Becoming English: Ronwenne’s Wassail, Language, and National Identity in the Middle English Prose Brut

Ronewenne, þat was Engistes douʒter, come wiþ a coupe of golde in here honde, and knelede bifore þe kyng, and saide to him “Whatsaile!” and þe kyng wist nouʒt what it was forto mene, ne what he shulde ansuere, for-asmiche as himself ne none of his Britons ʒitte couþe none Englisshe speke, ne vnderstonde it, but speken þo þat same langage þat Britons ʒitte done. . . . and þat was þe ferst tyme þat “whatsaile” and “drynkehaile” come vp into þis lande; and fram þat tyme into this tyme it Haþ bene wel vsede.

[Ronwenne, who was Hengist’s daughter, came with a cup of gold in her hand, and knelt before the king, and said to him, “wassail!” And the king did not know what it meant, nor what he should answer, because neither he nor any of his Britons could speak any English yet, nor understand it, but they spoke the same language that Britons [i.e. the Welsh] still do. . . . And that was the first time that “wassail” and “drink hail” came into this land, and from that time unto this time it has been well used.]¹

The Middle English prose Brut, the most widely circulating vernacular history of Britain in the Middle Ages, consistently presents England as a unified nation, one that arises out of the multiplicity of peoples in medieval Britain. This marks a departure from both its earlier sources and many of the histories contemporary with it, which present, instead, conflicting ethnic and regional identities within Britain. Recent scholarship has focused so heavily upon this counternational, regional tradition that it is easy to forget that there was also a strong current of “nationalistic” British historiography. I want to focus on this current here, with special emphasis on the prose Brut’s presentation of the Saxon² arrival in Britain and on the figure of Ronwenne in particular.

To speak of the English nation and English national identity in the medieval period is controversial. For the majority of scholars today, the nation is a strictly modern phenomenon, rising in concert with the Industrial Revolution and capitalism and dependent on these—the trappings of modernity—for its existence. These scholars argue that competing regional, religious, and familial identities posed a continual challenge to any unified national identity in the Middle Ages. In addition, there has been much recent work that rethinks the practice of studying the whole of medieval Britain rather than examining each region separately.³ Yet there were discourses in medieval Britain that attempted to imagine the island of Britain as a single political and cultural entity. Responding to the presence of terms and ideas suggestive of the nation in the literature of the past, an increasing number of scholars within medieval studies have questioned the most dominant narrative of the origin of the nation and proposed the existence of medieval national identities.⁴

In my approach to nationhood and national identity in the later European Middle Ages, I take my cue from Bernard Guenée’s cogent summation:

Did national consciousness exist in Europe at the end of the Middle Ages? That is an open question and badly phrased. It would be better to say: what did a European understand by “nation” at the end of the Middle Ages? In which State did the inhabitants see themselves as part of a nation? How intense was this “national” consciousness and what was it like? What vigour and cohesion did the State derive from this “national” sentiment?⁵

That medieval nations were different from our own modern ones—which themselves vary widely—is clear; but it is equally clear that there was some sense of what it meant to be English in the late medieval period. The modernist bias fails to account for a work like the Middle English prose Brut, with its persistent engagement with questions of cultural and ethnic identity, with nationhood both political and ideological, and, most importantly, with how to create a single, defining history of England that incorporates, nonetheless, its repeated colonization and ethnic...