The Inhabitants of the British Isles on the First Crusade: Medieval Perceptions and the Invention of a Pan-Angevin Crusading Heritage^*

Abstract

This article critically examines the Latin and vernacular evidence for participation from the British Isles in the expeditions associated with the First Crusade (1096–99), bringing together for the first time the full array of relevant medieval material which suggests such involvement. Although contemporary accounts of the crusade emphasise the universality of Pope Urban II’s appeal within Western Europe, there is very little reliable evidence that England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland contributed any sizeable force to the Christian armies travelling overland to the East, demonstrating that the early crusading recruitment was often culturally and geographically restricted. This article adds to the narrow corpus of material depicting insular contribution to the crusade the testimony of the Siège d’Antioche, a lengthy epic Anglo-Norman poem, which retrospectively inscribed the involvement of peoples from the British Isles onto the narrative of the First Crusade. It suggests furthermore, based on thematic and stylistic evidence, as well as direct textual references, that at least one stage in the development of this extant narrative should be associated with the Angevin literary milieu during the rule of Henry II (1154–89) and his sons. Its portrayal of crusaders from Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England shows that, in the late twelfth-century Angevin realms, the crusade, retrospectively viewed as a central site of Christian heritage and memory and a crucible for the formation of knightly and heroic values, could not be envisaged without the involvement of the wider Angevin world.

The call for crusade which was promulgated by Pope Urban II at the end of November 1095 was portrayed in the surviving histories of the expedition as a universal appeal—to all the faithful of the Christian world.¹ The histories of the First Crusade emphasise that all of Europe was stirred to make the journey to the East, from the Balkans to the furthest islands of the Atlantic. But crusading recruitment, in reality, was locally and geographically constructed. Urban may have intended to direct his call specifically towards the Franci, a nebulous grouping to which he himself belonged, as did the vast majority of his audience at the Council of Clermont, where the First Crusade was preached.² Most known crusaders came from particular regions of French- or Occitanian-speaking territories, and even then, not uniformly. Some areas committed most of their aristocracy to the endeavour, such as the Chartrain, the Vexin, the Limousin, and the Montlhéry lordship in the Île-de-France; others did not.³ The consistency of different forms of narrative, diplomatic, and dynastic texts in showing these divergent patterns of recruitment suggests quite firmly that this patchiness is not primarily the reflection of chance survivals of regional archival and historiographical material.⁴ Evidently, not all ears were turned towards Urban’s radical proposition.

The British Isles are one example of an area little touched by crusade recruitment. The narrative and documentary evidence for the involvement of participants from the British Isles is very small, with only scant references in the Latin texts.⁵ However, there is an unpublished account, never edited in full, which shows English, Irish, Welsh and Scottish participants engaging in the business of crusade. After examining all that can be determined about crusaders from the British Isles from the edited Latin and vernacular sources—bringing together for the first time the complete array of relevant medieval material which suggests such involvement—this article adds to that narrow corpus the extensive descriptions of crusaders from the British Isles contained in the Siège d’Antioche, an Old French account of the First Crusade in the style of a chanson de geste, found in full only in two English manuscripts and probably committed to its current form around the end of the twelfth century. I argue that this should not be seen as evidence for genuine participation from this region in the 1096–99 expedition, but rather ought to be read in the context of a late twelfth-century literary milieu in which there was a desire to promote an image of pan-Angevin involvement in the crusading movement from its earliest stages. This article therefore engages in an emergent body of scholarly literature which examines how the memory of the crusades was reinterpreted, repackaged and contextualised to serve a variety of dynastic, nationalistic and political ends.⁶ The first part of this article examines the full range of evidence for participation in the First Crusade from the British Isles which can be deduced from other texts: narrative, epistolary, hagiographic, institutional and diplomatic.⁷ The second section then turns to the neglected Siège, presenting its unique and extensive testimony on insular crusading, considering the context in which these passages should be understood, and analysing their function within the text.

I

Although news of Urban’s Clermont sermon apparently reached a receptive audience in England, the paucity of Anglo-Norman participants can probably be attributed to the political situation in 1096.⁸ William II ‘Rufus’, king of England, had agreed to provide his brother, Duke Robert ‘Curthose’ of Normandy, with a large sum of money, most likely 10,000 marks of silver, for the latter to participate in the crusade.⁹ The extreme financial burden imposed on the nobility of England by the collection of this sum probably prevented many from taking the cross.¹⁰ Abbot Jarento of Saint-Benigne, Dijon, had visited England as papal legate in April 1096, but probably confined his activity to pressuring the authorities to raise the cash for Robert of Normandy’s participation rather than preaching to encourage people to join the expedition.¹¹ The king, nobility and church in the British Isles seem to have had little interest in promoting the endeavour.¹²

However, nine figures can be identified who joined the princely expeditions to the East in 1096 and who had held significant lands in England, although their identities defy easy categorisation. Many also held lands and titles on the continent, and they were all of francophone heritage. Most were exiles from England.¹³ Ralph de Gael, perhaps the most high-profile crusader born in England, and once earl of Norfolk, was of Breton heritage and held extensive lands in Brittany, where he had lived in exile continuously for more than twenty years by 1096. He travelled with his wife, the Norman-born Emma de Breteuil, and their son, Alan.¹⁴ Ivo de Grantmesnil was the son of the sheriff of Leicester, Hugh, but was out of favour with William Rufus because of his role in the 1088 rebellion against the latter’s rule, and was most likely resident in Normandy.¹⁵ The same was true of the major continental magnate Eustace of Boulogne, brother of Godfrey de Bouillon, who had probably not been in England since the 1088 rebellion.¹⁶ Odo de Bayeux, William I’s half-brother, was an exiled persona non grata before the expedition and had long lost his lands in England.¹⁷ Ernulf de Hesdin was a similar case, holding extensive lands in England until he was falsely accused of treason in 1096 and entered voluntary exile, but born in France and directly involved in the administration of his family’s patrimony in Artois.¹⁸ Pagan Peverel was from a middling Anglo-Norman family with lands in England, and probably served as Robert Curthose’s standard-bearer—we know nothing for certain about him prior to the First Crusade.¹⁹ The clerk Philip ‘Grammaticus’ de Montgomery was a scion of the influential Montgomery-Bellême-Talvas clan (the dominant dynastic force in lower Normandy, Shropshire, and the Rape of Arundel), but, as a minor ecclesiastic, he held no major position in either England or on the continent, and had resisted Rufus in 1095.²⁰ Edith de Warenne, an English-born heiress of Norman-Flemish extraction, joined the crusade, evidently in her capacity as the wife of Gerard de Gournay-en-Bray in Normandy—her brother William held the family’s English lands.²¹ A final figure concludes the list of certain participants from the British Isles: William de Percy. His participation forms a significant part of the foundation charter of the Abbey of Whitby, but the only corroboration of his presence in the East comes from Albert of Aachen, who describes his capture in 1115 by a pagan army (although the Whitby cartulary describes his death outside Jerusalem in 1099).²² This group of transnational elite figures is best considered as a subsection of ‘Norman’ participation; they did not form a specifically ‘English’ grouping, and our texts certainly never describe them as English, individually or as a group.²³

