Walter Map and the Matter of Britain. Joshua Byron Smith
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have preferred a mute dog to Walter’s sharp tongue.
This tension between Walter’s familiarity with the Welsh and his disparaging remarks toward them, between his creative use of Welsh culture and his status as an English courtier, pervades the De nugis curialium. However, Walter is not alone in having a seemingly vexed opinion of the Welsh. Medievalists commonly group Walter Map with Gerald of Wales and Geoffrey of Monmouth—a trio of roughly contemporary Latin authors who called the Welsh border home. Gerald, never shy in describing his mixed Norman and Welsh heritage, provides the clearest evidence that those like him, of mixed background and inhabiting contested lands, were in the twelfth century perhaps beginning to think of themselves as a hybrid people, as a gens apart from the rest: “Marchers,” or marchiones in Latin.7 As for Geoffrey, it is difficult to tell whether he considered himself a Marcher in these terms; he has left behind little biographical information. Nonetheless, his connection with Monmouth allows for a relatively unproblematic designation as a border dweller. Our knowledge of Walter Map lies somewhere in between Gerald’s garrulous self-reporting and Geoffrey’s nearly total silence on biographical matters. Walter provides just enough information about himself to produce confusion in critics. One can read confidently that Walter was “born in Wales” and that “he was not even born in Wales.”8 In articles published within a year of one another, Walter the “clerc gallois” becomes Walter the “clerc anglais.”9 And although patriotic Welsh scholars in the nineteenth century celebrated Walter as a preeminent Welsh writer and the son of a Welsh princess, in 1940 R. T. Jenkins curtly announced that “the idea that he is a Welshman must be rejected.”10 Such contradictory statements could easily be multiplied. Yet many scholars, sensing that the evidence itself is contradictory, have remained content to call Walter Anglo-Welsh or simply a Marcher.
It is certainly safe to call Walter a Marcher; indeed, he explicitly declares himself to be one. More interesting, I believe, is that a closer look at some of Walter’s Welsh tales illustrates how he used his identity as a Marcher to his own advantage. This section, in addition to exploring Walter’s identity as a Marcher, also argues that Walter used his status as a border dweller to become, in a way, a foreign policy expert on the Welsh. Many of the Welsh stories in the De nugis curialium anticipate an elite audience of policy makers, including the royal court and the local elite of the Welsh March. Their political import suggests that for his colleagues and peers Walter may well have been seen as an expert on Welsh affairs. This reputation, in turn, helps illuminate Walter’s pseudonymous authorship of the Lancelot-Grail Cycle.
Any discussion of Walter Map’s ethnicity must first grapple with his quirky-sounding name—Map.11 The name has commonly been explained as a version of the Middle Welsh word map (son), which made up the linking element in male patronymic surnames.12 Dewi map Ceredic, for example, is David son of Ceredig. Given its ubiquity in Welsh names, map, so the theory goes, seems to have been viewed as a token of Welshness by the Normans and English. It was thus duly applied to people of Welsh descent or affiliation in a playful, mocking sort of way. (A good parallel seems to be Maccus, used to designate those with some Gaelic affiliations.)13 In support of this view is the fact that when other instances of the cognomen Map occur, they do so in places where English and French speakers would have encountered Welsh and Cornish speakers (the word for “son” in both languages is written map/mab). In the tenth-century Bodmin Gospels, a Godric Map appears in Cornwall, and Domesday Book records an Ælfric Mapesone in Worcester and a Godric Mapeson in Herefordshire during the eleventh century.14 If Map is indeed a nickname of sorts, it was not heard as too derogatory, since Walter claims it as his own, describing Map as his agnomen—a word that can, frustratingly, mean both “nickname” and “surname.”15 This agnomen also seems to have been jokingly incorporated into a group of prebends at St. Paul’s that received their names from men of Walter’s generation: Walter’s prebend was called Mapesbury.16
Yet it is challenging to work out what this nickname may have meant to contemporaries: Was Walter Welsh? Or just Welsh-ish? Testimony from the Welsh side of the border may help in this respect. The Welsh could use the term Sais (lit. “Saxon/English”) for a Welshman who was familiar with either English habits or the English language or even for Welshmen who enjoyed English patronage.17 Importantly, Welsh evidence shows that the term Sais says little about ethnicity. The son of Rhys ap Gruffudd, a powerful Welsh prince and contemporary of Walter’s, serves as a good reminder in this respect. Rhys’s son Hywel spent thirteen years as a hostage at Henry II’s court, and when he returned to Wales in 1171, he was granted a new addition to his name—Sais.18 Certainly, Hywel Sais, as a son of a very influential and politically powerful Welsh ruler, had few doubts as to his own ethnicity. Rather, his new nickname, which, one may suspect, may not have been wholly welcome, suggests “how his exile had shaped his attitude and behavior.”19 Perhaps Map meant something similar: a nickname bestowed upon men of non-Welsh descent who nonetheless had spent time among them or who were familiar with Welsh traits and customs. This description would suit Walter nicely.
Although this understanding of Walter’s name has received widespread approval, it is not without problems. First of all, some evidence points to Map having been a family name, rather than a personal nickname. Walter’s nephew Philip carried the Map name, and in the early thirteenth century a “Walter Map son of Walter Map of Wormsley” appears in a series of charters concerning Wormsley church.20 We have no way of knowing for sure that these last two are related to the author of the De nugis curialium, but it is not unlikely, especially because Walter held nearby interests.21 If Map is a family name, then it may say more about Walter’s ancestors than Walter himself. Second, a few have doubted that Map is in any way related to the Middle Welsh word map (son).22 A. K. Bate, following studies of English surnames, hesitantly suggests that Map derives from Medieval Latin mappa (cloth; map), which may indicate that Walter’s ancestors held some sort of administrative position.23 Bate also claims that the distribution of the name in border countries suggests a regional family—not a nickname—and he implies that the desire to have a Welsh or a half-Welsh Walter results from some passé stereotypes of Celtic storytellers.24 This last point undoubtedly has some truth to it, but deriving Map from Latin mappa does not make much sense. Why mappa and not something like *mappator?25 Moreover, the name never unambiguously appears as “Mappa” or “Mappe,” the latter of which would be the expected early Middle English outcome.26 Deriving Map from an Old English borrowing of Latin mappa seems no less problematic than the Welsh explanation.
Another wrinkle does little to clarify matters. Map (son) seems to have been an epithet common in the Brittonic world, with attestations in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany.27 Out of the dozen or so Welsh occurrences, two instances help explain what map means when used in this way: “Gruffudd Ddu ap Ieuan Fab ap Ieuan Las” and “Gruffudd Fab ap Gruffudd Gŵyr ap Cydifor.”28 (The word fab is merely mab with an expected initial mutation.) Since both Ieuan and Gruffudd have the same name as their fathers, it seems here that the use of map as an epithet parallels the way some British authors use Latin filius (son) to mean “junior” or “the younger.”29 French fitz (son) and English son were also used in a similar manner.30 It is not surprising that Welsh witnesses an analogous development. Nevertheless, this use of map does not seem to have been widespread, and it never overtook the much more common bychan (lit. “little”) in this regard. Nonetheless, the few instances of Map along the border could be explained as borrowings of this Welsh practice, perhaps in mixed families, rather than a nickname that the English and French applied to those of Welsh affiliations. Welsh attestations, after all, outnumber those from east of the border, and the English instances of Map appear only in places where Welsh (or Cornish) speakers were nearby.
Reading Map as “junior” also has the advantage of making the two occurrences of the surname Mappeson more intelligible. The semantic path from the nickname junior to the first name Junior is quite clear, as witnessed by the rise of Junior