HISTORIOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES - Julian Emperor

LEGENDARY HISTORY: HISTORIA AND FABULA 407Quels reis i ad en ordre eü,Ki anceis e ki puis i fu,Maistre Wace l’ad translatéKi en conte la verité.Si cum li livres le devise,Quant Greu ourent Troie conquiseE eissillié tut le païsPur la venjance de ParisKi de Grece out ravi Eleine,Dux Eneas a quelque peinneDe la grant ocise eschapa. (Arnold edn., vol. 1, ll. 1–15)This imperative to pen the history of a prestigious lineage 66 is a keyelement of Wace’s other roman, of Rou or Rollo, which he dedicatesaround 1160 to Henry II Plantagenet of England and to Henry’swife Eleanor of Aquitaine. In the epilogue to this work (which wasnever completed), Wace charges the task of bringing it to fruitionto the same Benoît de Sainte-Maure whose Roman de Troie was discussedabove. Recounting the history of the dukes of Normandy,from the founding of the duchy in the tenth century by the Normanchieftain Rollo to the conquest of England by William the Conquerorfrom 1066 onwards, the Rou finishes at the reign of the last ofWilliam’s sons, Henry I Beauclerc. This poem contains a narrativeof the ‘fact-finding visit’ made by the chronicler to the enchantedfountain at Barenton, hidden in the darkest depths of the forest ofBrocéliande (“donc Breton vont sovent fablant/une forest mult longuee lee”), but where he encountered neither fairies nor marvels of anykind. 67In his study of the vernacular historians of the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies, Peter Damian-Grint evokes the way in which, inthe Rou, Wace dismisses the witness accounts (uniquely oral) of jongleursand other peddlers of rumors or fabulous tales of wonder.Nothing that is not backed up by a written source, he informs us,can be trusted or retained for his own narrative: 6866According to Boutet (1999, 59), the motivation behind the Brut, the Rou andthe Chronique des ducs de Normandie was not so much ‘genealogical celebration’ as thedesire to reconstitute the History of the British or Brithonic peoples, as inhabitantsof the westernmost isles of Europe.67Wace, Roman de Rou, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols., Société des Anciens TextesFrançais (Paris, 1970–73), vol. 2, ll. 6377–398.68Cf. Damian-Grint (1999), 108–09.