1066 - Andrew Bridgeford [103]
The place of origin of the Chanson de Roland has long been debated. On the basis that the twelfth-century Oxford manuscript was copied out in the Anglo-Norman dialect of its day, some have argued that it is a Norman work.29 Others, however, see the original poem as emanating from somewhere else in northern France, perhaps the area around Paris known as the Ile-de-France, or in Champagne, Anjou or Lorraine.30 Chartres, too, has been suggested.31 That it may have been written in Ponthieu is a novel suggestion; but the possibility should not be dismissed out of hand. Count Guy of Ponthieu was a great-great-grandson in the male line of Hugh Capet, the French king who finally ended the rule of the Carolingians in 987. Hugh Capet himself, however, was an indirect kinsman of Carolingian lineage and Guy could presumably trace a descent from the emperor in several female lines. Moreover the links in the region with the age of Charlemagne were as strong as they were anywhere else. It was here that Charlemagne is said to have placed his son-in-law Angilbert (740814) in control of the region. Angilbert was also one of the most celebrated former abbots of the monastery of Saint Riquier, the chief monastic centre of Ponthieu.32 The distinction in the poem between the 'French' and 'Norman'divisions of Charlemagne's army seems to mirror the very same distinction made in the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio when it describes Duke William's invasion force, where the 'French' are (or include) the men of Ponthieu and Boulogne. The Chanson de Roland thus appears to reflect sentiments of 'French' identity that are very similar to those expressed in the Carmen. On the other hand, the notion that the Chanson de Roland is a Norman work is undermined by the fact that it is always the French who are given the greater prestige; the 'Normans' are allotted a merely secondary role and 'Normandy' is merely one of a number of subsidiary territories ruled over by the true 'Frenchman' Charlemagne.33The poem was probably written for a wider audience than just one French region, and no place in Ponthieu is mentioned in the text, but for political, historical and genealogical reasons Ponthieu, or one of its northern French neighbours, can hardly be ruled out as its place of composition or adaptation.
Nor is it impossible that the Roland is more or less contemporary with the Bayeux Tapestry, that is to say probably dating from the period between 1066 and about 1080 and perhaps more specifically from the early to mid-1070s. Various arguments have been advanced in favour of the Roland being significantly later in date than the tapestry, but none is persuasive.34 While the thrust of the Chanson de Roland puts the 'Normans' very much in the shade of the 'French', there are nevertheless some oblique references to Duke William's recent conquest of England. Thus it is mentioned that Charlemagne 'crossed the salty sea to England and won the poll-tax for Rome's own use' and that 'England became his domain'.35 Neither statement is true of Charlemagne but both are true of William the Conqueror. For this reason, if nothing else, the poem in its surviving form must date from after 1066. The widespread notion that the Chanson de Roland must, of necessity, have been written after a battle in Spain in 1086 (the Battle of Zalaca) is based on a series of false assumptions.36 Arguably, so is the notion that the Roland reflects the time of the First Crusade (post 1096); there is no reference at all, either implicit or explicit, to the Crusade in the East. What the Roland reflects is rather the climate of opinion that made the First Crusade possible. This was a time, some twenty or so years earlier, when contingents of French knights were already fighting against the Muslims in Spain, just as we find them in the Roland. Moreover, there may well be a number of oblique references in the Roland to contemporary events in 1071 or 1072, forming a cluster of allusions that suggests that the poet was writing not long afterwards.37There is also no reference to the Norman conquest of