We know of no named Welsh, Scottish or Irish First Crusaders.²⁴ A possible exception may be a Manx-Irish king, who seems to have departed on pilgrimage at some point around 1100. This figure has been appropriated by both Scottish and Irish historians in national approaches to the crusades.²⁵ In the Chronicle of Man and the Isles (the relevant section of which was committed to writing at Rushen Abbey, c.1261), the eldest son of Guðrøðr Crovan, Lǫgmaðr Guðrøðarson (latinised as Lagmannus), king of Man, Dublin and the Isles, in an act of atonement for castrating and blinding his brother Haraldr, ‘resigned his kingdom voluntarily: and, marked with the sign of the Lord’s cross, took the road to Jerusalem, where he also died’.²⁶ This section of the chronicle is misdated, with this information being sub anno 1056. The chronology of the early part of this text is hopelessly muddled; interpretation has variously argued that Lagmannus’ resignation should be dated to 1096, 1098, 1108 or 1110.²⁷ The reference to bearing the sign of the cross has given rise to the belief that this was no mere pilgrimage but rather engagement in the actual crusade, but the fact that the chronicler himself was writing in the mid-thirteenth century, when crusading participation was better established, might mean that this is a retrospective use of crusading vocabulary to refer to what was in fact penitential pilgrimage with no martial aspect involved.²⁸ The later dating of this pilgrimage, to 1108/10, would allow us to associate Lagmannus’ activity with that of his theoretical overlord, Sigurðr of Norway, who departed for the East in 1108 from his overwintering place in England.²⁹ There is therefore insufficient evidence to link Lagmannus to the First Crusade, as Jonathan Riley-Smith and Alan Macquarrie have done.³⁰

Some potential English participants undoubtedly sought to join the passage to the East without attaching themselves to the contingents travelling under the command of continental magnates. The monks of Cerne Abbey in Dorset had tried to hire a ship to go, prompting Anselm of Canterbury to write worried letters prohibiting monks on the south coast from taking part.³¹ Albert of Aachen talks about English participants joining one of the so-called peasants’ expeditions, which gathered in the Rhineland in 1096 before committing atrocities against Jewish populations and dispersed after an unsuccessful attempt to cross Central Europe.³² Neither of these groups reached the Levant. Although we find very little concrete evidence for insular participation, this does not mean that nobody departed. The Peterborough text of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle records that a group of English and Scottish crusaders who joined Hugh de Payn’s endeavour to capture Damascus in 1128 was the largest such group ‘since the first expedition in the time of Pope Urban’.³³ While indirect, this contemporary reference may represent reminiscences of actual participation en masse not covered by our continental sources.

There is some evidence that participants from the British Isles made their way to the Holy Land by sea, without joining the main contingents. Raymond of Aguilers describes how a group of Englishmen or angli, ‘having heard of the avenging of the Lord’ (‘audito nomine ulcionis Domini’), had sailed from the ‘English sea’ (‘mare anglicum’) and arrived in the Mediterranean having circumnavigated Spain. They had reached the Port of Antioch (St Simeon, modern Samandağ) and Latakia before the crusaders travelling over land arrived in the area in mid-October 1097. They were active in the surrounding waters for some time, working in tandem with Genoese fleets to protect Byzantine shipping and the overseas trade route to Cyprus and other islands which may have provided materiel and provisions. When the original thirty ships were reduced to nine or ten, as Raymond reports, by erosion of their hulls through age, the English burnt them and joined the push southwards to Jerusalem.³⁴ John Pryor has suggested that this force, based on contemporary ship sizes, would probably have consisted of around 1,200 English participants.³⁵ Raymond’s extensive report is complemented by several other primary sources which describe an English fleet present in the Levant between 1097 and 1100, but the details are impossible fully to reconcile.³⁶ This force may be related to the group of northern European mariners, led by Guinemar of Boulogne, about whom Albert of Aachen presents two contradictory narratives, but here English participation is not explicitly invoked.³⁷ A letter of October 1098 from the clergy and the people of Lucca to the faithful described how one of their citizens, Bruno, had travelled with English ships to the Holy Land in March of that year; and Gilo of Paris, an early twelfth-century Latin versifier of the crusade story, described a mixed Genoese, English and Venetian fleet at St Simeon in the same month.³⁸ English ships were still present in the East, working alongside the Pisans, in the spring of 1100, according to a letter of the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Daimbert of Pisa.³⁹

However, Raymond’s suggestion that these English mariners had responded to the call for crusade in 1095 is problematic. I have already discussed how royal, episcopal and baronial financial and logistical support from England was lacking. For this reason, it is hard to see who might have funded or supported the English ships. Faced with such problems, scholars have linked these angli with English auxiliaries in the Byzantine military, most notably the famed Varangians.⁴⁰ The only contemporary suggestion of this is found in the work of Ralph of Caen, writing in his Tancredus (c.1112–30), where he describes how Robert of Normandy had absented himself from the siege of Antioch to take possession of Latakia, which was, around March of 1098, in the hands of angli, ‘sent from the emperor’s bodyguard/protection’ (‘missi ab imperatore tutela’).⁴¹ The dual meaning of tutela—either they had guarded the emperor or he was protecting them—makes this passage difficult to interpret. In Kemal ad-Din’s account of the capture of Latakia in 1097, he specifies that the Western fleet came from Cyprus, which supports a link between the English fleet and the Byzantine authorities.⁴² But if this is the case, the English participants’ willingness to associate themselves with the forces of Curthose after their disembarkation suggests a group of Englishmen with a pre-existing link to Anglo-Norman dynastic governance.⁴³ The angli requested Robert Curthose’s protection, and Ralph discusses at length how, although they had previously departed from Norman leadership, they now returned to it naturally.

