Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Joshua Byron Smith
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of our afflictions and nurse of our wrath surpasses others in its storminess, you command me to be a poet in the midst of these discords [discordias]?”89 Understandably, Walter is jealous of those men of letters who have the leisure and means to compose undisturbed. After singling out Gilbert Foliot, Bartholomew of Exeter, and Baldwin of Worcester, he writes, “These men are the philosophers of our time who lack nothing, who have abodes [residenciam] stuffed with every abundance and peace [pacem] outside: they have begun properly and will attain a good end. But where is a haven for me, who scarcely has the leisure to live?”90 These first fifteen chapters form a lament for the courtier-cleric with literary pretensions, and they end with the clearest symbols of the vita actiua and vita contempliua known to the medieval mind—Jesus’s visit to the house of Martha and Mary.91 Walter, it is clear, prefers the constancy and calmness of the vita contempliua. Yet the court, to which he is both “bound and banished,” refuses him peace and stability.92 Walter’s complaints about the difficulty of literary pursuits while in the court manifests what John Cotts has termed “the clerical dilemma”: “the balancing of the professional, educational, and spiritual concerns in an uneasy synthesis,” which is found in the writing of many twelfth-century secular clerics.93 Walter’s duties as a member of the court stymie (so he claims) his literary pretensions.
The two stories of the monks who leave Cluny to fight for their land exemplify the pressures of the secular world on those who would lead a life devoted to more elevated pursuits. Guichard’s new life at Cluny is a matter of envy for Walter: “when [Guichard] had obtained an easy living and taken up newfound quiet [quietem], he brought his strength together into an undivided mind, which had previously been distracted when he lived as a soldier [milicie secularis]; he suddenly felt himself to be a poet, and shining forth brilliantly in his own way, that is, in the French tongue, he became the Homer of the laity. Ah, if only there were such a truce for me, to keep the wandering through the many beams of a scattered mind from creating barbarisms!”94 Like Gilbert, Bartholomew, and Baldwin, Guichard’s literary productivity directly—almost miraculously—results from his withdrawal from the commotion of the world. After necessity forces him to revisit his life as a soldier, he returns to his vow and to the monastery without any complications. The nameless monk of Cluny, however, has no such luck. In the moment of his triumph, he is struck down by a covert enemy’s arrow, never again to enter the peaceful confines of Cluny. Revised and in a new context, the tale of the militant monk of Cluny offers a counterpoint to Guichard’s experience: leaving the cloister, or any peaceful refuge from the world, can be fatal.
Understandably, in rewriting this story Walter focuses not on the monk’s attempt at penance but on the dangers of the outside world. Moreover, the revised tale also acts as a transition in the larger narrative structure of distinctio 1. Up until this tale, the subject matter of the distinctio 1 almost exclusively concerns the court and the uneasy place of a writer in it. With the tale of the militant monk of Cluny, Walter begins to address the instability and tumult of the world outside the court. As in its original form, the tale ends with the militant monk asking for penance from a boy. However, in the revised version, Walter adds a few “words of mercy,” quoting a well-known phrase, “In whatever hour the sinner laments, he shall be saved.”95 Given such mercy, Walter wonders how the Lord could not grant the militant monk salvation. This concluding discussion of penance, mercy, and salvation allows Walter to transition to these same topics in the world at large. He begins with jubilee years, which are years of “forgiveness and grace, of safety and peace, of exultation and pardon, of praise and joy.”96 For Walter’s contemporaries, jubilee years—and the remission they offer—were closely associated with crusading. A few decades earlier, Bernard of Clairvaux had explicitly connected the two, and Walter has skillfully made use of this connection to move to the starkest reminder of instability in the late twelfth century—the fall of Jerusalem in 1187.97 Thus, with the newly revised tale of the militant monk of Cluny Walter moves from private penance to public penance, and from the instability of court to the instability of the world. It is worth noting that this section, too, ends with a smooth transition to the next section on monastic satire. After cataloging Saladin’s victory and the apparent absence of the Lord’s mercy, Walter wonders why the prayers of so many thousands of monks are unable to alter the current discord of the world. These monks say that they serve the Lord as Mary does, devoutly sitting at Christ’s feet in pursuit of the vita contempliua, but perhaps, Walter suggests, they are too involved with worldly pursuits. With these words the first half of distinctio 1, with its focus on quies and the court, ends, and Walter’s famous satire on the monastic orders begins.
The survival of earlier versions of most of the material in chapters 1 through 15 shows that there is nothing haphazard in the organization of distinctio 1 of the De nugis curialium. In the foregoing discussion, I have, however, omitted Walter’s revision of chapter 11, the tale of King Herla, because it is the subject of Chapter 4. As will be seen, this tale also shows all the hallmarks of careful revision found in the rest of distinctio 1.
On the surface, distinctio 2 seems to contain two stories that have been revised from earlier material: the tale of Eadric the Wild and the story Walter calls “The Sons of a Dead Woman.” As I have explained elsewhere, in revising the tale of Eadric the Wild, Walter adds a famous Anglo-Saxon thane to an earlier story in order to shore up the rights of the bishop of Hereford.98 One more doublet, then, remains to be explained. Both distinctio 2 and distinctio 4 contain broadly similar stories concerning the offspring of humans and fairy lovers, classifying them as “sons of a dead woman” (filii mortue).99 Rigg considers these stories to represent the same episode in revised and unrevised forms. Thus, I have included them in Table 1. However, although these two chapters do touch upon the same subject matter, their identification as the same story is unwarranted. The only direct verbal similarity between the two tales is the tag “sons of a dead woman” (filii mortue). Moreover, distinctio 2 does not actually recount the story of one of these sons of a dead woman. Instead it directly follows the tale of Gastin Gastiniog’s son Trunio Vagelauc and Eadric the Wild’s son Alnoth, both of whose mothers are fairies.100 (Fairy-bride stories have a certain pull on Walter.)101 Walter explains that fairies and their ilk, or “phantasms” (fantasma) as he terms them, are merely demons whom God has permitted to change their appearance. This explanation would not surprise contemporary readers, as succubi and incubi, with which he equates these phantasms, have long been treated as demons in Christian thought. But what, Walter wonders, is one to make of cases in which the offspring of these unions “which remain and propagate themselves in good succession, as in this case of Alnoth or that of the aforementioned Britons, in which a certain knight is said to have buried his wife who was truly dead, and to have gotten her back after he snatched her from a ring of dancers, and afterward to have received children and grandchildren from her, and their offspring endures to this very day, and those who trace their origin from this source have become widespread—all of them are therefore called ‘the sons of a dead woman’ ”?102 Walter does not have a satisfactory explanation for these cases, gesturing merely to the incomprehensible ways of the Lord. Nonetheless, I think it is clear that Walter has not rewritten or retold the story of the sons of the dead woman here; he simply provides another version of the same type of story to increase his examples. This little vignette is made to stand on its own and requires no reference to the story in distinctio 4. No revision has taken place.
However, modern readers of the De nugis curialium have also found something puzzling about this passage, though not its demonology. The reference to “the aforementioned Britons” (Britonum de quo superius) here certainly seems to describe the story found in distinctio 4, in which a “knight from Brittany” (miles quidam Britannie minoris) rescues his dead wife from a great band of women and begets several children with her, the offspring of which are still numerous in Walter’s day.103 Problematically, no preceding story matches the description here. One suggestion is that Britonum