The late thirteenth-century romance of
Havelok differs from
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun because it depicts a couple who are both unwilling to marry. Abuses of power are the subject of this romance from the start, with its parallel storylines of how Godrich and Godard, close friends of the dying Kings of England and Denmark, are made regents and use this opportunity to disinherit the rightful heirs (Goldeborw and Havelok) and seize power for themselves. Part of Godrich’s strategy to disinherit Goldeborw is to marry her to Havelok, who appears to be a poor young man working as a kitchen servant. Coercion is not a strategy levelled by a desiring partner upon an undesiring one here: it is a political tactic, exerted by someone in a position of power over two subordinates.
Havelok therefore situates the relationship between desire, resistance, and social status differently to
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun, amplifying the undesirability of interclass relationships.
Havelok uses resistance to marriage to highlight the importance of maintaining class boundaries, perhaps challenging the interest in social mobility through marriage elsewhere in romance. Havelok and Goldeborw do come to love one another, but they do so (or at least Goldeborw, the apparently higher-status partner, does so) only after their status parity is revealed. Havelok’s and Goldeborw’s resistance and its development into love offer exemplary and socially conservative models for their medieval readers, functioning in ways that align with and elaborate on the identification of
Havelok as a
vita in the incipit added to it in MS Laud Misc. 108 (the only complete surviving manuscript, in which it appears with
King Horn).
1 See further Kimberly K. Bell, ‘Resituating Romance: The Dialectics of Sanctity in MS Laud Misc. 108’s Havelok the Dane and Royal Vitae’, Parergon, 25.1 (2008), 27–51 (pp. 32, 41–2, 51). Havelok is also referred to as a ‘gest’ within the text itself. For a full discussion of Havelok’s genre, see K. S. Whetter, ‘Gest and Vita, Folktale and Romance in Havelok’, Parergon, 20.2 (2003), 21–46. As well as MS Laud Misc. 108, fragments of Havelok survive in Cambridge University Library, MS Add. 4407 (19), along with fragments of the Elegy on the Death of Edward I, The Proverbs of Hendyng, and a poem based on the first elegy of Maximianus. See further Smithers, ‘Introduction’, in Havelok, pp. xi–xciii (pp. xiv–xvi). My reading of
Havelok’s exemplarity draws on Kimberly Bell and Julie Nelson Couch’s work situating
Havelok within its manuscript context but explores how
Havelok’s portrayal of resistance to marriage brings secular forms of exemplarity into dialogue with spiritual concerns, not simply echoing the focus of the more religious texts in the manuscript but inviting readers to draw connections between hagiographical material, secular love, and their own conduct.
2 See Bell, ‘Resituating Romance’; Julie Nelson Couch, ‘Defiant Devotion in MS Laud Misc. 108: The Narrator of Havelok the Dane and Affective Piety’, Parergon, 25.1 (2008), 53–79; and their edited volume, The Texts and Contexts of MS Laud Misc. 108.Goldeborw’s resistance to marrying Havelok offers a more worldly and potentially quite immediate set of concerns for the romance’s audience, concentrating specifically on the issue of social class.
3 Little is known about the initial audience of Havelok. For a discussion of the audience for MS Laud Misc. 108, see Bell and Nelson Couch, ‘Introduction’, pp. 14–16. For the South English Legendary, of which the Laud manuscript offers an early witness, O. S. Pickering has suggested an initial audience of ‘enclosed religious’, quickly broadening to encompass devout lay readers. Annie Samson suggests ‘regional gentry and perhaps secular clergy’ for the early South English Legendary readers, while Crane proposes a baronial readership for Havelok and King Horn. While a wider audience may have heard these narratives read aloud, a gentry or noble audience does not seem unlikely for Havelok. See Pickering, ‘The South English Legendary: Teaching or Preaching?’, Poetica, 45 (1996), 1–14 (pp. 6, 10, 12–13); Samson, ‘The South English Legendary: Constructing a Context’, Thirteenth Century England, 1 (1986), 185–95 (p. 194); Crane, Insular Romance, pp. 43–52. Goldeborw tells Godrich that ‘hire sholde noman wedde’ ‘but he were king or kinges eyr’ (1114–16), emphasising her fear of
mésalliance while also anticipating the providential outcome of her marriage to Havelok, who is actually the ‘kinges eyr’ of Denmark. Like
King Horn and
Amis and Amiloun, the focus on status is more emphatic in the Middle English romance, adapting the more courtly narratives of Geffrei Gaimar’s
Estoire des Engleis (written for Constance Fitz Gilbert, 1135–37) and the
Lai d’Haveloc (late twelfth to early thirteenth century)
to a socially conservative focus on status.
