A Missing Trojan Text



Hunterian MS V.2.8, folio 1a
Glasgow University Library


The Trojan War, or at least the texts that record its occurrence, has had an immeasurable effect on the English language.  From the many literary references to "the face who launched a thousand ships" to the characterization of a ruse as a "Trojan horse," the lexicon of Troy pervades newspapers and everyday speech.  The following material treats a "Trojan text" that unfortunately did not have much of an influence, at least in comparison to Homer and Virgil.  It is based in research I hope to present at a conference at Harvard on October 1st in honor of a mentor of mine, David Benson.  I would love to know your thoughts . . .
 

Do not ask a medievalist to tell you about the fall of Troy. For those of us who are familiar with the medieval Trojan tradition, this is a terribly complex request that must first be addressed with the clarifying question, “Which one?” As medievalists, we know that Troy was destroyed twice, but the destruction of the first Troy is unknown to everyone else for a number of reasons. First of all, the fall of the second Troy superseded the first with a gripping Homeric tradition that fascinated Renaissance audiences with a compelling cast of characters including the incomparable Helen, the childish gods, the arrogant Achilles, and the crafty Odysseus. Secondly, the destruction of the first Troy can not be found in the Iliad or the Odyssey – instead it was popularized in the Middle Ages through numerous translations of a Latin prose history known as the Historia destructionis Troiae composed by a thirteenth-century Sicilian judge named Guido delle Colonne. Its credibility as a work of history was confirmed in 1412 when John Lydgate rendered it in Chaucerian iambic pentameter at the behest of Prince Henry in an attempt to bolster Lancastrian claims to noble lineage that reached back to ancient Troy. While Lydgate’s Troy Book enjoyed great acclaim among in the aristocratic élite until the sixteenth century, once the Greek epics began to be translated into English, vernacular versions of Guido’s Historia fell into relative obscurity.


Even for his fourteenth-century English audiences, however, Guido ultimately did not deliver what they desired. The English believed that they were the inheritors of worldly power via the logic of translatio imperii, in which the destruction of one empire led to the birth of the next. While the destruction of Troy was lamentable, its imperial power arose, phoenix-like, once again in the form of the Roman Empire. And as Rome fell, Britain began its adolescence as a future imperial force that would strike fear in the hearts of their continental counterparts. Yet, when the English turned to Guido for indulgence of their fantasies, they found instead incisive critiques of their Trojan ancestors for their inhospitality, perfidy, and incompetence and a chilling prediction that the New Trojans will inherit destruction, not glory. For the English aristrocracy, this was a message they did not want to hear.

Despite his unsavory tale, Guido’s critical voice reached the ears of one provincial poet named John Clerk of Whalley. He composed what has become known as the alliterative Destruction of Troy, one of several alliterative romances that were composed during the late-fourteenth century in the north of England. The most famous of these poems is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but others, such as the alliterative Morte Arthure and the Siege of Jerusalem, have recently begun to receive significant critical attention. Each are written within the tradition of chivalric romance, whereby the feats and conduct of individual knights (ancient, Arthurian, or otherwise) rise to the forefront of action, which ranges from the placidly diplomatic to the excessively violent. Likewise, they perpetuate and, in some cases, enhance Guido’s critiques of Trojan identity, attributes that distinguish these provincial narratives from many popular historiographies, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, which justify England’s royal authority and national identity by claiming an ancestry that originates in ancient Troy and Rome. By ventriloquizing Guido, these alliterative romances constitute a minority voice to the dominant tendency to imagine the possibility of a unified and expanding English nation. As poems that speak from the literary and topographic periphery of London’s cultural center, they engage in critiques of warfare and territorial expansion, which may have alienated their noble audiences. Though these militaristic narratives are written to delight their aristocratic readers with chivalric accounts of Hector’s martial prowess, Vespasian’s siege of Jerusalem, and Arthur’s Roman conquest, they belie such martial fervor with graphic descriptions of violence, commentary on the suffering of innocent victims, and a preference for diplomacy that are not consistent with expansionist sensibilities.

