3 - Lawman’s Vision of History: Sources and Figuration in the Brut

Summary

Lawman's additions to Wace separate his version of the Brut from the rest of the tradition stemming from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Brittaniae (c.1138). Lawman composed the first Middle English Brut in the early thirteenth century, likely between 1199 and 1227. He positions himself in an agonistic relationship to his source text, Wace's French Roman de Brut (1155), even as he translates most of it relatively faithfully. While Wace presents a resolutely secular account that moves ‘from king to king and heir to heir’, Lawman instead affiliates his poem with Latin monastic historiography of England. In his well-known prologue, Lawman places himself in the company of monastic historians who used a robust array of sources to glimpse God's disposition of events. He draws on Bede and Augustine as he reinvents the episodic history he found in his source. In his view, Wace's Brut failed to reflect the disjunction between human experiences of time and the divine disposition of history. For the Middle English poet, history is comprised of distinguishable but related temporalities. In Lawman's revised history, cyclical divine time thrums in the background of the human experience of linear subjective time. Put simply, Lawman's additions to Wace's text reflect the methods and philosophy of history more often associated with monastic writing.

Despite the suggestive portrait of a Benedictine monk in the historiated initial that begins one copy of Lawman's Brut (fig. 3.1), this claim is not necessarily meant to be biographical. Secular historians writing around Lawman's time, such as Henry of Huntingdon, similarly adopted methods and perspectives inherited from Bede. Rather, I mean only to name a significant difference between Lawman's Brut and other Bruts, and identify a strategy Lawman used both to demonstrate his understanding of the workings of history and to garner authority for his early Middle English text.

Two Manuscripts, Equal Authority

Studying Lawman's Brut poses a thorny methodological problem. Since the 1960s, manuscript scholars have concurred that the two surviving manuscripts containing Lawman's Brut, London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix (hereafter Caligula) and London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii (Otho), are roughly contemporaneous. Caligula dates from the second half of the thirteenth century, and Otho from the final third of the same.