4 On FitzGilbert as Gaimar’s patron, see Emily Dolmans, ‘The View from Lincolnshire: Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis as Regional History’, in Writing Regional Identities in Medieval England: From the ‘Gesta Herwardi’ to ‘Richard Coer de Lyon’ (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020), pp. 64–96 (pp. 65–6, 68, 70–2); Ian Short, ‘Introduction’, in Estoire des Engleis | History of the English, ed. & trans. by Ian Short (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. ix–liii (pp. ix–xii). On the relationships between the Havelok stories, see Crane, Insular Romance, p. 40; Smithers, ‘Introduction’, p. liv. In Gaimar’s
Estoire, Argentille (as Goldeborw is named in the Anglo-Norman works) starts to love Havelok before she knows his true status, as when ‘il firent primes lur deduit: / mult s’entreamerent e joïrent’ [‘they made love for the first time. They showed great affection to each other and found great pleasure’].
5 Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis, ed. & trans. by Short, lines 192–3, trans. p. 13. Likewise, in the
Lai d’Haveloc, while Argentille is initially ashamed of Haveloc,
puis s’asseürerent tant,
Et par parole et par semblant,
Qu’il l’ama et od lui geut
Come od s’espouse fere deut.
[…]
Et la meschine s’endormi;
Son braz getta sus son ami.
6 ‘Later they became so trusting of each other, / In both their words and their expressions, / That he loved her and lay with her / As it was his duty to do with his wife. / […] / And the maiden slept, / Throwing her arm over her lover’: The Anglo-Norman Lay of ‘Haveloc’: Text and Translation, ed. & trans. by Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015), lines 387–96.These lines establish a loving relationship between Haveloc and Argentille after their marriage but before the revelation of Haveloc’s true status in the Lai d’Haveloc, as well as in Gaimar’s Estoire: in both cases this reflects a courtly focus upon sexuality, which the Middle English romance eschews.
In doing so,
Havelok makes social class a more significant preoccupation, expanding the focus from the couple’s initial resistance to consider how the development of love is influenced by social status. When Goldeborw travels to Grimsby with Havelok, ‘sory and sorwful was she ay’, ‘þat she were yeuen unkyndelike’ (1249, 1251), ‘unkyndelike’ potentially conveying the moral implications indicated above in relation to
King Horn’s portrayal of
mésalliance as against ‘cunde’. Whereas love develops between Haveloc and Argentille in the
Estoire and the
Lai before Haveloc’s status is revealed, in the Middle English romance it is only when Goldeborw sees the light coming from Havelok’s mouth and the cross on his shoulder and thinks ‘he beth heyman yet’ (1261) that her attitude towards him starts to change. This episode yokes together immediate, practical, and worldly concerns about social class with religious symbolism: Bell notes the holy and specifically Christological connotations of the light and king-mark as symbols of Havelok’s status, and this combination of religious and secular concerns is developed as Goldeborw is told by an angel to ‘lat þi sorwe be! / For Hauelok […] is kinges sone and kinges eyr’.
7 Bell, ‘Resituating Romance’, pp. 44–50; Havelok, lines 1266–8. Only after the angel’s message, which echoes the terms in which Goldeborw earlier attempted to set a condition for her marriage, does she become ‘so fele siþes bliþe’ (1278) that she kisses Havelok and calls him ‘lemman’ (1323). The time frame here is unclear: it is possible that the angel appears to Goldeborw ‘on their wedding night’, as Emma O’Loughlin Bérat suggests, but this is not clearly stated.
8 Emma O’Loughlin Bérat, ‘Constructions of Queenship: Envisioning Women’s Sovereignty in Havelok’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 118.2 (2019), 234–51 (p. 248). Goldeborw may actually fall in love with Havelok more quickly than Argentille in Gaimar or the
Lai, but the time frame is perhaps less important than whether Argentille/Goldeborw knows her husband’s true status before loving him. The way in which Goldeborw’s developing love for Havelok is impacted by her understanding of his class status positions her desire firmly within a conservative framework, where she may function as an exemplary model of how a middle- to upper-class family might wish their daughters to consider their romantic attachments.
