8 - Taming the Wilderness: The Exploration of Anglo-Norman Kingship in the Vie de Saint Gilles

Summary

In the two decades between assuming the throne of England and the compilation of the Domesday Book in 1086, William the Conqueror brought several large tracts of land under the purview of royal control and established the notorious Forest Law, which existed, outside the common law, to protect the king’s interests. In response to the Forest Law and the New Forest in Hampshire in particular (referenced for the first time in the Domesday Book as Nova Foresta) contemporary accounts from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and later historians such as John of Worcester and Orderic Vitalis decry the king’s arrogant presumption and abuse of royal privilege, especially his disenfranchisement of the English people in order to enjoy the pleasure of the hunt. But what is especially striking about the chroniclers’ rhetoric of the forest is how the king and his court became symbolically associated with the forest as a result of the controversy surrounding it. This connection between the forest and kingship is used to augment the question of secular and religious power relationships in a late twelfth-century text, the Vie de Saint Gilles (hereafter cited as VSG), a hybrid example of romance-inspired hagiography most likely written for the court of Henry II by Guillaume de Berneville. By using the legend of Charlemagne in the poem, Guillaume de Berneville manipulates the very image of ideal kingship for an Anglo-Norman audience that looked to Charlemagne for legitimacy, raising questions about the limits of royal authority, a question that was as much a concern in the second half of the twelfth century as it was in the ninth.

Some symbols can be specific and overdetermined, relevant and resonant with only one audience; others incorporate elements and suggest connections that can have broader meanings and provide resources for the claims of many different groups. In the case of the Norman conquest of England, the Norman rulers sought to express and legitimate their newly acquired power, in part through negotiation with the symbols of Anglo-Saxon rule, but also through the integration of symbols of Carolingian authority, especially those that offered a constant and enduring visual reminder of Anglo-Norman power.