L'Estoire des Engleis (History of the English) (review)

Ian Short's new edition and facing-page translation of Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis (History of the English) is a most welcome and long overdue contribution to the available resources for the study of the literature and history of twelfth-century England. Finished close to 1136, as Short argues in the introduction, the Estoire is the earliest substantial piece of European vernacular historiography that we possess. It is also one of the earliest surviving examples of octosyllabic French verse. It was first edited in 1850 by Thomas Wright, and his edition was subsequently translated in 1854 by Joseph Stephenson. In 1888-1889, it was published as volume 91 of the Rolls Series, accompanied by an inaccurate and all but unreadable translation, and that volume remained the edition of reference until 1960, when Alexander Bell reedited the Estoire for the Anglo-Norman Text Society, that is, for the subscriber list of a very small specialist society. In the light of this textual history it is perhaps no wonder that, with several notable exceptions, including John Gillingham and the late Jane Zatta, scholars of Insular historiography and of French courtly literature have not given Gaimar's work nearly the attention it deserves.

Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis survives in four manuscripts. The oldest witness, MS Durham Cathedral Library C. IV. 27, dates from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. In this manuscript, the Estoire follows Wace's Roman de Brut (1155), and is followed by a brief Description of Britain, and then Jordan Fantosme's Chronicle. A thirteenth-century manuscript, Lincoln Cathedral Chapter Library 104, consists of the same material. In these manuscripts Gaimar's text is made thus to form a link in a continuous history stretching from the mythical founding of Britain to the reign of Henry II. The two early fourteenth-century manuscripts containing the Estoire are historiographical compilations with different interests; in these manuscripts as well, Wace's Brut precedes the Estoire as if forming its first part. In fact, if we are to trust the end of the so-called long epilogue, and there seems to be no reason not to, Gaimar originally began the Estoire with the Troy story, and it stretched continuously from "the point where Jason left in pursuit of the Golden Fleece" to the death of William Rufus. Wace's 1155 translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's immensely popular Historia Regum Brittaniae seems to have supplanted this first part of the Estoire—at least to date no manuscript witness of it has been found.

For his edition, Short has wisely taken London, British Library, MS Royal 13 A. xxi, the latest of these manuscripts, as his base text, even though its language postdates Gaimar's by some 200 years. That this manuscript, as Short notes in the introduction, "is, textually speaking, the most complete and by far the best of these manuscripts has long been recognized, not least since Vising, who, in 1882, made a careful study of the textual tradition of the Estoire and drew up a stemma" (pp. xxi-xxii). The nineteenth-century editions were based on the same manuscript. Bell, on the other hand, chose the oldest witness, the Durham manuscript, as the basis for his 1960 edition, on the grounds that its linguistic features were closest to Gaimar's language. He completed it by reference to the Royal manuscript, thus producing a composite text. Bell's practice was roundly condemned in contemporary reviews, M. Dominica Legge going so far as to call it "a monstrosity." Short has emended conservatively though diligently, as one would expect from this consummate scholar, and carefully recorded all changes in the Rejected Readings at the foot of the page. Unfortunately, however, Short has not provided the reader with a complete collation of the four manuscripts. Instead, he refers the reader to Bell's edition, which is likely to be easily available only to very few readers.

Gaimar wrote under...