OBEDIENCE
The final section of CCAii is the shortest in terms of the number of works, but it includes as its thematic anchors three long pieces, two of which are romances and one, Sege of Jeru- salem, that is historical and yet is also considered by some to be at least partly related to romance. The remaining works are two short poems attributed to Lydgate and one and a half stories from
the South English Legendary. At first glance, the section does not appear to be as thematically uni- fied as the previous sections of CCAii, but the stories are nonetheless related, both to each other as well as to the rest of the manuscript, by their theme of obedience. In Chevalier Assigne and Sir Isumbras, we see God directing the characters to perform a task and when that task is complete, the characters are rewarded for their obedience. Sege of Jerusalem is also a story that implies the opera- tion of God's hand in events: the Christian Romans seek revenge on the Jews for killing Christ and their victory shows that God is pleased with their actions. This section is also a fitting end to the manuscript, as it also involves chivalric obedience, a theme consistent with the earlier romances in CCAii. Chevalier Assigne reiterates the Constance-saga found in Sir Eglamour and Emaré. Sir Isumbras contains a bird as a messenger to order Isumbras to do penance for his sins. The story of Jerome and the lion reiterates the lion as companion that we see in Octavian and emphasizes not only the religious symbolism of the lion, but Jerome's abiding faith and service to God. Through- out this section, there are numerous motifs that refer to earlier works and help to “conclude” the manuscript. The theme of obedience is obvious in the two romances, but it is less evident in Sege of Jerusalem where nonetheless, it serves as an important theme.
Sege of Jerusalem is an alliterative poem written in quatrains. Unlike the other works in CCAii, Sege is not written in two columns. Because of the length of the lines, the scribe elected to spread the lines out in a single column rather than attempt to fit them into two. The poem was probably written in the last decade of the fourteenth century at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire.261
261 Livingston, Michael, Introduction to Siege of Jerusalem (Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2004).
Despite Sege's relative popularity in the fifteenth century, until recently many modern scholars have not spent much effort on the poembecause of its grisly portrayal of the death of Jews at the hands of Christians. In the past twenty or so years, scholars have begun to reconsider Sege as a poem worth studying because of what it tells us about the time in which it was written and also indicates its audience's expectations for entertainment. One of the major problems for modern scholars is the question of genre—what is the poem? It often appears in manuscripts in clusters of romances. Hanna and Lawton note in their description of the CCAii text that
our descriptions should reveal that our one-volume presentation of The Siege differs decidedly from any medieval experience of the work. No surviving manuscript pre- sents The Siege as an isolated “literary text” as an EETS volume does: in every case, the poem has been contextualized through its juxtaposition with other works. Such collocations might well query modern generic categories such as 'romance' (al- though by and large, the context in C[CAii] supports such a reading) or 'alliterative history'. And certainly, they reveal The Siege as capable of polyvocal recuperations during its textual life. Thus, L, P, D, and probably V present The Siege in a context where it should read as a quasi-Scriptural narrative, a pendant to the Passion; . . . Our copy A combines such an interest with one in specifically crusading poetry . . . And Frampton's copy, U, construes the poem as learned classical history, a tale of Roman conquest.262
Some consider it historical, though the author took significant liberties with historical fact in writing the story, including the major point that the Romans in the story are converted to Christianity and Rome becomes the seat of Christianity—in the first century. Rome did convert and become the seat of Christianity, but not until the fourth century when Constantine made Christianity legal. The actual siege of Jerusalem about which the author writes took place in 70 AD.263 That the poet chose to change history to make his point is relevant—making the seat of Christianity Rome rather than Jerusalem would have “interested English supporters of Urban VI. . . that the Roman papacy, not Avignon, was directly linked to the presence of Peter at the cultural height of the Roman Empire.”264
While some scholars view the poem as history, others view it as related to hagiography;265 some consider it as merely an anti-Semitic work in which the characters take seeming joy in inhu- mane actions.266 Others consider it tentatively as a romance, but Millar places the poem firmly in the category of romance. She compares Siege of Jerusalem to romances, saints' lives, and religious narrative and concludes that because of its plot construction, characterization, language, structure, and use of the marvellous, the poem is indeed a romance, though it does challenge some of the normal assumptions one would have about romance. Millar contends that the author “wishes to
263 Yeager, Suzanne M. “The Siege Of Jerusalem and Biblical Exegesis: Writing About Romans in Fourteenth Century England.” The Chaucer Review. 39.1 (2004): 70-102.