Such a focus may have suited the audience of
Havelok aptly: although earlier scholarship argued that it may have appealed to a lower-class audience,
9 Henk Aertsen, ‘Havelok the Dane: A Non-Courtly Romance’, in Companion to Early Middle English Literature, ed. by N. H. G. E. Veldhoen and Henk Aertsen, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1995), pp. 29–50; Roy Michael Liuzza, ‘Representation and Readership in the Middle English Havelok’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 93.4 (1994), 504–19. this view has been refuted by scholars who have revealed that the aspects presumed to appeal to lower-class audiences also appear in the earlier Haveloc narratives (associated with the upper classes), emphasising the romance’s primarily baronial and bourgeois sympathies.
10 Crane, Insular Romance, p. 43; Sheila Delany and Vahan Ishkanian, ‘Theocratic and Contractual Kingship in Havelok the Dane’, Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 22 (1974), 290–302. Scholarship has also focused on the textual evidence for readership provided by the only complete manuscript, MS Laud Misc. 108.
11 Nelson Couch, ‘Defiant Devotion’, pp. 56–7, 63–4; see also the broader discussion in Bell and Nelson Couch, The Texts and Contexts of MS Laud Misc. 108. Although little is known about the readership of the Laud manuscript, Andrew Taylor suggests that it may have been ‘a purposeful commission from a prosperous, sophisticated, and highly literate patron’.
12 Andrew Taylor, ‘“Her Y Spelle”: The Evocation of Minstrel Performance in a Hagiographical Context’, in The Texts and Contexts of MS Laud Misc. 108, pp. 71–86 (p. 85). Amongst middle- to upper-class readers, social class and
mésalliance appear to have been matters of considerable concern.
Menuge notes that five out of six of the works she defines as wardship romances ‘share the connected themes of wardship marriage, marriage abuse and disparagement’, indicating the relatively popular nature of this subject; Menuge also interprets the presence of legislation against disparaging marriages in medieval law as indicating that such marriages were occurring, revealing the real-life problems wardship romances confront.
13 Noël James Menuge, ‘The Wardship Romance: A New Methodology’, in Tradition and Transformation in Medieval Romance, ed. by Rosalind Field (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), pp. 29–43 (pp. 33, 37). See also the discussion of disparaging marriages and the interest in prospective husbands’ rank in Harris, English Aristocratic Women, pp. 54, 56. Mésalliance may have been a real concern for the early readers of
Havelok, opening up connections between the romance’s possible audience and Goldeborw, which may have enhanced her exemplary potential by prompting empathy for her.
Goldeborw’s experience of marital disparagement and coercion is extreme, but, as Menuge argues, it
closely engages with legal and social realities, as the ‘marriage [is] thrust upon [Goldeborw] with the threat of “force and fear”’, following the legal identification of forced marriages, while the constraints upon Goldeborw to accept Godrich’s command ‘must be representative of the legal difficulties female wards faced’.
14 Menuge, ‘The Wardship Romance’, p. 31; Noël James Menuge, ‘Female Wards and Marriage in Romance and Law: A Question of Consent’, in Young Medieval Women, ed. by Katherine J. Lewis, Noël James Menuge, and Kim M. Phillips (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), pp. 153–71 (p. 159). These emphases are particularly characteristic of the Middle English
Havelok, which
is more preoccupied with consent and the law throughout (for example, in the praise of Aþelwold’s laws, the description of Godrich establishing his reign, and the judgement and punishment scenes at the end), as well as specifically in Goldeborw and Havelok’s marriage.
15 For further discussion, see Corinne Saunders, ‘A Matter of Consent: Middle English Romance and the Law of Raptus’, in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. by Noël James Menuge (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000), pp. 105–24 (p. 113); Crane, Insular Romance, p. 48; Robert Rouse, ‘English Identity and the Law in Havelok the Dane, Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild and Beues of Hamtoun’, in Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England, pp. 69–83 (pp. 75–7). In Gaimar, Argentille’s non-consent is evident only after the marriage has taken place, when she
sovent son uncle maldisseit
ki si l’aveit desheritee
e a un tel home donee.
16 ‘Kept cursing her uncle for having disinherited her and for having given her to a man like this’: Estoire des Engleis, lines 188–90, trans. p. 13.The Lai, meanwhile, gives more prominence to the barons’ dissent than to Argentille’s:
Entre eus dient en apert
Que ceo n’ert ja par eus suffert.
