Sovereign Fantasies. Patricia Clare Ingham
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unsurprising that by the late fifteenth century, English sovereigns will be increasingly anxious to foreclose subversive accounts of Merlin’s words.
Prophetic texts link history’s imagination of the past with its claim on the future, a fantasy of what will be as a return to a past now gone. Because of this recursiveness, scholars tend to emphasize the nostalgia of these texts. Yet I would describe them as melancholic. For all their utopian impulses, these prophecies strain toward the apocalyptic, offering little view of a longstanding British golden age; instead they depict loss and devastation as an historical inheritance of Britain. Why, at a turbulent time like that of the later fifteenth century in England, would solemn and fatalistic texts depicting the end of British sovereignty be so popular?
I will argue in this chapter that melancholy prophecies inspire late medieval British fantasies of insular recovery by signaling a melancholy British endurance through loss rather than despite loss. They link cultural recovery to the work of mourning. To demonstrate this, I turn first to a Middle English commentary of the Prophetia Merlini dating from the fifteenth century.8 Images of a small remnant of conquered Britons clinging to life in the recesses of the island and on the edge of Wales stand as a synecdoche for a specific insular history: an ancient Britain suffering catastrophic ruin yet nonetheless remaining poised for wholeness. In its representation of the remnant and surviving Britons, the commentary on the Merlin prophecies appropriates the survival and endurance of a conquered insular people for a future of insular stability.
A similar analysis applies to the popular prophecy of the end of British sovereignty known as the “Last Six Kings” or the “Six Kings to Follow John.” Widely attributed to Merlin, but not found in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, versions of the “Six Last Kings” circulated during the fifteenth century as part of the most popular Middle English history, the Prose Brut or Chronicles of England. The text’s melancholy refrain, “‘alas’ shall be the common song of fatherless folk,” encodes common loss and mournful longing as unity. Through the figure of Merlin this account of insular loss nonetheless alludes to the contentious political history that produced it, and thus to disagreements over its legitimate fulfillment. I will argue that this commentary and these prophecies deploy what Michael Taussig has called “the magic of mimesis,” borrowing the resources of recovery and loss from a conquered Welsh in order to imagine a future English sovereignty. The image of a lost and desolate insular British sovereign past becomes a means for mourning losses to English sovereignty, and predicting a future beyond dire accounts of England’s last days.
Prophetic Historicity and the Prophetia Merlini
An English commentary on the Prophetia Merlini of Geoffrey of Monmouth constitutes the sole text of a fifteenth-century manuscript held by the Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University.9 As its editor Caroline Eckhardt notes, the manuscript offers “the longest medieval translation of [Monmouth’s] Prophetia Merlini into English prose” and “the sole continuous medieval commentary on the Prophetia Merlini in English” (19). In its special concentration of prophecy and commentary, this text establishes an historical specificity for, and an orthodox interpretation of, Merlin’s prophetic words, implicitly challenging the provocative ambiguity so important to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia.
The two parts of this text, prophecy and commentary, are framed by a double formalistic repetition: the prophecies are introduced with the formula “and Merlyn said”; their respective commentaries begin, “and Merlyn seid sooth.” This double structure recurs throughout the text’s 490 lines, alternating between Merlin’s speech act and its fulfillment, between distant past (written in what seems an eternally imminent future tense), and the more recent (although equally past) corresponding fulfillment. The commentary’s doubled structure attempts to foreclose interpretive ambiguity. Claims to Merlin’s words and to their truth testify first to the prophet’s authenticity and then to the commentator’s accuracy. The two parts, prophecy and commentary, are thus mutually defining. The precision of the latter proves the truth of the former.
The historical interpretations cover the period of British history from Saxon conquest through Norman invasion to the period of Norman and Angevin rule. The text omits some prophecies given in Geoffrey’s Historia, specifically the prophecy of the “Breton Hope” and the prophecies of the Apocalypse. It includes the prophecies of the Red and White Dragons, another group called the Norman Conquest prophecies, the succession of the two dragons, the lion of justice, the eagle, the Sextus, the lynx, all related to Norman and Angevin rule. At the point in Geoffrey’s text where the prophecy of the “Breton Hope” begins, the fifteenth-century commentary turns instead to the first prophecy in the series on the “Six Last Kings,” material not included in Geoffrey. The text ends abruptly with the first of the last kings and a brief mention of Henry III.
The following excerpt (a version of Merlin’s famous twelfth prophecy) details and explicates the battles between red and white dragons. (In Monmouth’s text, the dragons fight beneath Vortigern’s crumbling tower.)10 This is an episode, we recall, that A. O. H. Jarman identifies with Welsh vaticination. The excerpt below exemplifies both the repetitious structure of the Prophetia Merlini and one of the Commentator’s most persistent concerns, British loss and disinheritance:
Merlyn seid … that the whight dragon schall [rise] ayen. and he schall calle to him ϸe doghter of Saxonie. Than schall oure gardeyns be replenished with straunge seede, and ϸe Reede dragon schall langwyssch and moorne in the boordis of a water.
Merlyn seide sooth. For the Englissh peple that were left o lyve aftir the greete derth and deth sent in to saxonie. where thei were boore for men wymmen and childre to stuffe cities and townes with peple a geyn. Than come the saxons and multiplied wondir thik and used the langage of hir oune contree. and chaunged the names of cities and townes and castels and held the countries baronages lord-shcippes as bretons had compaced hem be forne. And among hem that come from saxonie to Englond came ϸe noble quene sexburga with men and wymmen with ovte nombre. and arrivid in Northumbrelond. and toke the lond from Scotland in to Cornewaille for hir and for hir peple. for al that lond was desolate and voide of peple except a fewe powre bretons that were left in mountayns and in woodis. Than began saxons for to reigne. and departed the lond be twix hem and made kinges by dyuerse contries. The first was of westsex. The second of Estsex. The thrid of Estangle called Northfold and Southfold be iiij king of Merchlond with many oϸer as king of Northumbrelond & cetera. And the bretons sum of hem fled into walis. vnto ϸe boordis of the see. (ll. 125–35)
The vague symbols of what is to come, in the short space of a few lines, are transformed into a forthright historical narrative: red dragons signify the Britons driven by invaders “into Wales unto the borders of the sea.” The strange seeds in “our” gardens are said to signify the progeny of Saxon conquerors who multiply “wondrously thick.” The commentary offers an orthodox English interpretation of the two dragons’ fate, with the White Dragon standing as a figure for the English, now united with the Saxons, and the Red Dragon as the newly conquered Britons. The dragon symbolism follows the prophecy of insular devastation from famine (told in prophecy ten), the land “desolate and voide of peple”: “ϸe feeldes shall disceyve the plowman. And the peple schall suffre hungre and greete deeth, and tho ϸat be lefft o lif schall forsake ϸer natif contre … And ϸan schall bretayn be nere hand desolat” (ll. 93–95). Queen Sexburga and her people, a Saxon (re)population, come onto British territory at the invitation of the English, usefully repopulating what is here described as a nearly vacant countryside. These Anglo-Saxon bodies quickly move in on British territory (“changing the names of cities and towns and castles and taking ownership of the baronages and lordships”), gesturing in this moment to the links between territorial acquisition and linguistic change.
The image of a new people settling and (re) naming a vacant countryside is a common trope of narratives of migration and conquest. Desolation from conquest is here specifically named British: “Bretayn” was “nere hand desolat”; the vacant land offers only the trace of a “fewe powre bretons” remaining “in mountayns and in woodis.” The pleasures of Saxon repopulation contrast with an explicitly British poverty and ruin. While the commentator identifies two insular groups predating Saxon arrival, he links intense