The Proleptic Fantasy of Anglo-Saxon Crusade in a Manuscript for King Henry VI

In London, British Library, Harley MS 2278 (ca. 1434–44; henceforward Harley 2278), the presentation manuscript of John Lydgate’s Lives of Ss. Edmund and Fremund (henceforward EF), folio 61r depicts a canonical scene of the martyrdom of St. Edmund of East Anglia, king and martyr (fig. 1).¹ In the center of the image, Edmund is bound to a tree, stripped to a simple tunic but still crowned, and shot with arrows until, in Lydgate’s words, he “Rassemble[d] an yrchoun [i.e., a hedgehog], fulfillid with spynys thikke” (l. 1799).² The text tells us that his attackers are Danish Vikings, invading East Anglia in the late ninth century,³ yet they each wear colorful, elaborately twisted turbans, and their leader, Hyngwar, carries a barbed sword. Against Edmund’s passive endurance of his sagittation, these Danes are actively, vibrantly depicted in white, yellow, and the same pink as Edmund’s own tunic. The Dane closest to firing an arrow has fabric streaming back from his turban as if caught in a breeze.

The representation of the Harley 2278 Danes wearing turbans draws upon the late medieval trope of the “Saracen,” the largely fictionalized ethno-religious group imagined by Western Europeans to represent practitioners of Islam.⁴ Since an Islamic force in fact never attacked England during the

Figure 1.

St. Edmund bound to a tree and shot with arrows.

© The British Library Board. London, British Library, MS Harley 2278, fol. 61r. Image source: British Library Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts. Used with permission.

Anglo-Saxon period, why are there Saracens in Harley 2278? The trope functions as prolepsis, the deployment of ideas before they emerge within the narrative—or in this case, historical—timeline, by reimagining Anglo-Saxon martyrdoms within a crusading context, despite the martyrdoms in question occurring over two hundred years before the advent of the Crusades. Both literary and historical texts attest to the very real fear of Saracen attack, however unfounded, during the Crusades and especially during the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century.⁵ Harley 2278 roots that anxiety in a proleptic fantasy of England’s Anglo-Saxon past.

This is not the only apparent anachronism in Harley 2278. For example, Rebecca Pinner has suggested that Lydgate’s praise of Edmund for suppressing Lollardy (ll. 932–45) “should not be read as a historical anachronism or an authorial error, but rather an allusion to the contemporary monarch and the difficulties he could expect to encounter during his reign.”⁶ In much the same way, the proleptic fantasy of a defensive Anglo-Saxon crusade should be read not as “anachronism or an authorial error,” or even an error of the illustrators, but as a means of modeling real fifteenth-century concerns for Harley 2278’s audience. This essay argues that the incongruity in the image of Saracens carrying out the martyrdom of an Anglo-Saxon king participates in Harley 2278’s proleptic use of Crusades iconography to model royal piety in the context of the Hundred Years’ War for the manuscript’s original audience: King Henry VI.

From Christmas Eve of 1433 until after Easter 1434, the twelve-year-old King Henry VI of England visited the Benedictine abbey of Bury St. Edmunds, during which time he joined the confraternity of the abbey.⁷In commemoration of this visit, Abbot William Curteys commissioned a vernacular life of the abbey’s patron saint from John Lydgate. A monk at Bury and the most prominent poet in England, Lydgate also had royal connections; he had perpetually served as “poet-propagandist” for the Lancastrians, having written his Troy Book under Henry V’s patronage, and having already composed occasional texts for Henry VI’s court prior to writing EF.⁸ Lydgate substantially exceeded his commission for a life of St. Edmund, producing more than 3,600 lines of verse, primarily in rhyme royal stanzas, and adding to a lengthy life of St. Edmund a shorter, but still significant, life of St. Fremund, Edmund’s...