Orderic Vitalis’ narrative of English pilgrims arriving in the East claims the largest involvement ‘from England and other islands of the ocean’, with Edgar Ætheling, grandson of Edmund II Ironside, leading nearly 20,000 crusaders who arrived in Antioch between 6 and 28 June 1098. After they took Latakia (as above), Edgar supposedly handed it over to his close ally and overlord, Robert Curthose.⁴⁴ Although there are clear intertextualities with the aforementioned accounts, there are good reasons for doubting the veracity of Orderic’s description: he most likely misdated Edgar’s journey to the East, which occurred in 1102, as recorded by William of Malmesbury.⁴⁵ Edgar was present in Scotland in late 1097, and is unlikely to have been able to organise a fleet of such a size in time to be in Antioch in the summer of 1098. His vassal Robert fitz Godwin, whom we know accompanied him on his expedition and who died at Ramla in 1102, was in prison in 1098.⁴⁶ Orderic’s account does not, therefore, add convincing evidence for insular involvement in the 1096–99 expedition. All we might say in conclusion regarding the fleets of angli is that, between 1097 and 1100, there were probably fleets operated by Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman sailors active in the eastern Mediterranean, and they collaborated with other seafaring powers—Byzantium, Genoa, Pisa and Venice—in securing supply routes and providing naval support. Resolving the contradictions in the source material without disregarding any of it would require there to have been at least two separate forces.⁴⁷ Whether there was one fleet or several, when exactly they travelled to the East, and thus whether they were responding directly to Urban’s exhortation as ‘crusaders’, cannot be established on the basis of the contradictory evidence currently available to us.

The final category of references to participation from the British Isles in the First Crusade comes from what might be called ‘universality statements’: long lists of peoples and regions which contributed troops to the endeavour.⁴⁸ The historians of the First Crusade tried to depict the expedition as an event of unprecedented scale, emphasising (and probably misrepresenting) the unity of the Christian community’s response to Urban’s provocation at Clermont.⁴⁹ As part of this programme, many writers highlighted the diversity of peoples which joined the enterprise, and the geographical range of participation. Most of these universality statements are presented at the opening of the texts’ narratives, before the events of the expedition are recounted.⁵⁰ Since the narrative function of these extensive lists of the regions and peoples who were involved in the First Crusade is to emphasise unanimity and the monumental scale of the crusade, their use as evidence for establishing patterns of crusade recruitment is severely limited.⁵¹

Many of these inventories in early twelfth-century sources include peoples from, or regions of, the British Isles. Albert of Aachen writes of how crusaders were called to the endeavour ‘as much from the kingdom of France as from Lorraine, from the land of the Teutons, and from that of the English, and from the kingdom of the Danes’.⁵² Fulcher of Chartres, writing of the diversity of languages (‘so many kinds of language in one army’, ‘tot tribus linguae in uno exercitu’) being spoken outside Antioch—where he was not present, although he was an eyewitness to other stages of the crusade—describes ‘Angli’ and ‘Scoti’ as being among the tongues being utilised.⁵³ Sigebert of Gembloux presents a list of crusaders, including participants ‘from Britain/Wales, Scotland, and England’ (‘a Britannia, a Scottia, ab Anglia’), and similar listings are found in other chroniclers who tangentially discussed the First Crusade.⁵⁴ The same phenomenon is found in the work previously attributed to Ekkehard of Aura, where ‘Anglia, Scotia, et Hibernia, Britannia, Galicia’ are included as part of a longer enumeration, fulfilling precisely the same role, that is, demonstrating the global appeal of this movement of people.⁵⁵ The vernacular Chanson d’Antioche transposes its universality statement to the walls of Nicaea, where the crusaders assemble as one for the first time, writing of how, among a much longer list, those ‘of England and Scotland, and those of Ireland’ (‘D’Engleterre et d’Escose, si furent cil d’Irlaigne’), were present outside the city’s walls.⁵⁶ Robert of Gloucester, writing a lengthy Middle English account of the First Crusade as part of his late thirteenth-century history, insisted that some crusaders had come from ‘Engelond … brutayne | of walis & of yrlonde … of scotlond’.⁵⁷ Only the first, England, is in the universality statement of Robert’s assumed source material for the crusade, the history of Henry of Huntingdon.⁵⁸ There is no way of telling where this information came from but it falls into the category outlined above, and could well have been invented for the metrical characteristics it provided.

Other writers emphasised the British Isles in order to evoke a sense of the furthest reaches of civilisation, grouping them with other islands of the sea. For example, Baldric of Bourgueil devotes a lengthy section of his history of the crusade to Urban’s pan-European appeal, which even touched ‘England, or other islands of the sea’ (‘Angliam, vel alias maritimas insulas’).⁵⁹ Orderic Vitalis, who drew on Baldric’s account, expands, characteristically evocatively, on how this appeal crossed conventionally impermeable barriers: ‘That great thunder [the call for crusade] did not fail to reach England and the other islands of the ocean, though the depths of the sounding sea separated them from the remainder of the world’.⁶⁰ Gilo of Paris’ elaboration on this theme supports the possibility, analysed above, of naval participation from the British Isles: ‘the ocean breeze filled the sails of the blond-haired Britons’ (‘Oceanus flavis distendit vela Brytannis’), included as part of a very extensive list of participants.⁶¹ Such striking parallels between a wide variety of texts are interesting in the light of the possibility that an earlier passage incorporating the ‘islands of the sea’ material was circulating independently of the major narratives, in the form of a purported letter of Alexander, chaplain to Stephen of Blois.⁶²

Two further historians of the first half of the twelfth century used the opportunity to present stereotypes of the inhabitants of the British Isles, again with the intention of highlighting the pervasiveness of the crusade’s call, here by emphasising the savagery, lack of civility, and otherness of those who heeded it. Guibert of Nogent, in an imaginative passage, describes how Scoti participants on the First Crusade were distinguished from their peers. He writes: ‘There you would have seen bands of Scots, ferocious in their own land, but elsewhere unwarlike, their knees bare, with their shaggy cloaks, provisions hanging from their shoulders, having slipped out of their boggy borders, their weapons seeming ridiculous to us, offering us plentiful aid out of their faith and loyalty’.⁶³ William of Malmesbury took this motif of wide participation and tailored it to a northern European environment, writing that all who lived in the furthest isles heeded the call to crusade: ‘Then the Welshman left his leaping hunt, the Scot his familiar fleas, the Dane his continuous drinking, and the Norwegian his raw fish’.⁶⁴ These texts seem to have had an exhortative purpose: if even the uncivilised races of the North might join God’s endeavour in the form of the crusade, what excuse did the ‘culturally French’ nobility have?

