Food, Sovereignty, and Social Order in Havelok the Dane

[T]he daily fight in which the human body is engaged to keep the world clean and prevent its decay bears little resemblance to heroic deeds; the endurance it needs to repair every day anew the waste of yesterday is not courage, and what makes the effort painful is not danger but its relentless repetition.¹

I. The Genre of Labor

As Hannah Arendt suggests in the above passage, there is a generic problem inherent to the story of the struggle of the working class. In myths humans labor heroically against nature and find victory and glory in their efforts. Even when a hero performs a seemingly ordinary act—for example, cleaning out a stable or competing in a swimming contest—the stakes become magnified far beyond what any other person could expect to achieve. For everyone else, there is only a "relentless repetition" of the struggle against decay and chaos, an interminable battle to maintain life itself. The circularity of labor, which must immediately reincorporate some part of what it produces in order to continue working, forestalls the question of heroism as much as its grinding endlessness overflows narrative bounds. To be recognized as extraordinary, a hero must wrest surplus into his possession, a feat that demonstrates excellence among others. In the narrative of productive labor, there are few of the remainders—wealth, honor, or glory—that allow a tale to be pushed toward climax, conclusion, and repose. Labor power as material phenomenon or human condition exists beyond the horizon of aristocratic genres, like tragedy, epic, and romance, and this exclusivity renders these literary forms unable to represent the actual source of the political power they celebrate.

The romance of Havelok (ca. 1295) is an experiment in generic frontiers, an attempt to look into the vanishing point that is the unrepresentable space of labor. It is a narrative profoundly concerned with the human body's distressing vulnerability in a world of sweat and hunger. It is a story pitched at the grand scale of international political maneuvering, of dynasties and usurpation, of invasion and restoration that nonetheless characterizes its own themes in a decidedly more local context, describing itself as a story of "Hw he weren born and hw fedde" (l. 2987).² Such a homely assessment seems overly modest for such a rich, complex, and magnificent tale, yet it is literally true. In charting the course from Havelok's exile in infancy, youth of toil, and ultimate reclamation of his inheritance, the romance never stops watching his body, and his efforts to sustain himself during his exile stand in for the more standard set of adventures of the knight-errant. Havelok is a conspicuously physical hero, remarkable not only for his great size and strength, but for a physicality bound up in the quotidian, in the "relentless repetition" of daily struggle for sustenance.

The story of Havelok operates on a continuum between deprivation and labor at one end, and superabundance and effortless acquisition at the other. Havelok's life moves between these extremes in a relationship intelligible mostly through the consumption of food. The conspicuous presence of eating in Havelok is not an attempt to court the tastes of middle-class readers; rather, food is vital to the romance's inquiry into political theory. Havelok has long fascinated and puzzled readers with the wealth and realism of its portrayal of working-class life and its apparent lack of traditional romance topoi. It is unique in its disregard of the courtly world of tournaments and quests, a generic panoply that "never pretend[s] to give an accurate picture of life in their times."³ Instead, the first thousand lines of Havelok abound with details of working-class life and economic conditions, and create, explicitly, a "rags-to-riches" journey for Havelok. As he climbs the social ladder, we see fish, meat, and bread produced and exchanged, starvation lingering a step away from plenty, and unemployed boys knocking each other down in order to gain work.

This emphasis on the quotidian in a genre otherwise known for its fantasies of courtly life has led to serious...