17 ‘They said openly among themselves / That they would never tolerate this’: The Anglo-Norman Lay of ‘Haveloc’, lines 373–4. For further discussion of this baronial emphasis, see my article, ‘The Ethics of Community in the Lai d’Haveloc’, Le Cygne: Journal of the International Marie de France Society, 3rd ser., 8 (2022), 53–71.Their resistance is overcome when Alsi summons his soldiers to force their acceptance. The emphasis on the barons may relate to contemporary aristocratic concerns, as Susan Crane notes that the Angevin kings (who ruled during the period in which the
Estoire and
Lai were written) extended their powers over the barony ‘to include forced marriages of the king’s choice’.
18 Insular Romance, p. 19. While the
Lai makes the barons’ opposition clear, all we hear of Argentille herself is that Alsi
Sa niece lur fet amener
Et a Cuaran esposer.
Pur lui aviler et honir
La fist la nuit lez lui gisir.
19 ‘Had his niece brought forward / And married her to Cuaran. / To disgrace and dishonour her / He made her lie next to him that night’: The Anglo-Norman Lay of ‘Haveloc’, lines 377–80.While this highlights Argentille’s lack of agency, her consent is not expressly declined; instead, it is absent. This contrasts with the Middle English narrative, which makes consent an individual issue and gives significant prominence to Goldeborw’s experiences of coercion.
Havelok adds the scene in which Goldeborw and Godrich discuss her marriage before it occurs and focuses significantly on her emotional response to coercion during the wedding itself:
Sho was adrad for he so þrette,
And durste nouth þe spusing lette,
But þey hire likede swiþe ille,
Þouthe it was Godes wille. (1164–7)
These details are very different to the omission of Argentille’s feelings in the
Lai and the mention of her non-consent only after marriage in Gaimar. The Middle English writer establishes Goldeborw’s anger and fear, focusing on her emotions both as they are externally manifested and internally experienced by Goldeborw. She is said to have ‘gret and yaf hire ille’ when she is first told she will marry Havelok (1130), but she also ‘was adrad’ and ‘durste nouth’ protest, privileging the reader with knowledge of Goldeborw’s fear and dissatisfaction to elicit sympathy for this coerced bride. This offers a striking contrast to the lack of detailed interest in women’s emotional experiences characteristic of several of the romances discussed in Chapter 1. As Nelson Couch notes, the narrator of
Havelok repeatedly ‘shape[s] an audience response of sympathy for the victimized heroine’, ‘mapping out expected actions for the external audience’ and ‘priming us to suffer with her’.
20 Nelson Couch, ‘Defiant Devotion’, p. 70. While Nelson Couch connects this to
Havelok’s emphasis upon affective, meditative reading, the sympathy evoked for Goldeborw may also reflect an implicit connection between Goldeborw’s experiences and the more moderate experiences of or fears about marital coercion relevant to middle- and upper-class readers. Goldeborw’s experiences emphasise the violating nature of disparaging marriages and suggest the importance of status parity for a successful partnership.
However, while Goldeborw protests her forced marriage, she also accepts the need to abide by God’s will: ‘þey hire likede swiþe ille, / [she] þouthe it was Godes wille’ (1166–7). The ensuing comment that ‘God […] / Formede hire wimman to be born’ (1168–9) resonates with Custance’s famous reflection that ‘wommen are born to thraldom and penance’ in Chaucer’s
Man of Law’s Tale, an echo that highlights that Goldeborw is not accepting the marriage as a positive outcome but is rather criticising gendered constructions and the coercion of female wards.
21 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, in The Riverside Chaucer, pp. 87–104 (line 286). However, her acceptance of God’s will even while she opposes the marriage further develops her exemplary function, indicating the importance of faith in God even at an apparently disastrous moment. This reference to accepting God’s will in the face of crisis is particular to the Middle English romance, as Gaimar and the
Lai only
refer to God’s will in positive contexts. Crane notes that ‘a sense of providential favor suffuses the story’s developments’ in the
Lai, while Gaimar affirms at the comparable point that ‘ore est mesters de Deus aït’ (170) ‘[‘what is needed at this stage is God’s help’, p. 11], appealing for God’s assistance with restoring good fortune rather than acknowledging his providence at work even in an apparently negative outcome.
22 Insular Romance, p. 41. There is no exact counterpart in the Lai, but it emphasises the positive nature of God’s providence: ‘mult fut einçois desesperee, / Mes ore l’ad Dieus reconfortee’ [‘earlier she had been in great despair, / But now God had comforted her’], lines 977–8. The different emphasis of the Middle English romance again heightens its engagement with exemplary behaviour, aligning
Havelok with other pious romances that emphasise accepting God’s will, such as
Sir Isumbras and
Sir Amadace. Goldeborw’s focus on God’s providence offers a model of pious behaviour, which may explain her particular prominence in
Havelok, as in this light she shares similarities with hagiographical-romance heroines like Custance or Emaré, whose heroism focuses on enduring and accepting suffering while upholding faith.