None of these universality statements inspires much confidence in the proposition that thousands of crusaders from the British Isles actually participated in the campaigns, since, within the texts in which they are found, they fulfil a strictly narrative function of emphasising the breadth of the crusading movement. Where all of these examples resemble each other is that not one of them portrays English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh crusaders as part of the main contingents themselves, working under one of the crusade leaders, or fighting in battle. The Siège d’Antioche, which will be explored in the rest of this article, breaks this trend, and places participants—sometimes named individuals—from the British Isles alongside their continental companions in the front line of combat on the First Crusade.

II

The only First Crusade text which survives solely in insular manuscripts, the Siège d’Antioche ovesque le conquest de Jerusalem de Godefrei de Bullioun, or Siège d’Antioche, is a circa 15,680-verse Old French poetic rendering of the narrative of the expedition in the style of a chanson de geste.⁶⁵ Although it shares some characteristics with the continental vernacular traditions of the crusade, it deviates significantly from the ‘Old French Crusade cycle’ and related texts, which have been studied in greater depth.⁶⁶ Early on in its narrative, the Siège suggests that it is an Old French reworking of an earlier text by Baldric of Bourgueil, archbishop of Dol (probably referring to his Latin Historia), but frequent deviations and reams of independent material cast the text’s own self-identification into doubt, and a more judicious approach would be to view the account as an independent repository of First Crusade tradition structured around a textual architecture borrowed from Baldric’s history.⁶⁷ The text survives in two complete manuscripts (Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 77, and British Library, MS Add. 34114), and two fragments, one of which is now bound with the oldest manuscript (Hatton 77). The other is Oxford, Brasenose College, MS D 56. The London manuscript also includes a unique circa 3,000-verse continuation, covering the early history of the crusader states.

The text has not yet been edited in full. Paul Meyer in 1876 published a few passages of transcription in an article in Romania, and the first 5,127 lines were the subject of a linguistic study and partial edition by Jennifer Gabel de Aguirre in 2015.⁶⁸ Academic study of the text has been limited, partly on account of the great length of the narrative and its perceived status as a mere vernacular translation of Baldric of Bourgueil.⁶⁹ As is frequently the case with vernacular epic, the compositional date of this account is hard to determine. Yet the question of dating, as demonstrated below, is fundamental to the interpretation of the appearance of crusaders from the British Isles in the text. The chansons de geste, in their origin at least, were performative pieces, perhaps composed orally, using formulaic structures and clichés to facilitate composition.⁷⁰ However, many of the later texts in the format of chansons de geste are self-consciously literary, and may not even have been performed orally.⁷¹ If the Siège belongs, or had an ancestor, in the former category—and intertextualities with other traditions of the First Crusade suggest that this might be the case—then the text probably was not composed all at once, and the extant narrative would have gone through several stages of revision as new versions or copies were made.⁷² There is some scholarly consensus that early chansons de geste on the subject of the First Crusade, in more or less developed, oral or textual, forms, preceded the extant versions of the continental Old French and Occitan vernacular accounts, perhaps originating shortly after the events themselves.⁷³ The Siège might thus contain reminiscences of these proto-chansons, but, as I will argue, is most likely to be a product in its current form of the last few decades of the twelfth century. Hatton 77, the earliest manuscript, demonstrates palaeographic and linguistic features typical of the first half of the thirteenth century, probably early in this period. Although this is far from a perfect diagnostic characteristic, the text commences on each page above the top line.⁷⁴ The language in the manuscript is Anglo-Norman, with orthographic features typical of circa 1150–1250, although opinions have varied on whether the language exhibits insular or continental characteristics.⁷⁵ The inclusion of a single word in English, ofer, in a description of the crossing of the Arm of St George, implies an insular compositional or redactional provenance: ‘Quant vos tendrez le siege juste ofer le rivage’, ‘when you are conducting the siege just over the strait’.⁷⁶

The versification, topoi and stylistic features of the Siège suggest a very particular context for at least one stage of the development of the text. The Siège is a poetic work, written in dodecasyllabic alexandrines, with medial caesurae, arranged into rhymed laisses. This format of Old French vernacular is most readily associated with the Alexander romances of the second half of the twelfth century: Thomas of Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie (before 1175) and Alexander of Bernay’s Roman d’Alixandre (c.1185–90).⁷⁷ This prosody became popular around the middle of the twelfth century, and was particularly prevalent in the Anglo-Norman literary sphere, with part of Wace’s Roman de Rou (1160–74), the Roman de Horn (c.1170), and the Harley Brut (thirteenth century) all making use of it. Although some contemporary chansons de geste use an alexandrine metre, the most notable here being the Anglo-Norman Fierabras, these tend to have been composed significantly later. The Alexander romances were very closely related in generic terms, although they used a different versification, to the so-called romans d’antiquité—Roman de Thèbes, Roman d’Eneas and the Roman de Troie (all c.1152–70).⁷⁸ All three of these have been seen as being Anglo-Norman or connected to the Angevin court, with the Troie describing Eleanor of Aquitaine as ‘the powerful wife of a powerful king’ (‘riche dame de riche rei’), as if she were likely to read the compliment.⁷⁹ The London manuscript of the Siège (c.1380–1400), produced for Henry de Spencer, the crusading bishop of Norwich, is presented alongside a range of other romances in the same hand and presentational style, two of which are Eneas and Thèbes.⁸⁰ This suggests that, from the perspective of a late fourteenth-century scribe or compiler, the Siège was well suited for presentation alongside vernacular romances of the Angevin court of the twelfth century.

