 2 papers to be worked on, and the first will be to explore the reason for the name of Southampton. It is a complicated process, requiring research into areas of history that do not seem to have been investigated before.

The matter of names has already informed my earlier research and resulted in my small article on the name of ‘Boeve’ in Notes and Queries. The name of Southampton has long been accepted as the name of the hero’s patrimony, but the establishment of the reasons for this to be the case do not seem to have been investigated, but once again the research is taking me back to look at the Anglo-Norman Boeve. The reason for its transmission into the Middle English Bevis could be simple, but in fact I believe there is more historical context to be researched in order to understand that transmission in its fullest form, but that is a matter for the second research paper. There is more than enough to be done on phase 1, especially as my research will take me into new areas which will require understanding of matters such as the influence of the Templars.

September already

The last month has been particularly busy and I regret to say Bevis has had to take a back seat for a while as other work demanded my attention. It hasn’t been forgotten, and some of my ideas have had time to coalesce, while others have received a little light editing to try to pull them into better shape. My focus is definitely on the relationship between the hero and Southampton, but I need to consolidate my understanding of historical events and relationships now. Recent work by the scholar Steve Tibble on the appearance of the Templars in England and their relationships with the royal women of the 12th century has added new dimensions to my thinking, and returned it to an older question – to what extent did movements such as that of the Templars, as well as the troubadours, help to transmit the chanson de gestes of Provence and Aquitaine northwards, or indeed westwards into the Iberian peninsular during the early stages of the Reconquista. With no other deadlines to consider now, I hope to make better progress on this tricky research – tricky because one of the books I must get to know better is a French work, and my grasp of academic French is in need of improvement, but Dominic Carraz’s work has already proved worth the effort.

The End of July

And so another month passes. I’m happy to say that I have begun a new paper on Boeve intending to establish why the hero should be ‘…of Haumtone’, and thus ultimately ‘of Southampton’. The answer seems relatively simple, at least from the point of view of my research, although it may take some work to construct the properly convincing argument. It is based on historical details and literary references, and happily the keystone of the argument emerged from all the work I did last year on pilgrimage. This demonstrated the significance of the port. When I add in Geoffrey of Monmouth and Ralph de Diceto some interesting connections can be made.

Of course the dating of Boeve requires negotiation, but I still believe that composition must be separated from the scribal recording. This is likely to be contentious but I am prepared to defend my theory by reference to all the historical records. There are so many other aspects to the matter of naming in Boeve, and they all eventually echo in Bevis, but I believe the only way to proceed is by taking each element in turn because I have already, on more than one occasion, made the mistake of trying to put too much into one paper. However, I now regard each of those disappointing attempts as ‘mines’ from which I can now abstract the more valuable nuggets and refine and polish them. Only time will tell if this approach will work.

Late June

Rather sooner than I had anticipated, I’m back in the company of the ‘good knight’ Sir Bevis. A short diversion into other wholly unrelated matters seems to have been refreshing and I am back in translation with renewed vigour and clearer eyes, meaning I can see things that need tweaking and other things that need revising because of the work  have been doing on related matters, such as childbirth – which woke me up to more of the political agenda, and pilgrimage – which gave me new insights into the relevance of the hero’s home as a name of ‘significance’.

So much invigorated, I am once again enjoying the company of an interesting hero and the fascinating females who make him what he is!

Small changes in preparation

When I created this blog I had just completed the translation of the Auchinleck MS version of Sir Bevis, but wanted to signal the fact that the story moves from the ill-treatment of the child named Bevis towards the exploits of the hero later known as Sir Bevis. Now I am about to move further into my research, leaving behind the translation, as I recognise the need for more focussed work on specific areas of the history of the texts not only of Sir Bevis, but of the earlier Boeve. Indeed, this needs to be more fully historicised in order bring out the political point of the later Sir Bevis text of the first half of the 14th century. In order to signal the development of my interests, I have slightly altered the title of the blog to give it what I consider to be a more ‘generic’ title of Sir Bevis as the name by which the story is more familiar.

There will however, be a short intermission while other matters take up my time and energy, and also allow my thoughts coalesce around the new areas of Bevis research, and new directions for publication.

After Kalamazoo

It is perhaps perverse to claim that anything good could have come out of the Covid years, but they prompted the development of facilities like Zoom, and without this and similar online options for virtual participation I would never have been able to experience the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo (ICMS). I was so grateful to everyone who made this possible, because I was able to ‘attend’ a number of sessions, other than the one in which my paper was scheduled.

The session, Birthing in Mind and Memory 1, included 2 other papers, both of which surveyed more than one romance, and concentrated on the sense of community created in the birthing chambers depicted in the stories, where midwives and gossips were in evidence, and mothers-in-law created a sense of alienation by their attitudes towards mothers. These papers showed how distinctive the treatment of childbirth is in Bevis and in Boeve, where none of these elements are present, and childbirth references serve complex social, political and cultural agendas. The ‘Mind and Memory’ aspect is of particular interest in the case of the relationship between the thirteenth-century Boeve and the Auchinleck MS version of Bevis dating from the 1330s, i.e. the earliest extant Middle English version.

There is more work to be done to develop this, indeed, there is a great deal of work to be done in all the areas I have so far investigated, and I look forward to getting back to my research as soon as other matters permit.