Because of the deeply cherished connections between heritage and nobility, I want to suggest that the alliterative romanciers’ investment in the figure of Troy becomes a full-scale critique of the Trojan politics largely embraced by the cultural milieu of the south. They resist the fashion of their metropolitan contemporaries to envision London as a “New Troy” or the last stop of translatio imperii, the translation of empire from Troy to Rome to Britain. And unlike their renowned alliterative cousin, Piers Plowman, the alliterative romances are defined by their vernacular engagements with Latin chronicles of militaristic enterprises. They translate Latin history into alliterative long lines that are well suited for the rhythm, pace, and spectacular violence of battle. This alliterative sensibility is expressed both through their slavish consistency of meter and self-conscious revelations about the historical function of such formulaic verse. As poems composed in northern dialects, their critiques of the metropolitan aristocracy become attempts to provincialize Troy. Based on the modest conditions and limited numbers of the manuscripts, their ambivalence about aristocratic sovereignty was not well received by or beyond their readership. It is striking that while Piers Plowman is extant in fifty-four manuscripts, the alliterative romances, with one exception, survive in single or incomplete copies. The consistency of their northern dialect, metrical choice, and martial subject matter suggest that these romances were a product of an alliterative school of provincial skepticism toward aristocratic practice and claims to sovereignty. The unfortunate result of this dissent was their limited capacity to contribute to the canonical formation of English literary culture.

The sole surviving manuscript that contains the Destruction of Troy is a helpful case in point. It only takes a glance at Glasgow University Library’s Hunterian MS V.2.8 to notice that the modest paper codex was obviously at some remove from an armigerous patron. Its archaic vocabulary and alliterating units were so foreign to the Victorian scholar G.A. Panton that the description he sent to F.J. Furnivall in 1865 stated that the manuscript contained "A stately poem called the Destruction of Troy, wrote by Joseph of Exceter, who lived in the reign of King Henry the Second, from 1154 to 1189. In Old English verse." This early editor of the manuscript not only misidentified the text and verse form, but also assumed it to be a work composed in the early Middle Ages. Without a precedent or an analogue, this Trojan history expressed through archaic Anglo-Saxon verse left Panton, and subsequent readers, at a loss.

To complicate matters further, the text itself suffered a loss at the seventh folio, one that proves to be very provocative. As the poet details the achievements and personalities of the first conquerors of Troy, the Argonauts, the description of Hercules is cut short and the manuscript proceeds into a latter point of Guido's second book, Jason's arrival at Colchis. Book II would have fascinated medieval English readers since it is here that Guido both presages the destruction of the first Troy and tracks the city’s influence upon the establishment of Rome and the Trojan heritage of Britain. Guido’s account, however, does not include a glorious prophecy about the prestige and authority of the Trojan line. Instead, Guido recalls the origin of the strife between the Greeks and Trojans to Laomedon’s dismissal of Jason and Hercules from the shores of Troy and then digresses to discuss the future ramifications of this inhospitable action, saying, “On account of these things, a far-reaching plague of great destruction infected the whole world” (11). For readers such as Prince Henry who claimed the Trojans as ancestors, this pessimism about the destiny for New Troys would have been received with great discomfort or even indignation. Was the section’s content too disagreeable for the English patron to tolerate?

While that question cannot be definitively answered, it is clear that the scribe of Hunterian MS V.2.8, now known to be the sixteenth-century copyist Thomas Chetham, perceived the missing section as noteworthy. The first folio lists an index of chapters and their descriptions inscribed with letters that vary in size. Book II, which is almost entirely absent in the manuscript, is listed as “The ijd boke: how the grekes toke lond vpon troy. CAWSE of the first debate.” While the Destruction contains the section that describes the Greeks arrival at Troy, it does not include subsequent text that would have included a discussion of the “CAWSE.” Since the word “CAWSE” is noticeably large and bolded in comparison to the words of the other chapter descriptions, we can deduce that Chetham deemed this section as especially noteworthy. The importance of the lacuna is confirmed if we turn to the lines preceding this missing section, which conclude a discussion of the life of Hercules and begin the story of one of the greatest imperialists of all time, Alexander the Great:

The mighty Massidon kyng maistur of all,

The Emperour Alexander aunterit to come:

He wan all the world & at his wille aght. (313-5)

A reference to one who conquered the world is an appropriate, albeit hyperbolic, convocation to a discussion of empire and praise of Alexander’s ancestors, but here is where the lacuna begins – these lines end the folio and the text restarts on the next page with an account of Jason and the Argonauts’ arrival at Colchis. Since the transition is so rough, editors Panton and Donaldson not only conclude that folios are missing from an earlier manuscript, but also include in their edition the part of Guido’s text which presumably would have been there. In fact, its absence may be the best testament to its importance.