In addition, there are several similarities in content which demonstrate that the Siège is best placed in the context of Angevin vernacular historiographical material.⁸¹ The Siège, when recounting the crusaders mourning their losses outside Antioch, describes how ‘not a rotrouenge was sung, not even a line of song’ (‘N’ot chante rotrouenge ne neis un vers de son’).⁸²Rotrouenge was a technical term for a type of lyric poem (the c.1146 crusade lyric Chevalier, mult estes guariz being the oldest surviving example), but literary descriptions of songs of this genre being sung first occur in the spate of Anglo-Norman romances discussed above, all with compositional dates circa 1152–74—Thèbes, Horn, Rou, and Benoît of Saint-Maure’s Chronique des ducs de Normandie—and thereafter only very occasionally for the next century.⁸³ Notwithstanding additional battle scenes and variant specifics, the greatest departure the Siège makes from the Latin and vernacular accounts of the First Crusade is the addition of a lengthy romance storyline between a Saracen princess, Gaudette, and her beloved, a pagan called Saracon who apostatises, becomes a Christian through baptism, and joins the crusaders. Gaudette gives dramatic, courteous speeches about her plight. This romance is unique among First Crusade texts. Again, the Alexander romances provide the closest parallel: a narrative structured generically around epic adventure with romantic and courtois discourse thrown in.⁸⁴ It is possible that the figure of Saracon is inspired by the eponymous hero of the Chanson de Syracon, a late twelfth-century chanson de geste which survives only in fragments in Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS 135, a manuscript roughly contemporary to MS Hatton 77, with shared Anglo-Norman dialectal and palaeographical features.⁸⁵ Another extensive deviation on the part of the Siège concerns the tents of the leaders outside Antioch, which are described in great detail, linking the ownership of miraculously large tents back from the First Crusade leaders to classical counterparts: Alexander, Candace of Meroë, Caesar, and so on. Aimé Petit has worked extensively on these intertextualities, highlighting that an early (c.1160) Poitevin version of the Alexander narrative contains an analogous description.⁸⁶ One of these tents—Godfrey’s, but once belonging to the ‘Alexandrian’ queen Candace of Meroë—is described as being seven-sided, with each panel decorated in such a way as to represent the seven liberal arts in the guise of women.⁸⁷ This scene thus indicates an author or redactor with a close interest in the represented classical past, as well as a broadly scholastic understanding of iconography. As noted by Paul Meyer, who printed the relevant passage, the Siège incorporates a lengthy diversion on the wonders of the East, another feature characteristic of the twelfth-century clerical Alexander tradition.⁸⁸ The subsequent influence of classical material on innovative narrative composition is most evident in the insular romances of Hugh of Rotolande, Ipomedon and Protheselaus (both 1180s), which collapse temporal distance by utilising Alexandrian names in an obviously contemporary medieval court setting.⁸⁹

In the Angevin realms of the second half of the twelfth century, learned Latinate clerics were experimenting with composing in the vernacular, writing epics, histories and romance-style texts—for example Jordan Fantôsme, or the Master Thomas who wrote Horn.⁹⁰ Following the lead of Gaimar’s innovative Estoire des Engleis (1136–37), the vernacular was increasingly being seen as an appropriate vehicle for complex and sophisticated narratives which blurred generic boundaries and were replete with scholastic, intertextual resonances, appealing to both lay and clerical audiences.⁹¹ Authors such as Wace and Benoît of Saint-Maure began to apply these models to writing relatively contemporary history, incorporating awareness of classical models and permeability to oral traditions.⁹² The resemblances of content and style offered by the Siège suggest some relationship to this historiographical environment. This shift in the respectability and authority of vernacular narrative was driven by the shifting demands of patrons—royal, noble and episcopal—who wished to hear the history of their society in a more easily comprehensible language.⁹³ Henry II himself seems to have favoured vernacular histories over Latin texts.⁹⁴ Although Henry II and Eleanor’s direct patronage of literature was probably quite limited, they (and their sons) presided over an intense period of literary production, in which writers sought to gain royal favour through the assertion of their right to rule and the justification, using representation of the historic past, of the collection of territories which they came to dominate.⁹⁵ The intellectual environment at Henry II’s court was self-consciously learned, ‘a uniquely productive literary culture’—just the place where the composition of a text furnished with scholastic imagery referencing the Trojan and Alexandrian past, mixed with francophone vernacular motifs and structures, and which implicitly stressed the unity of Henry’s realms, might be expected.⁹⁶ In the absence of more precise evidence for dating, the Siège might fruitfully be considered alongside romances and verse vernacular histories of the Angevin world in the second half of the twelfth century.

In this light, we can better comprehend the Siège’s depictions of participation from the British Isles on the First Crusade. As in the accounts interrogated above, there is emphasis on the breadth of participation from various European peoples on the expedition. However, unlike the other texts, these people are not just described in vague terms at the opening of the narrative, but instead fill the front-line contingents at the climactic Battle of Antioch of 28 June 1098. Those from the British Isles are associated with Curthose’s contingent. When the retinues of all the major leaders are outlined in turn, as the crusaders march out to battle, Robert of Normandy’s troops are described:

This evocation of Irish fighting alongside those from the Touraine, and the Scottish standing alongside their Breton counterparts, makes most sense in the context of some form of political or cultural unity between these diverse peoples. The most likely vantage-point from which this emphasis on plurality might have emerged is the Angevin ‘empire’, which exercised more-or-less direct suzerainty over these peoples between the period 1171 and 1204 (although, of course, the claim of Angevin right to dominance in these areas lasted for many decades after the later date). Although Ireland had not been entirely alien to the Anglo-Norman world before 1169–71, it was between these years that the first meaningful control of Ireland by francophone elites came into being.⁹⁸ This presentation of Curthose’s soldiers thus not only dates this passage to after 1171, but implies that one of the ways in which the Siège furthered the narrative of its source material was to stress the unity of the Angevin world in an imagined past. According to the internal logic of the text, if Curthose was the Norman leader, it follows that he must also have been overlord of the peoples who would later come to be part of the Anglo-Norman-Angevin political environment.