23 On Goldeborw’s prominence, see Bérat, ‘Constructions of Queenship’, p. 236; Whetter, ‘Gest and Vita’, pp. 43–6. On Custance and similar heroines as models of female endurance, see Holly A. Crocker, ‘Virtue’s Grace: Custance and Other Daughters’, in The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), pp. 111–53. Although her acceptance of God’s will is mentioned only briefly, it is supported by the greater prominence of religious concerns in the Middle English work compared to its Anglo-Norman antecedents, such as the emphasis on confession and prayer in Aþelwold’s and Birkabeyn’s deaths, the focus on religious objects in the oaths Godrich and Godard swear, the references to Godard and Godrich as Judas, and the appearance of the angel to Goldeborw.
24 Bell discusses these aspects: ‘Resituating Romance’, pp. 38–9, 44. The brief indication of Goldeborw’s acceptance of God’s will broadens our sense of
Havelok’s appeal and didacticism, indicating some of the more immediately imitable models
Havelok may have offered its audience.
While Bell suggests that
Havelok ‘exerts its own influence on the
vitae [in the Laud manuscript] by offering a more complete picture of royal sanctity’, the romance also presents models of exemplary behaviour more immediately relevant to its readers through the dual focus on Goldeborw and Havelok.
25 Ibid., p. 28. I am suggesting, then, that the Laud romances add to the hagiographical narratives’ focus, providing models of behaviour that readers might more readily be called upon to imitate. The presence of these intermediary models of behaviour may encourage readers to broaden their emulation of exemplary actions from the more easily imitated romance models to encompass religious models, too. While Goldeborw’s resistance to marrying Havelok reinforces class boundaries and opposes coercive practices associated with wards’ marriages, she also offers an exemplary model of worldly piety through the brief but significant focus on God’s providence.
Havelok’s unwillingness to marry further extends the moral remit of this motif by using it to elicit consideration of and sympathy with experiences of poverty. His situation reflects a(n apparently) much more extreme situation of class difference than that in King Horn and Amis and Amiloun, as Havelok lacks basic necessities. When Godrich asks if Havelok wants to marry, Havelok responds,
Hwat sholde Ich with wif do?
J ne may hire fede ne cloþe ne sho.
Wider sholde Ich wimman bringe?
J ne haue none kines þinge –
J ne haue hws, Y ne haue cote,
Ne I ne haue stikke, Y ne haue sprote,
J ne haue neyþer bred ne sowel,
Ne cloth but of an hold with couel. (1138–45)
Havelok’s reservations about marriage are not concerns about the boundaries between degrees of rank but reflect his urgent material need. The extent to which Havelok considers his situation unsuitable to allow him to marry anyone, let alone the heir to the throne, is emphasised by the vagueness of Godrich’s offer. Asking ‘mayster, wilte wif?’ (1136), it is unclear whether Godrich has specifically mentioned Goldeborw at this point or whether Havelok is rejecting marriage in general because of his poverty. Havelok does not imagine marriage as enabling upward social mobility – again subtly conveying caution about this – but considers poverty a debilitating state that prevents him from marrying.
Havelok, then, takes the didactic and moral potential of resistance to
mésalliance further than the other romances discussed so far, broadening its audience’s moral and social framework to elicit sympathetic consideration of social issues like poverty, which were probably outside of their lived knowledge. Sympathy with Havelok, however, does not inspire an interest in social mobility: while Goldeborw and Havelok’s marriage is unambiguously forced, social mobility is also depicted negatively elsewhere in the romance. Grim almost murders the child Havelok ‘for monetary gain and upward social mobility’, while Godrich’s treachery seems to be motivated by a desire for social advancement, as he demands of Goldeborw, ‘hwor þou wilt be / Quen and leuedi ouer me?’.
26 Bell, ‘Resituating Romance’, p. 48; Havelok, lines 1120–1. The moral focus of this romance, its socially conservative and cautious representation of relationships between people of differing status, and its exploration of coercion, then, serve complementary functions, all of which can fruitfully be read within the Laud manuscript’s exemplary framework. The portrayals of Goldeborw and Havelok develop these interests in new ways by emphasising the qualities middle- to upper-class readers ought to consider when determining whom to marry.