7 - For King and Country? The Tension between National and Regional Identities in Sir Bevis of Hampton

Summary

The discourse of national identity in medieval England has been the subject of much critical debate in the past decade. The publication in 1996 of Thorlac Turville-Petre's England the Nation established the study of medieval English nationalism as a vibrant and important field of study, and numerous additions to the debate over the origins, development and nature of medieval notions of Englishness have appeared since. Important studies by scholars such as Siobhain Bly Calkin, Geraldine Heng, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Kathy Lavezzo illustrate the degree to which the study of nationalism has become embedded within the practice of medieval scholarship. This chapter seeks to examine the narrative of English identity found in Sir Bevis of Hampton, reconsidering it in the light of two important geographical foci of the romance – the region of Hampshire and the lands of the East – in order to highlight the complexities of identity that are suggested by Bevis’s continual geographical relocation within the romance.

Bevis is, as Turville-Petre has argued, a text that is deeply concerned with the construction of Englishness. In describing the Auchinleck MS ( Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1), the home of the bestknown and oldest extant Middle English version of Bevis, as ‘a handbook of the nation’, Turville-Petre argues that the manuscript's narrative of England, written in English, ‘does not simply recognise a social need but is an expression of the very character of the manuscript, of its passion for England and its pride in being English’. The individual romances within the manuscript contribute to the construction of the manuscript's idea of Englishness – as Heng's analysis of Richard Coer de Lyon has demonstrated. While the historical royal figure of Richard I is one embodiment of the English nation in the Auchinleck MS, in Bevis we witness another important narrative space in which Englishness is constructed. In this respect the Middle English Bevis differs from its antecedent, the Anglo-Norman Boeve de Haumtone: as Susan Crane notes, ‘Sir Beues of Hamtoun undertakes an important development, whose beginnings are barely discernible in Boeve, from the perception of the baronial family as a political unit owing personal allegiance to rulers on the basis of reciprocal support, to a wider perception of national identity and the importance of national interests.’