This focus on pan-Angevin participation was not necessarily a feature of the Siège only at the final stage in its textual development. We detect a close parallel for these lines in the Occitan Canso d’Antioca, a continental vernacular text which also found its current form in the late twelfth century, and in which Robert of Normandy also leads a force of diverse ethnic and regional identity into the same battle:

The lists of peoples here are obviously very similar. It may be that the two texts, Canso and Siège, share a common ancestor: the Siège also presents some material otherwise unique to the Castilian thirteenth-century compilation Gran conquista de Ultramar, which demonstrates reliance upon a version of the Occitan Canso, possibly an earlier one than now exists.¹⁰⁰ Both are in alexandrines. The extant Canso was almost certainly a reworking of an earlier account of the crusade, perhaps, as with the Siège, stretching back to the events themselves.¹⁰¹ If we argue that the passages above are more than mere coincidence, then it is likely that the traditions of the Siège and the Canso, at some point after 1171, intersected in a common version. This could be the extant version of either, but as discussed above, both had probably undergone a process of remaniement throughout the twelfth century.

The presence of crusaders from the British Isles among Curthose’s forces is also maintained by two other extended quotations from the Siège, which muse extensively on the characteristics of the Irish as part of the Anglo-Norman battle array. Both passages describe the engagement of 28 June 1098:

Throughout both descriptions, Curthose is the leader of soldiers from across the Angevin world (with the addition of Danes—perhaps a reference to England’s culturally Danish heritage in the eleventh century). Yet the most striking feature of these two passages is the detail lavished on the Irish, whose portrayal depicts them as barely civilised yet fearsome warriors whose strength and boisterousness can overcome all opponents. Portraying the Irish as eating raw food, eschewing agriculture and hefting weighty axes links the Siège very closely with a roughly contemporary series of descriptions in Gerald of Wales’s Topographia Hibernica (c.1186–87, with subsequent revisions).¹⁰⁵ Gerald’s descriptions of the Irish have gathered much attention for their othering and barbarising ethnography of the indigenous people of Ireland.¹⁰⁶ The features which Gerald stresses are the spurning of agriculture, the use of axes and darts as weapons, and the wearing of mantles of black material—three features which, as demonstrated above, appear in the Siège. After a lengthy passage on the dress of the Irish (‘palliorum vice phalingis’, ‘mantles instead of cloaks’), which can be equated with the ‘Qui vestent en lur terres coteles de corveis’ in the section of the Siège cited above, the Topographia presents excerpts with a very close resemblance to the crusade epic:

Tribus tantum utuntur armorum generibus; lanceis non longis, et jaculis binis … securibus quoque amplis, fabrili diligentia optime chalibatis … Una tantum manu, et non ambabus, in securi percutiunt pollice desuper manubrium in longum extenso ictumque regente; a quo nec galea caput in conum erecta, nec reliquum corpus ferrea loricae tricatura tuetur … Gens ex bestiis solum et bestialiter vivens; gens a primo pastoralis vite vivendi modo non recedens.¹⁰⁷

However, they use three types of weapons: short spears, two darts … and great axes, carefully forged and made … with one hand, and not both, they strike with their axes held above their heads, haft grasped firmly with the thumb outstretched, guiding the blow, in the face of which no conical helm can protect the head, nor can the rest of the body be protected by a woven iron hauberk … A people living only off the flesh of beasts, and like beasts; a people who are not progressing from the primitive habits of pastoral living.

The text shown in bold was not part of Gerald’s first recension of his work, which was probably completed as early as 1187, but was added shortly afterwards when he reworked the text before 1189.¹⁰⁸ The repeated assertion of the inability of hauberks and armour to protect against Irish axes is almost identical in all three of the above excerpts. The spurning of agriculture and the carrying of multiple darts are also mentioned in both texts; although two darts is the figure Gerald gives, the other options of ‘three’ or ‘five’ in the Siège may simply have been included to complete the rhymed line. Gerald’s Topographia goes on to describe the extent of the Irish avoidance of arable agriculture, and subsequent chapters reinforce the message about the great Irish axes, so large they could be used as staves (‘quasi pro baculo’), and present a story about some island-dwelling (cf. the ‘of isle and marsh’ in the Siège) Irish who were so barbarous that they were barely dressed, but ate meat and fish (‘carnibus tantum et piscibus’), refusing bread and cheese, of which they had hitherto been ignorant.¹⁰⁹ That the Siège’s material owes a significant debt to Gerald of Wales’s work (and not the first recension of it) is almost certain. Although earlier Anglo-Norman and Late Antique texts had mentioned the Irish, they had presented no information of this sort.¹¹⁰

These similarities are particularly revealing in the light of the involvement of Gerald’s intellectual circle in preaching the Third Crusade and in the composition of accounts of the crusading movement. At the same time as Gerald’s material on Ireland was circulating, works discussing the crusades in the East were being commissioned in the episcopal entourage of Baldwin of Ford, archbishop of Canterbury between 1185 and 1190. Gerald, in his autobiography, describes how he was himself engaged in 1188, after returning from a crusade-preaching tour in Wales with Baldwin, his patron, to write a prose history ‘of the restoration of the land of Palestine by our princes, and the defeat of Saladin and the Saracens by the same princes’. Baldwin’s nephew, Joseph of Exeter, was to write a companion verse piece on the same subject.¹¹¹ The inclusion of Saladin as part of the subject-matter of the proposed works indicates that this was to include a narrative of the impending Third Crusade. The broad terms in which the work is described make it impossible to tell whether a history of the First Crusade was also to be included.

