In the Name of the (Dead) Father: Reading Fathers and Sons in Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Bevis of Hampton

I. Introduction

In his entry on fathers in De Proprietatibus Rerum (ca. 1240), Bartholomaeus Anglicus writes: "He loves most the son that is most like him and often observes and watches over him. He gives his children clothing and food and drink appropriate to their age. He purchases land and provides an inheritance for his children, and makes sure it increases. He tills the land and leaves it to his heirs."¹ Moving away from the more abstract scientific discourse on the father's role in procreation that begins the entry, which he attributes to Constantine and Aristotle, Bartholomaeus grounds his depiction of fatherhood in affect, provision, and inheritance. At the same time, he observes that a father's actions are guided by the order of his children's birth and how much they appear to resemble him. These themes are taken up again toward the end of the entry:

And the more the child is like the father, the more he is loved by the father. . . . The feeding and upbringing of children is the most important occupation of loving parents. The inheritance is kept for the children, in hope of offspring. Often, the child is punished and disinherited by law for injuring and despising his father. . . . The law requires that the eldest son have a larger portion of the inheritance. Sometimes, because of a wrong done to the father by the eldest son, the inheritance, rights, and name of the eldest son is taken away and given to another son who is more worthy to have them.²

Thus, while Bartholomaeus's order of things would have firstborn sons inherit the greatest portion of a father's holdings, in the hope of extending the paternal line, it also considers the dangers unfilial sons pose to the constituted order and how this threat can be dealt with by adjusting the customs governing inheritance.

These descriptions of fatherhood would have held the interest of a medieval aristocratic audience as the father-son relation gained importance during the High Middle Ages as the basis of patrilineal inheritance by primogeniture. This system of inheritance had become common among the aristocracy across northwestern Europe from the eleventh century, and by 1300, it had largely replaced inheritance along other principles.³ As the inheritance of nonpartible land holdings to the eldest son became widely practiced, the father-son relation took precedence over all other familial relationships and became increasingly concerned with the extension of lineage and guarding the integrity of inheritance. As Georges Duby puts it, by the eleventh century, "[t]he significance of a family has become the significance of its heir."⁴

Despite the cultural valorization of primogeniture, anxieties regarding the stability of the father-son relationship surface in the plots of many Middle English romances, where the disruption of the relationship is the source of dramatic tension. In these romances, misfortune or malice causes the separation of father and son, and the protagonist grows up without the benefit of his father's presence, often in a foreign court under his mother's care. However, the protagonist manages to reunite with his father and eventually fulfills the strict terms of patrilineal succession through primogeniture.⁵ The Middle English romances discussed in this article exhibit this alienation—return structure. However, they also form a more exclusive group as they feature not the temporary separation of father and son but a more permanent break in the relationship: each father dies while the protagonist is still a young child. In Havelok the Dane, King Horn, and Bevis of Hampton, the opening action comprises the death of the father, and in each case this death causes the political crisis of disinheritance. Yet, unlike other romances of separation, these fathers are never really absent: they continue to hover prominently over the narratives as they are invoked throughout in various ways. Indeed, dead fathers become role models that guide the protagonists' actions. As I demonstrate below, the similarity between father and son, expressed in physical likeness and noble attributes, becomes...