DAVID CROOK, Robin Hood: Legend and Reality

Abstract

of the dismissive reaction of modern historiographers to the value of his work (listed pp. lxxiv–lxxv). Perhaps the most often-cited original section is Alfred’s introductory Descriptio of the island of Great Britain (though Ireland is not entirely ignored) and its peoples (pp. 3–10 in this edition), which includes a remarkable example of the fascination of his generation for the history of gentes. It became a source for a similar passage by the fourteenth-century universal chronicler Ranulf Higden in his Polychronicon. Another such independent passage is Geoffrey’s engagement with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae. It is this last feature of Alfred’s History which is Dr Slevin’s argument as to why his work deserves a lot more attention, at least in the field of historiography. In a fascinating chapter (pp. xxxii–xlii) Dr Slevin analyses how Alfred became quite as caught up with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fictional history of early Britain as his literary contemporaries. But in attempting to reconcile Geoffrey’s fables with his other sources for early British history Alfred experienced doubts, and in many ways signalled his caution about the Historia Regum Britanniae to his readers, yet all the while genuflecting to his contemporaries’ urgent desire to accept its historicity. In this way, Alfred acts for us as a conduit of the doubts and debate current in his intellectual community, a world of the mind more far flung than the valley of the River Hull and the archdeaconry of the East Riding. One of the strengths of this edition is the delicate drawing out of the network of interlinking writers and minds that lies behind the construction of Alfred’s History. A lot can be learned about the way he uses the work of other writers who were his sources and presumably correspondents, and creates from it a unified narrative. The edition is a skilful exercise in twelfth-century historiography above anything else. The excellent translation of the Latin text by Lynda Lockyer is backed up by pertinent and expansive historical footnotes, presumably by the editor. They neatly signal and amplify the historiographical argument behind the book. I doubt that this edition, for all its virtues, will bring people to Alfred of Beverley to learn anything much about the history of medieval England. But it argues a new importance for him as a central figure in the mid twelfth-century efflorescence of historical writing and method.