While Gerald, as far as we can tell, never wrote his account, Joseph did—at least in part. He accompanied Archbishop Baldwin on the Third Crusade itself, where the latter led the advance guard which arrived at Acre ahead of the king.¹¹² A fragment of an Antiocheis composed by Joseph survives, but the full work has been lost.¹¹³ What exactly this history described is difficult to ascertain, but the title may give an indication that Joseph’s work included a narrative of the First Crusade: the 1096–99 expedition was held up outside Antioch for more than a year, while the English contingents on the Third Crusade never went anywhere near the city and certainly did not fight there. Antioch functioned as a site for the most inventive episodes of First Crusade historiography, and its central importance is indicated in the titles of several texts which give the narrative of the entire crusade.¹¹⁴ If it was a history of the Third Crusade only, why call it Antiocheis? The editor of Joseph’s work suggests that the Greek form of the title must refer to the personal name of the biblical enemy of the Maccabees, Antiochus, equated with Saladin as an opponent of the crusaders.¹¹⁵ I would question whether this could have been a significant enough parallel for Joseph to have named his entire work after it. At the end of his other major poem, an ‘antique’ epic on the Trojan war (Yliados, also known as De bello Troiano, completed 1188–90), Joseph mentions his intention to write next a work on ‘the wars, deserving of song, of Antioch(us)’ (‘canenda Antiochi … bella’). The extant fragment gives no hard evidence as to the scope of the work, but Edgington suggests that a history of the Third Crusade is envisaged, since the opening section dedicated to Brutus and Arthur and leading to an even greater king in their lineage seems to be introducing Richard I.¹¹⁶ While I agree that this must have been the intention and climax of the work, the title and reference in the Yliados suggest that the Antiocheis may have been intended to link the glories of the First Crusade with the anticipated success of the Third. Baldwin’s archiepiscopal court was probably involved in the creation of other crusade accounts around this time: the earliest element of the history of the Third Crusade text Itinerarium peregrinorum may well have been composed by an English crusader connected to Canterbury.¹¹⁷ Episcopal households were fecund environments for the composition of courtly and vernacular literature—for example, Jordan Fantôsme was probably engaged to write his 1170s history at the request of the bishop of Winchester—and the close parallels between the Siège and Gerald’s work, and the obvious importance of the crusade to Canterbury’s household at this time, suggest that this should be considered a possible origin of at least one stage in the Siège’s textual development.¹¹⁸ Canterbury was certainly a venue for contemporary experimentation with the alexandrine verse format in vernacular historiography, as evidenced by the unusual Vie de Saint Thomas, composed by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence at Canterbury in the early 1170s, and which, like the Siège, exists solely in insular manuscripts.¹¹⁹ Two references in the Siège further support this possibility. In a formulaic phrase typical of chanson de geste literature, a crusader, ‘Guineman li Pohier’, dismounts a pagan opponent and takes his horse: ‘That he would not give away for all Canterbury’ (‘qu’il nel duroit por tute Cantorbee’).¹²⁰ The London manuscript confirms the use of Canterbury as a lieu de référence with the addition of an uncorroborated English crusader, ‘Goi de Cantorbee’.¹²¹

Although the references above outline participants from the British Isles in the line of battle, the Siège also presents scattered instances of English crusaders actually fighting. In the Lake Battle of 9 February 1098, eighteen English crusaders are listed among the dead.¹²² The names of two individuals are given as fighting in the climactic battle on 28 June: ‘Gocelin l’engleis’ and ‘Gilebert l’engleis’. The latter appears alongside a known crusader, Cono of Montaigu.¹²³ The sections described above constitute the full range of references to identifiably ‘British’ participants among the crusading forces. However, the Siège may, I contend, be added to the small corpus of texts which report that a Siward, so-called ‘earl of Gloucester’, had joined Byzantine service by 1097. As the crusaders in the Siège approach Constantinople, the ‘wicked’ Alexios I Komnenos is intent on killing and mutilating them all:

Who are these figures, father and son, with distinctly un-Byzantine names? Their names do not match any of Alexios’ known western counsellors.¹²⁵ However, the name of the father is corroborated in other Western medieval texts about the court of Alexios, where a ‘Sigurðr’, or ‘Siward’, is described as being in the emperor’s employ. This Anglo-Scandinavian name has been rendered in Anglo-Norman as ‘Suart’; for example, the Historia Norwegie (c.1160–75) represents Sigurðr, son of Harald Fairhair, as ‘Suardus’ in the most definitive manuscript from an insular context.¹²⁶ Evidence for our Sigurðr’s presence in the East has come from two non-contemporary texts. The Saga Játvarðar konungs hins helga, an Icelandic fourteenth-century saga about the life of Edward the Confessor, outlines the dissatisfaction of the pre-Conquest inhabitants of England with William I’s rule.¹²⁷ A splinter faction of aristocrats, led by ‘Sigurðr, jarl af Glocestr’, took matters into their own hands and sailed for the Mediterranean, where they gravitated towards the service of the unnamed Eastern Emperor. After fighting for the Greeks and winning a great battle, the English were given a grant of as-yet-unconquered territories on the Black Sea, possibly near the Crimea or the Sea of Azov. Here, the settlers set up a colony which they called ‘New England’, naming towns after London and York. Although the use of uncorroborated saga evidence to establish historical events is problematic, the existence of a similar story in the Chronicon Laudunensis, written at Laôn shortly after 1219, adds credence to the Játvarðarsaga’s account.¹²⁸ A near-identical narrative is related, but the name here of the leader is ‘Stanardus’, still earl of Gloucester (‘comes cladicestrie’). The most in-depth study of these texts has argued that both accounts shared a common Latin ancestor in which ‘Siwardus’ was attributed with leading the expedition.¹²⁹

The historicity of this story is debated, but Byzantine sources corroborate the arrival, early in Alexios I Komnenos’ reign (1081–1118), of an important nobleman from England.¹³⁰ The ‘Sigurðr’ described may have been Siward Barn, a relatively important member of the Anglo-Scandinavian aristocracy, holding land in Gloucestershire, who was imprisoned after Hereward’s 1071 rebellion against William’s rule and later released, ostensibly on the occasion of the Conqueror’s death in 1087.¹³¹ Whether he then sailed to the East is not known, but there is extensive evidence that, in the thirty years after the Norman conquest, English troops were active in the Byzantine arena as mercenaries and Varangians.¹³² Some consensus has been reached that at least one significant influx of English immigrants arrived in Byzantium between 1066 and 1096, as reported in the two texts described above, but when this might have occurred poses more problems. The Chronicon and Játvarðarsaga indicate that Constantinople was under a great siege (perhaps that of 1090–91), which the English lifted, and the latter states that Kirjalax the Tall (presumably Alexios) had just come to power.¹³³ John Godfrey favoured the view, seconded by Fell and Ciggaar, that this occurred in the later reign of Michael VII rather than Alexios I, on the basis that 1091 is ‘too far-removed from the collapse of independent Englishmen’s hopes of resistance c.1075’.¹³⁴ As discussed above, these ‘English’ may even be identical with the forces that were active around Latakia in 1097.

