Roe deer in Islands Thorns Inclosure, New Forest - geograph

"The Rime of King William" is an

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

poem that tells the death of

William the Conqueror William I; ang, WillelmI (Bates ''William the Conqueror'' p. 33– 9 September 1087), usually known as William the Conqueror and sometimes William the Bastard, was the first Norman king of England, reigning from 1066 until his death in 1087 ...

. The Rime was a part of the only entry for the year of 1087 (though improperly dated 1086) in the "

Peterborough Chronicle The ''Peterborough Chronicle'' (also called the Laud manuscript and the E manuscript) is a version of the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicles'' originally maintained by the monks of Peterborough Abbey in Cambridgeshire. It contains unique information abo ...

/Laud Manuscript." In this entry there is a thorough history and account of the life of King William. The entry in its entirety is regarded "as containing the best contemporary estimate of William's achievements and character as seen by a reasonably objective Englishman" (Bartlett, 89). As a resource, earlier writers drew from this in a more literal sense, while later historians referred to it more liberally. The text in its original language can be found in ''The Peterborough Chronicle 1070–1154'', edited by Cecily Clark. A modern translation can be found in the ''Anglo-Saxon Chronicles'' translated by G.N. Garmonsway.

Seth Lerer Seth Lerer (born 1955) is an American scholar who specializes in historical analyses of the English language, in addition to critical analyses of the works of several authors, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer. He is a Distinguished Professor of Liter ...

has published a more recent modern translation of "The Rime of King William" in his article, "Old English and Its Afterlife," in ''The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature.''

Text and translation

Summary

The Rime itself is short, and is more of a criticism of King William rather than praise of his reign. It also acts as a summation of that year's entry. The author appears to have chosen a few points that he may have found particularly interesting and turned them into a poem within the entry for the year. Depending on the editor's choice of line arrangement, the poem is somewhere between 17 and 32 lines long, depending on whether the editor arranges according to Old English alliterative meter or as rhyming couplets.

Authorship

The author of this Rime, as with many Old English texts, is unknown, but the author does offer an important detail earlier in his entry. "The one definite piece of information which he gives is that he was a member of William's household" (Whiting, 91–92). :Þonne wille we be him awritan swa swa we hine ageaton, Þe him on locodon an ore on his hirede weredon. : hen shall he write of him, as we have known him, who have ourselves seen him and at time dwelt in his court.(Garmonsway, 219) So, at one point the author was a member of the royal household. When and for how long is not sure. Beyond this, there are no other facts offered but it is safe to assume that the author was a monk or a member of a religious house.

Artistic criticism

This poem has been criticized for being immature and "a garbled attempt at rhyming poetry: a poem without regular metre, formalized lineation or coherent imagery" (Lerer, 7). Many other scholars support this criticism. Professors

George Philip Krapp George Philip Krapp (1872–1934) was a scholar of the English language who was born in Cincinnati. He graduated from Wittenberg College in 1894 and received a PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 1899. His doctoral thesis was on the Legend of t ...

and

Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (May 9, 1907 – March 23, 1970) was an American scholar of Anglo-Saxon literature who taught English at Columbia University. Early life Dobbie was born in Brooklyn, New York City, in 1907. Education and academic care ...

did not include the Rime in their six-volume ''Anglo Saxon Poetic Records''. Its value as a representation of

literature as well as the quality of the poem, simply as a poem, is called into question. The end rhyming is unlike the

alliterative Alliteration is the conspicuous repetition of initial consonant sounds of nearby words in a phrase, often used as a literary device. A familiar example is "Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers". Alliteration is used poetically in various ...

Old English poetry, which is the basis for most scholarly criticism. Bartlett Whiting refers to the Rime as having "a lack of technical merit," referring to the sudden jump from prose of the formal entry, to that of the "rough and ready verse" (89). With its end-rhymes it is often taken as an example of the transition to

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...

Significance

No matter the quality of the Rime's rhymes, the spelling of this Rime was used to age both the text itself as well as chart morphology in Old English texts. Whiting refers to the specific dropping of the final n, indicative of the loss of inflectional endings from Old to Middle English (Whiting, 89). The poem serves as "an elegy for an age as much as for a king, this entry as a whole constitutes a powerfully literary, and literate, response to the legacies of pre-Conquest English writing" (Lerer, 12). The text offers both the political time line (the twenty first year that William I ruled) and a religious timeline (one thousand eighty-seven years after the birth of Jesus Christ). Within the form of the

lament A lament or lamentation is a passionate expression of grief, often in music, poetry, or song form. The grief is most often born of regret, or mourning. Laments can also be expressed in a verbal manner in which participants lament about something ...

for King William it expresses the indignation of the English at the introduction of the Norman forest law. Stefan Jurasinski has shown that it is most likely by the compiler of the Peterborough Chronicle himself and that it stands at the head of a developing tradition of literary

polemics Polemic () is contentious rhetoric intended to support a specific position by forthright claims and to undermine the opposing position. The practice of such argumentation is called ''polemics'', which are seen in arguments on controversial topics ...

against the injustice of the forest laws ("The Rime of King William and its Analogues").

Digital Facsimile Edition and Modern Translation

* Foys, Martin ''et al.'
''Old English Poetry in Facsimile Project''
(Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2019-); digital facsimile edition and Modern English translation.

Notes

References

*Bartlett J. Whiting, '"The Rime of King William", ''Philologica: The Malone Anniversary Studies'', Eds. T. A. Kirby and H. B. Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins) 1949. *Clark, Cecily. The Peterborough Chronicles. First. London: Oxford University Press, 1958. *Garmonsway, G.N. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. First. London: J.M. Dent & Sons LTD., 1953. *Lerer, Seth. The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature. “Old English and Its Afterlife.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. *Jurankski, Stefan. "The Rime of King William and its Analogues", ''Neophilologus'', 88.1, (January 2004), pp. 131–144; . *Wallace, David, 2002 (ed.) The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, Cambridge University Press, The Rime of King William pp. 15–16. {{DEFAULTSORT:Rime of King William Old English poems Cultural depictions of William the Conqueror