264 Ibid. 72.
265 Livingston, Introduction.
266 Livingston reviews some of the negative comments made by scholars about the work. Two of the main influences on modern critical reception were Derek Pearsall and A. C. Spearing's negative commentary on the poem. See Narin van Court, Elisa, “The Siege of Jerusalem and Augustinian Historians: Writing About Jews in Fourteenth- Century England,” The Chaucer Review 29.3 (1995): 227-48, especially page 227. See also Millar, Bonnie, The Siege of Jerusalem in its Physical, Literary, and Historical Contexts (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2000).
re-examine the horrors of warfare rather than describe heroes the equal of the twelve peers”267 as a majority of romances usually do. The conclusion of Millar's discussion of romance, historiography, and hagiography as they relate to determining the genre of the poem is worth quoting in full:
the poem is most certainly not a history or a religious narrative, and conforms more to the romance mode than to any other. This is evident in the construction of plot and its presentation, as it is a beautifully written, carefully constructed poem which utilizes direct speech and description imaginatively. Its use of characterization af- firms this impression, highlighting, as it does, chivalric ideals, although these can sometimes be found in histories. The mixture of fictional and factual elements is common to all three types of narrative, but it is significant that The Siege of Jerusa- lem focuses less on the marvelous than most texts. Pertinently, the work is unusual in that it never refers to its sources, and the narrating voice never makes assertions of truth or comments directly. This suggests that the poet wished to write a ro- mance which dealt with serious subject matter in an appropriate manner, as is indi- cated by his choice of alliterative verse, and the result is in many ways a unique lit- erary work that allows readers to interpret things for themselves within certain pa- rameters.268
Further, the author
267 Millar 223.
does not seem to want to teach a specific message or to be especially prejudiced or partisan, as is the case with works of historiography or hagiography. Basically, he wishes for the audience to examine for themselves the validity of the values pre- sented (chivalry, war). It is his attitude towards his subject-matter which is respon- sible for these differences and this perhaps explains the marginalization of the poem in modern day criticism, as its innovativeness has rendered it difficult to classify neatly, because it extends the boundaries of romance.269
The serious subject matter that Sege addresses is the matter of war, as well as the justified, at least as far as the Christian audience saw it, defeat of Jerusalem and the Jews because of their role in killing Christ. That the beginning of the poem opens with a recounting of Christ's Passion is important because that event would have colored the audience's reception of the rest of the events that take place in the poem.270 The Exegetes believed that the loss of Jerusalem to the Jews and the need to reclaim it was the result of human sin. Neither the Jews nor the Romans are safe from this idea: “the exegetical applications demonstrate that the Romans also occupied an antago- nistic role: that of the Antichrist.271” In addition, Yeager contends that
when one examines the behavior of the Romans against the ideas of medieval Christian exegetes, one finds that they are depicted as depraved persecutors of the faithful and as victorious warriors for Christ. While the Siege fits loosely within the genre of crusades literature, as Hamel has shown, the work becomes much more
269 Ibid. 231.
270 Yeager, Suzanne M., “The Siege of Jerusalem and Biblical Exegesis: Writing About Romans in Fourteenth-Century England,” Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004): 76.
than a crusading poem when one acknowledges the portrayal of the Jews from the Augustinian tradition together with the depiction of the Romans from the exegeti- cal tradition.272
That is, the Jews are portrayed and should be interpreted as the killers of Christ and the Romans fulfill the promise of a “new” Jerusalem by making Rome the seat of Christianity, as well as by avenging Christ's death. Luke prophesied the fall of Jerusalem
to a nameless enemy with unspoken incentives; however, the fourteenth-century poem transforms the image of Rome from that of an unintentional mediary to that of a willing instrument working to fulfill the plans of God. No longer power- hungry hordes, the Romans are like medieval Christian Crusaders who fight be- cause God wills it.273
Despite its being dismissed as an overtly anti-Semitic poem, both Yeager and Van Court examine the author's portrayal of the Jews and conclude that not all of them are shown negatively. Some of the Jews are definitely portrayed as evil—Caiphas, Pilate, John, and Simon, for example— but others, like Josephus, are portrayed in a sympathetic way. He treats Titus' illness and refuses any reward for having done so. Neither are all of the Romans portrayed as good: Nero is clearly evil, according to the poet. In addition, the author clearly places the blame for the siege even hap- pening at the feet of the Jewish leaders because they refused to pay their tribute to Rome. Some scholars have likened the portrayal of the Jews in the poem to a “homogenized group of Jews, Sara-
272 Yeager 71.
cens, and heretics,”274 but Narin Van Court argues that the Jews in the poem indeed stand for Jews and not some other group. She states,
the most compelling argument I can make that this poem is about Jews is to dem- onstrate the nuance and ambivalence with which the Siege poet represents the Jews, for it is in the simultaneous brutality and sympathy offered in this work that we find the dualistic Christian ideology about the Jews most fully and emphatically ex- pressed. The representation of the Jews in most medieval narratives is, predictably, anti-Judaic. But the representation can also be complex and finely nuanced, a reflec- tion (at least in part) of the centuries-old dualistic Christological perspective inher- ited in Church doctrine.275
It is clear that the author of the poem presents his Jews as villains because of their role in Christ's death. As a Christian, the author's viewpoint is that whoever killed Christ deserves to have that death avenged, and thus, his portrayal of the Jews is not anti-Semitic, but, in his mind, justified by their deeds.