This tradition matches the Siège’s brief reference quite closely. If Sigurðr’s men had sailed to the Mediterranean, they were clearly in possession of a fleet. If Alexios deployed them as mercenaries to conquer (and presumably hold in imperial suzerainty) new land on the Black Sea coast, an appellation of ‘notier’ (‘sailor’) is quite appropriate. Whether we date Sigurðr’s commencement of imperial service to the 1070s or the early 1090s, any of his children, for example a hypothetical Mennau (perhaps ‘Magnús’), were likely to be alive in 1097 when the crusaders approached Constantinople. While it is possible that the Siège records some reminiscence of the First Crusaders’ experience in Constantinople, the figure of Suart could simply be interpolated from contemporary literary tradition, c.1200. The most probable situation is that the narrative of Sigurðr’s voyage was circulating in England, and was subsequently referenced by the Siège author or redactor to add depth to his account of the Byzantine court. The monk of Laôn who wrote the Chronicon around 1219 was a Premonstratensian from England, and may have been using English source material.¹³⁵ There is a compelling case for linking the character of ‘Sequart’ in the early thirteenth-century Anglo-Norman dynastic romance Gui de Warewic with Siward Barn.¹³⁶ Ciggaar, analysing the Játvarðarsaga and the Chronicon, suggested that a common source for the Sigurðr material might have been a now lost twelfth-century hagiographical collection at Winchester.¹³⁷ Rogers had previously presented a similar argument, linking the tradition to Winchester, and indicating that an Old French text might lie behind the two accounts.¹³⁸ Although the Siège’s one-line testimony on Suart is not extensive, his unusual name and the context—a sailor in Alexios’ service—suggest analogy with the Játvarðarsaga’s Sigurðr tradition, and propose yet another link to late twelfth-century insular literary themes.

III

The rather slight corpus of material relating to crusaders from the British Isles on the First Crusade is greatly expanded by the addition of the Siège d’Antioche, an unpublished text hitherto unconsidered in this context. Unlike all the Latin accounts, and most of the edited vernacular narratives, it mentions English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh crusaders not just in abstract terms to support contentions of universality, or as accompanying naval forces, but throws them into the front line of battle, fighting in the main contingents under the leadership of Curthose outside Antioch. It is the only account to place Scottish crusaders in this context. Without a full edition and analytical study, the compositional circumstances of the Siège can only be tentatively established. But a number of factors—thematic, stylistic and intertextual—strongly suggest that one or more stages in the development of the extant narrative should be associated with the Angevin literary scene circa 1170–1200, probably in England, and possibly with some relationship to the archiepiscopal household of Canterbury. It is in this light which we should read the presentation of participants from the British Isles in the Siège d’Antioche.

The discovery of such material does not add any meaningful evidence to the proposition that insular crusaders actually were in the land forces marching towards Jerusalem in 1096–99. The same objections to large-scale insular participation—William Rufus’s and his episcopate’s prohibitions, absence of charter evidence, and an apparent lack of interest—still apply. What it does do, however, is show how the narrative of the crusade was appropriated and utilised in the Angevin era to imply a coherency and unity (even when the characteristics of different gentes could be quite various) between the peoples who lived under the greatest extent of Angevin royal power during the rule of Henry II and his sons.

It is unclear whether this image of unified ‘British’ participation in the First Crusade was deliberately evoked by the author/redactor, acting on his own initiative or at the request of a patron, to achieve political objectives or further an agenda, or was merely a by-product of a reassertion of shared cultural values about the territorial immutability of the Angevin polity. The first option leads one inevitably to the text’s relationship to the Third Crusade (1189–92), the years either side of which seem the most likely candidates for the period of composition of the Siège’s present manifestation. If, like the Latin texts commissioned by Baldwin of Ford, it was composed (or reworked) before the expedition, its portrayal of the people of the British Isles fighting side by side takes on an exhortative function, perhaps intended to inspire enthusiasm for the expedition or aid recruitment. If, like the vernacular Estoire de la guerre sainte, also written in the Angevin literary sphere in the 1190s, or the Latin Itinerarium peregrinorum 1, similarly exhibiting strong links to Canterbury, it was part of a literary response to crusading enthusiasm, its represented unity of participants of the British Isles would serve as a pertinent (yet entirely fictitious) reminder that insular crusaders had always been centrally involved in the expeditions to the East, just as had been the case on the recent endeavour. But nothing in the text permits us to make a judgement definitively in favour of either proposition; although the story is framed as an ‘essample’ of moral virtue there are no direct appeals to participate in crusading activity, nor are there explicit evocations of any interpretational or historical link between the Third and the First Crusades.¹³⁹

A further possibility—and one which, in the absence of direct indications of propagandistic intent, I favour—involves viewing the Siège’s testimony in less instrumental terms, and arguing that the political links which tied together England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and the Angevin holdings on the continent from the 1170s, albeit very new in the late twelfth century, had given rise to a concept of atemporal cohesion between these disparate places which could subsequently be projected back into the past. Scholars of the vernacular historical romance in Angevin England have long remarked on the seemingly jarring ability of francophone writers swiftly to adopt and appropriate the identities fostered by the territories they came to dominate, ‘formulating a sense of self in their bonds with the land’ and extolling the ‘permanence of place’.¹⁴⁰ The Siège presents an idea of the perpetual territorial unity of the Angevin realms, under the dominance of the descendants of the Conqueror, contributing to the business of crusade. It was not important, for author or audience, that the image of territorial unity and crusading heritage put forward by the Siège was anachronistic: it would become real in time. The episodic, set-piece accounts of the First Crusade exhibited great versatility in being adapted by writers, with dynastic and regional concerns shaping the construction of texts.¹⁴¹ The testimony of the Siège shows that, in the late twelfth-century Angevin realms, the crusade, retrospectively viewed as a central site of Christian heritage and memory and a crucible for the formation of knightly and heroic values, could not be envisaged without the involvement of the wider Angevin environment. In the case of the Siège d’Antioche, the world which is interpolated into the narrative of the First Crusade is that of the 1180s rather than the 1090s; a time when Irish axemen could be depicted as fighting for Christendom alongside knights from the Chartrain without a jarring sense of unreality. The narrative of the First Crusade presented a blank canvas, marked only with the draft lines of the Latin accounts, onto which contemporary concerns and depictions could vividly be painted.

Footnotes