Chapter Four - Writing Places

Summary

‘There are other forms of power. The storyteller appeals to the mind, and appeals

ultimately to generations and generations and generations and generations…It is the

storyteller, in fact, who makes us what we are, who creates history.’

The wealth of surviving texts from the late Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Norman period was briefly mentioned in the Chapter One, dealing primarily with the Anglo-Saxon wills, and a few documentary sources were also touched upon in the previous chapters. But these are not the only texts from our period: Anglo-Saxon poetry and legal writing, Norman and Anglo-Norman history, for example, have left us a rich textual tradition. Although moving from the realm of the physical to the representational, these texts have much to say about space, gender and authority, though we should not always expect a direct correlation between the ideas and social concepts displayed in the material record and those in the textual sources. Indeed the representation of places in these texts displays a mentalitéappropriate to the experience of place and authority, not simply in as structural a sense as Boudieu's habitus but with the actors written in these texts demonstrating both an awareness of the societal norms at a conscious and subconscious level, as in habitus, but also the abilities and willingness to subvert or counter those norms, both working within and without the social framework of those spaces.

The texts here, however, move to a level of society somewhat different from that examined in the previous chapters. Although the previous chapters attempted to focus on aristocracy and below rather than royalty, as a result of the nature of the remains available to study in the wills and the sites, here the texts under study focus on aristocracy and above. The reasons for this are as before: to some degree, extant pieces from the period focus in that level of society, and doubly so when particularly taking advantage of history writing and hagiography. In fact, two of the three tales studied in this chapter focus on kings and their houses: Beowulf, and the stories of King Eadwig leaving his coronation feast to dally with two women, told in five different texts, one by the anonymous Auctor B, two by Eadmer, and two by William of Malmesbury.