While Sege of Jerusalem is rife with complexities, its reception is also a complicated matter. As a poem closely related to romance, it was meant to be entertaining, but it also had practical value as a recruiting tool. Yeager states that
the Siege poet portrays his Romans with characteristics that would have had special resonance to an audience who had participated in campaigns in the Holy Land or
274 Yeager 70.
275 Narin van Court, Elisa., “The Siege of Jerusalem and Augustinian Historians: Writing About Jews in Fourteenth- Century England,” The Chaucer Review 29.3 (1995): 232.
France, or, by the same token, who were being actively recruited for that purpose. To this end, the poet shows a mix of chivalric and devotional images that would have been used both to entertain an audience and to urge it to support the cam- paigns. Even the poem's links to Bolton Priory, a hotbed of Lancastrian activity, suggest the very practical nature of the poem as a recruitment piece.276
The idea that the poem is a tool for recruiting crusaders is made even clearer when we con- sider that Chevalier Assigne is directly related to Godfrey de Bouillon, who tied his ancestry to that of the Swan Knight. Godfrey was a great hero of the First Crusade and leader in Jerusalem after- ward. This fact also unifies the two poems because both are romances that blur history, or at least use history to add a sense of realism and importance to the stories. By telling the story of the siege as a sort of romance, the audience is then educated as well as entertained. The education in the poem is not as obvious or heavy-handed as it is in more conventional romances, but it is there nonetheless. The theme of obedience is seen in the Romans' determination to avenge Christ's death, although that same determination can be seen as disobedient: Psalm 59:12 says “slay them not, lest my people forget,” a clear injunction against killing the Jews. The Jews are clearly disobe- dient, at least to Rome in that they refuse to pay their tribute. Ironically, the Romans carried out Christ’s Passion after Pilate reluctantly sentences him to death for sedition against Rome. In the poem, it appears that neither side is wholly obedient, nor is it wholly disobedient. The poem's complexity certainly leaves a lot to interpretation and makes readers consider multiple issues and decide for themselves what is important. Perhaps this complexity also emphasizes the fact that
276 van Court 73.
sometimes obedience is not simple—obedience to God's law can sometimes put someone into op- position to civil law and vice versa. In the case of the characters in Sege, they were all in some way obedient as well as disobedient to God's as well as civil law. The poet left the issues ambiguous in order to place the responsibility of deciding what is right onto the reader.
Sege of Jerusalem is directly related to the story that follows it, Chevalier Assigne, because that story is also related to the Crusades and to history. The Swan Knight is said to be the ances- tor of Godfrey de Bouillon, a hero of the First Crusade and leader of Jerusalem. The poem begins the motif of the direct hand of God in the action of the characters' lives that will be seen in most of the remaining poems of the MS.
The Middle English version of the Swan Knight story in CCAii, entitled Chevalier Assigne, is an adaptation of the first of a three-part French chanson cycle that tells of the of the ancestry of Godfrey of Bouillon. Chevalier Assigne is a variation of the title of the original story, which is called
Chevalier au Cygne. The tale found in CCAii is a short version of La Naissance du Chevalier As- signe. The version in CCAii is the only poetic version extant in English. Jaffray believes that the story originated several centuries before its earliest appearance in writing in the thirteen century. The hero of most of the stories is Helyas (or Enyas, Elias), but Wolfram von Eschenbach named the hero Lohengrin in his early thirteenth-century story Parzival. Lohengrin and Helyas probably made their appearance in literature at about the same time.277 Scholarly attention to Chevalier As- signe is sparse, and the last edition of the work was Gibbs' edition for E.E.T.S in 1868.
277 Robert Jaffray Two Knights of the Swan, Lohengrin and Helyas: A study of the Legend of the Swan-Knight, with special reference to its two most important developments. New York: Putnam, 1910) 109.
The Middle English story is quite short at 370 unrhymed alliterative lines, but it contains the details of the birth and early life of the Swan Knight. In the preface to his edition, Gibbs states that the poem is taken from another book, as indeed the narrator tells us several times, and is the “epitome of the first 1083 lines of the French poem . . . which forms part of the volume marked 15 E. vj in the Royal Collection”278 housed in the British Library. Royal 15 E. vi is a beautifully illuminated manuscript that dates to around 1425.
The tale of the Swan Knight was exceptionally popular in the Middle Ages, not just with readers, but with artists as well. Many manuscript versions of the story are illuminated and the printed versions contain woodcuts. In the preface to his edition, H. Gibbs mentions an ivory cas- ket with panels on it that depict the Swan Knight's story. He states that the casket is a fourteenth century work and belongs to a “Mr. William Gibbs of Tyntesfield, Co Somerset, and formerly to his wife's family, the Crawley-Boeveys, Baronets, of Flaxey Abbey, co,. Glouchester.”279 Mary Alice Wyman mentions this casket in her discussion of the Embriachi Ivories, which also date from around the time of the manuscripts.280 The Dunstable Swan Jewel is another treasure that is tied to both the Swan Knight legend and its association with real people. The Dunstable Swan is a liv-