A digression that flouts the popular fiction of England’s Trojan inheritance would have certainly caught the attention of readers such as Clerk, but since we have no evidence to attest to this, we must turn to one of Guido’s other known readers, John Lydgate, in order to determine late medieval English interest and use of this section of Guido’s text. Lydgate sees Guido’s digression as an opportunity to wander from the plot to explain the role that “gery Fortune” (1.744) plays in inflicting destruction upon the world. While Guido similarly refers to the intervention of “the envious succession of the fates” as a cause for Troy’s fall, their role in the “plague of great destruction” is much less heavy-handed (11). Lydgate, on the other hand, elaborates on Troy’s legacy by claiming that God interrupted this harmful course of events instigated by wily Fortune:

For every wyght oughte to compleyne

That lytel gylte schulde have swyche vengaunce,

Except parkas thorugh Goddys purvyaunce

That this mescheffe schulde after be

Folwyng perchaunse of gret felicité. (1.806-10)

According to Lydgate then, the providence of God works against Fortune in order to rectify a wrong and create a greater good. Lydgate continues by translating Guido’s brief description of translatio imperii, but amplifies the importance of each city involved in the transfer. Rome has now become not just the chief of all cities, but also of “passing famous worthinesse” (1.819). Likewise, Brutus is described as “passyngly famus” (1.832) and Britain is described as a “noble yle” (1.836). By including modifiers that glorify the new Troys and adding God’s “purvyaunce” to Guido’s non-providential history, Lydgate not only perpetuates translatio imperii, but also bolsters its ability to redeem Troy’s destruction. Given his tendency to amplify rather than compress Guido’s text, it is especially curious that he chooses not to translate or comment upon Guido’s pessimistic line, “But the human mind holds in doubt whether the cause of such a great betrayal was finally the cause of subsequent good” (12). Instead, Lydgate substitutes an elaboration of the Trojan genealogy:

And thus whan Troye toun

Eversed was and ibrought to nought,

Ful many cite was ibilt and wrought,

And many lond and many riche toun

Was edified by th’ocasioun

Of this were, as ye han herde me telle. (1.912-7)

Even though Lydgate generally remains faithful to Guido’s historical account, his contention that “[f]ul many cite was ibilt and wrought” and excision of Guido’s pessimism indicates his own predilection for the furthering of the transfer of empire that runs counter to Guido’s ambivalence. This is not to say that Lydgate’s Troy Book is a triumphalistic poem through and through. In fact, as David Benson contends, Lydgate is more concerned with replacing “Guido’s pessimism with practical advice” than bolstering English claims to empire. Benson also characterizes Lydgate’s references to Britain’s Trojan heritage both in theses lines and in his later description of Henry V as sovereign over “Brutys Albyoun” (5.3377) as historical fact. While I agree that it is certainly safe to assume that Lydgate, Clerk and their contemporaries would have viewed their connection to Troy as part of truthful history, Lydgate’s endorsement of this transfer of power is a rejection of Guido’s critique of translatio imperii. Lydgate’s reception of this section then sends at least two messages. First, its content as a whole, particularly regarding the imperial line, is attractive to English audiences and worthy of translation. Second, Guido’s pessimistic coloring of translatio imperii does not suit the interests of Lydgate or his patron. Given Lydgate’s embellishment and enthusiastic rendering of this section in the early fifteenth century, we must ask why this section is missing in Clerk’s Destruction, which was most likely composed only twenty years beforehand.

While there are other portions of the poem in which lines are lost or compressed, no other missing section, which I estimate to be approximately three folios, matches the significance of this one. No leaves are missing from the book, which indicates that the loss is the result of lost folios in an earlier manuscript. It is therefore highly probable that Clerk had included this section in his original composition of the poem and that it was either lost through copy error, overuse, or censorship. While copy error is a common reason for a missing section, the second and third possibilities are especially compelling, because even a quick glance at one of the manuscript copies of Guido’s Historia reveals the popularity of this section to its audience. A reader who flips through Glasgow University Library’s Koln 140 cannot miss the extent of the glosses that fill the margins. The importance of this section is reflected by scribal flourishes in other manuscripts as well. For example, in Codex Claustroneoburgensis 746, held in the Klosterneuburg’s Stiftsbibliothek, a manicula (f.3v) points to the lines that relate translatio imperii. Codex Admontensis 185 of Admont’s Stiftsbibliothek even contains a manicula (f.3r) that signals Guido’s most pessimistic line “But the human mind holds in doubt whether the cause [causa] of such a great betrayal was finally the cause of subsequent good” (12). Since the glosses indicate that this part of Guido’s text was well read and perceived as instructional, interesting, and/or controversial, it is probable that Clerk’s readers turned to this section both to discover more historical confirmation about their Trojan heritage and to interrogate Britain’s own aristocratic fantasies.

While we cannot uncritically support a reading of Destruction based on what has not survived, we would not do the “history” of Troy justice without following Clerk’s textual clues, all of which indicate that this section was a part of the poem during its original composition. Even if this section were never a part of Clerk’s original poem, we must consider why he might have excised this attractive historical content. All in all, the loss compels us to consider the complex role Troy plays, not only within Clerk’s version of the fall, but also within the late medieval English imagination.