Geffrei Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis, Peacemaking, and the “Twelfth-Century Revival of the English Nation”

Geffrei Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis is the earliest existing example of history written in French.¹ It was composed during the reign of King Stephen (1135-54), a period dominated by a civil war that sprang from a disputed succession to the English crown. Stephen acquired this crown after the death of his uncle King Henry I (1100-35) in violation, his opponents claimed, of an oath he and other Anglo-Norman magnates swore in 1127 to accept the succession of Henry's daughter, Empress Matilda. The resulting civil war, during which Matilda and her supporters challenged Stephen's kingship, was a chaotic and protracted conflict: the nineteen long years when Christ and his saints were said to have slept.² During their slumbers, royal authority atrophied, Stephen lost control of Normandy, rebellions turned back the tide of Anglo-Norman conquest in Wales, Welsh rulers and soldiers helped to defeat and capture the English king at the battle of Lincoln (1141), and the Scots invaded and extended their dominion over large parts of northern England.³ Gaimar's history was written, therefore, "when the empire of the kings of England was most at risk, most in danger of being overthrown by the military successes of the Scottish and Welsh kings."⁴

Gaimar was commissioned to write by Constance, wife of Ralf Fitz Gilbert; she was a secular aristocratic lady who lived for a time in Lincolnshire and in whose household Gaimar may have served as a clerk. The writing took fourteen months, a period usually regarded as falling within the years 1135-40 but possibly better placed somewhere between 1141 and 1150.⁵ The Estoire is the surviving part of a larger work originally covering history from Trojan times. It addresses English history from the time of King Cerdic (519-34) to the death of King William II (Rufus) in 1100. It is largely based, as far as to the accession of King Edgar in 959, upon the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (ASC), but it is supplemented by various tales that may be partly or wholly legendary and derived, to some extent, from oral traditions. It employs such traditions thereafter in conjunction with several written sources.⁶ The sum of its parts is unique.

Scholarly opinion is divided about the Estoire's value and purpose: "[a]s a verse history, it has been better appreciated-or, rather, parts of it have been-by scholars of language and literature than by prosaic historians."⁷ A number of scholars have noted its inaccuracies and errors, adoption of literary conventions, similarities to romance writing, and incorporation of legendary and eulogistic material.⁸ Others have viewed it as a valuable reflection of twelfth-century aristocratic morals, attitudes, values, or aspirations. The work of three of them-John Gillingham,⁹ Elizabeth Freeman,¹⁰ and Jane Zatta¹¹-is particularly germane to the argument of this paper.

Gillingham examines the themes of chivalry, kingship, war, love, and marriage evident within the Estoire. He argues that they mark Gaimar out as a writer of chivalric literature that "offers us an unparalleled insight into the thought-world of the secular aristocracy of the early twelfth century" and "precious early evidence of an alternative and secular set of values."¹² He also observes that the Estoire suggests, "as Sir Richard Southern pointed out, that by the 1130s the Francophone secular elite [in England], the gentry of the time, could see the Anglo Saxon past as their past"; the Estoire thus helps to reveal a profoundly important perception that, Gillingham argues, took root in the "crisis of empire" that occurred during Stephen's reign. This was "the emergence of a new sense of national identity" in which the distinction between Norman conquerors and oppressed English subjects had vanished and the French-speaking inhabitants of England thought of themselves as English: "It looks as though one of the consequences of the wars against the Welsh and the Scots in Stephen's reign was to crystallize a newly reemerging sense of English solidarity and identity...