Textual Situations. Andrew Taylor

aspiring to the monk’s stability.¹⁴³ As the great Augustinian educational theorist, Hugh of Saint Victor, noted, “A quiet life is just as important [as humility] for discipline, whether the quiet be interior, so that the mind is not distracted with illicit desires, or exterior, so that leisure and opportunity are provided for credible and useful studies.”¹⁴⁴ But the canons, living in cities, were also brought into daily contact with the world, and their rule provided for a civic function, including preaching and general education. According to the twelfth-century abbot Anselm of Havelburg, the Regular Canon “being generally sought out by rude people is chosen and accepted, and like a lantern lighting a dark place, teaching the world by word and example, is loved and honoured”¹⁴⁵ In the case of the canons of Oseney, however, the people seeking them out were scarcely rude. Many of them were students. The canons played an important role as landlords of student digs, renting whole blocks of rooms that would eventually become student halls, and the abbey “apparently permitted scholars and students who were not of the house or order to use the facilities of the convent, principally the refectory and the cloisters.”¹⁴⁶

      The Augustinian order was known for its moderation, emphasizing learning, eschewing mortification, and deliberating rejecting the more austere practice of the Cistercians, which it considered ostentatious.¹⁴⁷ Many Augustinian convents served meat three times a week, and the canons wore linen garments, as opposed to the rougher woolen habits of monks. Moderate conversation was sometimes tolerated in refectory. There was considerable flexibility within the order, both from one house to another and within a house. Dickinson, a warm advocate of the twelfth-century order, notes that “the rule of St. Augustine affronted a powerful section of religious opinion in refusing to insist on complete uniformity of treatment within the convent—victus et tegumentum non aequaliter omnibus quia non aequaliter valetis omnes sed potius unicuique sicut cuique opus fuerit” (Food and clothing should not be allotted equally to everybody, since not everyone has the same state of health, but rather to each according to his need).¹⁴⁸ This moderation encouraged intellectual pursuits. More time was allotted to study than in other orders and the Augustinian rule stipulated that “manuscripts shall be sought at a fixed hour every day.”¹⁴⁹

      What the canon made of the Roland is another matter. He could have approached the Roland, as some preachers apparently did, as a tale of militant Christianity and as suitable material to read or even chant in the refectory or to use to flesh out a popular sermon. Of course he might have been a frivolous and worldly man, given to talking about “military matters, dogs, and hawks,” like the scandalous Bishop Gaudry, in which case the volume would have been a private dissipation and perhaps also an imaginative release of suppressed violence. Guibert derides Gaudry because once, coming across a peasant carrying a lance, he snatched it up and “couched it as if to strike an opponent.”¹⁵⁰ Gaudry was playing at being a knight. A third possibility is that the canon read the text privately but seriously, bringing to it the glossator’s mentality that he applied to the Timaeus. This reading might have brought him close to some modern interpreters, who have pored over the text and extracted from it moral lessons that would have amazed Leon Gautier or Gaston Paris. Peter Haidu captures this shift from a text that is “heard” and sings praise to a text that is considered intellectually and raises troubling questions. As he suggests, the poem illustrates the central conundrum of chivalry, that the knightly class was seen as vital guarantor of social stability but was given over to internecine warfare:

      The text sings the praises of force, of military display, the brilliance of armaments. It gives voice to the rhetoric of mutual dependency, vassalic duty and the lord’s protection, singing the virtues of the warrior and the social cohesiveness of men at war for common ideals according to a common code of value and behavior. It also depicts the specific mechanism by which these very virtues are turned into ghastly destructiveness, in which lived and sung ideals of courage, loyalty, and group identification turn into betrayal, somber death, and collective loss. The relations between the assertions of the dominant class ideology and the performance of its narrative program can only be termed tragically deconstructive.¹⁵¹

      Haidu returns to the text to elicit deeper and more troubling readings. Transforming narrative into allegory and propagandistic simplicity into internal tensions, he finds in the poem moral ambivalence, abstraction (for the text deals “with a political system rather than just its actors”) and suggestions of an emerging guilt culture with its split subjectivities.¹⁵² Haidu is reading as a scholar and perhaps the Digby Roland’s first identifiable readers shared something of this frame of mind. At least one of the canons knew scraps of Juvenal by heart, and it was the lines from the ninth satire that he chose to write on the last leaf of the Roland:

      Malo pater tibi sit Tersides dumodo tu sis

      Eacide simil Uulcaniaque arma capessas

      Quam te Terside similem producat Hachilles.

      I would rather that Thersites were your father as long as you were like the grandson of Aecus (that is, Achilles) and could wield the arms of Vulcan, than that you should have Achilles as your father but be like Thersides.

      Or, as Gilbert Highet puts it, “Better to be a hero born of a fool than a fool born of a hero.”¹⁵³ Why were these particular lines so close to the canon’s heart? Was he a man of humbler birth who aspired to be an Achilles, or was he reflecting cynically on the knights he knew who were closer to Thersites? Was he perhaps appalled by the endemic violence around him, the gang warfare and brawls between the northern and southern factions that plagued medieval Oxford?¹⁵⁴ It is, at any rate, an intriguing piece of marginalia, and unless we are to dismiss it as an idle doodle on the part of someone who happened to be holding the Roland in his hand but never read it, it becomes the poem’s first gloss.¹⁵⁵

      A cleric chanting in the refectory or a cleric turning from the Timaeus to the Roland-these two scenes form the core of one possible history of the way Digby 23 was read in the Middle Ages, but it is one that has been almost systematically rejected, so that the Song of Roland can be preserved in all its martial and national purity as a French epic. The intellectual interests of the Augustinian canons have not received attention from the poem’s modern critics, nor have the reading customs of English baronial households or the political anxieties in England during the manuscript’s first two centuries, or anything to do with the communities where the manuscript first appears. In this regard, the attitude of Old French scholars to the Digby manuscript has been curiously conflicted. On the one hand, there has been a determined effort to preserve the classification of Digby 23 as a manuscrit de jongleur, because this preserves the text’s status as a close reflection of an oral performance for a chivalric audience. At the same time, the French poem must be extracted from the English manuscript and saved from its taint, which means that in practice scholars have ignored the manuscript as far as possible. As a result there are a large number of Old French scholars, from Leon Gautier to Paul Zumthor, who have pronounced on the status of the manuscript without ever examining it closely.

      With the Roland the taint of writing is compounded by the taint of the foreign and the provincial. It is a singular embarrassment that the earliest written version of France’s national epic survives in an manuscript copied by an Englishman in an Anglo-Norman dialect. It was imperative that the early editors distance the true, original, and national poem from this corrupt witness.¹⁵⁶ Gautier confronts the problem in his first edition, claiming that “the dialect of a manuscript comes from its copyist, and not all from its author. It is in the heart and not the form of the Song that we should seek some light.”¹⁵⁷ In his school edition of 1887, he takes a curiously convoluted path, insisting on his fidelity to the manuscript (“NOT A SINGLE WORD has ever been given an orthographical form THAT WAS NOT OFFERED BY THE OXFORD MANUSCRIPT”) while at the same time undertaking to restore more than five hundred lines to produce “a text that fits the rules of our dialect.”¹⁵⁸ L. Clédat “francisized’ the vowels in his edition of 1886 on the grounds that the Chanson de Roland was “d’origine française.”¹⁵⁹ Joseph Bédier, the poem’s most prolific editor and popularizer after Gautier, was highly critical of such normalization. He