The Matter of Fulk: Romance and History in the Marches

I.

Fouke le Fitz Waryn can scarcely be described as a widely known text. Most properly and tangibly, the title refers to an Anglo-Norman prose tale of ca. 1325-30. ¹ But this narrow description cloaks from view a particularly marginal type of cultural production (as well as a considerably more varied and relevant textual history). Those margins Fouke invokes are multiple, not limited to the text's position on the edge of critical ken. On the one hand, Fouke is, for the most part, focussed upon a geographical edge, the area around that locale central to its narrative, Whittington, in the Marches, the Shropshire/Powys border; on the other, like many post-Conquest texts, Fouke seems to inhabit a troubled generic borderland.

Most of the surviving Fouke is devoted to a tangible historical event. In 1201, Fulk FitzWarin III, a fairly minor Shropshire landholder, renounced the lordship of King John. In the main, he saw his cause as one of wrongly deprived inheritance, his genealogical right to the castellanship of Whittington, near Oswestry, not acknowledged by the king. Fulk III remained in armed rebellion for nearly three years; eventually, he and John reached an accommodation by which he was vested in Whittington. Fulk died peacefully, as this narrative of his revolt tells, at an exceedingly advanced age in 1258, and his family remained seised of Whittington.

Such a recapitulation obscures the fundamentally problematic mode by which Fulk's outlaw career has been narrated here. The historical account readily accommodates itself to one of the grands récits of insular narrative, sometimes designated "ancestral romance." These imaginative narratives, which include such hardy perennials as the stories of Guy of Warwick and Beves of Hamptoun (Southampton), describe the efforts of their eponymous heroes to regain and reestablish lost family patrimonies. It is perhaps more accurate to describe them as "exilic narratives," stories in which an estranged young hero manages through courage, wit, and pluck to reclaim a decidedly local lordship wrongfully denied him. ² Such accounts, which include the honored fonts of narration in the English language, Horn and Havelock, are invariably considered "romance," imaginative literature, and not historical material at all. Fouke shares with them an interest, especially pronounced in the lengthy description of the 1201-3 rebellion, in offering narrative materials very far from plausible, let alone historical. One fairly typical scholarly description, "a crude mixture of mainly accurate local history . . . and traditional folklore," gives some flavor of both the text and its customary critical reception. ³

One can illustrate the problems involved in this text (and by extension, a range of others) by a description of its opening narrative moves. Fouke begins in the reign of William the Conqueror, a full four generations (in actual fact, five—since one is elided in the narrative) before the life of the hero Fulk III. Initially, the work provides a fully historical episode, a description of what can, retrospectively from a fourteenth-century view, be described as "the foundation of the March." In the period 1067-71, the Conqueror established new lordships to control the frontier between England and Wales; these stretched, as Fouke accurately indicates, from west of Bristol all the way to Chester and marked out a disputed frontier that only nominally followed the line of Offa's Dyke. ⁴

Most importantly, both for history and the narrative Fouke, this action did not designate merely a frontier territory. It also, from the text's retrospect, conferred with land a specific unique legal status. "The March" was "cowboy country," not simply because it was a contested land of war. The lords of the March, in this retrospect, had received exclusive legal rights with their landholdings and military responsibilities; the March was construed to be outside the customary shire and hundred system usual elsewhere in England, governed at the will of its lords (most obvious legally in the designation of Cheshire, for example, as a "palatinate").

On the one hand, this was a place where "extreme measures/prejudice" were deemed a necessity of governance; on the other, one motive of "good governance," on both sides...