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COPYRIGHT 2006 University of Texas at Austin (University of Texas Press)
By the thirteenth century, the English had learned that the Welsh were treacherous and fickle. (1) In the last quarter of the fourteenth century, the English trembled when the Welsh both raided English territory and produced an alarming increase in the number of settlers migrating into English border counties. (2) After the widespread Welsh uprising in the first decade of the fifteenth century, the English realized that the Welsh were not the submissive and deferential natives they had feigned to be, but were a perfidious people, on par with the wild Irish. (3) These "insights" into the nature of the Welsh were widely held perceptions among the English in the late Middle Ages. Lest the English forget that the Welsh possessed these characteristics, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (SGGK) was prepared to remind them.
SGGK was thoroughly tied to England's colonial project in Wales when the poem was composed. SGGK is typically dated between 1350 and 1400 (a common ascription being the last quarter of the fourteenth century), a period during which the English were attempting to complete their colonization of Wales, while the Welsh violently opposed such domination. Resembling several Arthurian histories from medieval Britain, (4) SGGK is structured by these colonial conflicts and, appropriately, arises from a border culture: the poem is conventionally believed to have been composed in northwest England, alongside the Welsh border, and employs a northwest midlands dialect, specifically, the dialect of Lancashire and Cheshire. Appropriately, the bulk of SGGK's narrative action unfolds in the English-Welsh borderland. This location is specified at the beginning of Gawain's quest to find the Green Knight. Gawain initially journeys through the realm of Logres (England, south of the Humber) (5) and eventually reaches northern Wales. Gawain passes the Anglesey Islands, fords rivers near the headlands, crosses at Holy Head, and lands "In [thorn]e wyldrenesse of Wyrale" ("In the wilderness of Wirral," 701), (6) a peninsula just inside England, by the northeastern border of Wales. Gawain is in Wirral when Bertilak's castle magically appears, making SGGK a border romance.
This article investigates SGGK's participation in colonial struggles between the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century. As the models of ideology employed in British cultural studies attest, a text does not simply reflect the political climate in which it is composed but intervenes in the political terrain and participates in the production of the social formation. Hence, using a methodology in dialogue with Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, Louis Althusser, and Antonio Gramsci, (7) this article examines how the ideologies speaking through SGGK attempted to reformulate readers' conceptions of themselves and of their neighbors and thus shape their perceptions of how to negotiate English-Welsh conflicts.
The defining work of SGGK in relation to England's colonization of Wales is that of Patricia Clare Ingham, and we disagree dramatically about how to understand the English-Welsh negotiations embedded in the poem. Ingham argues that, as the poem unfolds, the issues surrounding colonization raised early in the text disappear and that the ethnic and geographic disparities between the English and the Welsh in the first half of the poem collapse to be replaced by gender difference. (8) I maintain that SGGK insists throughout the entire poem--as did, in general, the English and the Welsh in the late fourteenth century--that the two peoples differed greatly. Ethnic and geographic incongruities are not effaced as SGGK unfolds, but are reinscribed at the locus of gender--more precisely, at the site of female sexuality--in a conventional move that acts to further elaborate and consolidate colonial power by buttressing ideologies of colonialism with ideologies of gender.
This divergence points to a more fundamental disagreement between Ingham's work and my own. We understand the English colonization of the Welsh, and hence the poem's colonialist politics, very differently. Ingham writes,
Welsh and English interaction in march towns, at regional marketplaces, on the battlefield, or in the narrative tropes of a Middle English poem become the multiple places where unity is forged from ethnic heterogeneities. Colonial union becomes an act of cultural synchronicity, a coordination of capitulation ... Rhetorics of distance and differentiation-the desire to separate "Welsheries" from "Englishries" in late medieval histories, or in the case before us to determine once and for all which parts of Gawain are Welsh or English--efface the familiarities, shared dreamings, common spaces of household and story. (9)
Ingham views the intermixing of the Welsh and English (in the poem and in Wales) as the creation of a hybridity, a conflation which is, for the most part, a reasonably pleasant cultural and geographical commingling. Rhonda Knight's work on SGGK and colonization also centers on hybridity, insisting that Gawain's identity is a "cultural collage" and that Bertilak embodies Anglo-Welsh hybridity, reflective of the border region. (10) Knight acknowledges the harshness of England's seizure of Wales but claims that by the time SGGK was composed, the intensity of conquest and occupation had subsided to be replaced by a more settled coexistence. (11) Hence, both Knight and Ingham seem unaware that the English conquest of the Welsh in the late fourteenth century was frequently bloody: many Welshmen and women were dispossessed of their lands and livelihoods; and many were killed by the invaders. Focusing more strongly on consensual relations than coercive ones, Ingham roots her discussion in the dialectical (specifically in Homi Bhabha's formulation of mimicry); (12) but when discussing a dialectic, it is important to emphasize that two disparate groups do not approach their convergence on equal terms, as Ingham's work frequently seems to imply. As Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall argue, when a dominant group seeks to produce hegemony, there is a dialectic, where, in order to be effective, the ruling group must take account of the interests and tendencies of the subaltern groups over whom hegemony will be exercised. However, such compromise does not imply equity, and the two groups do not contribute equally to the production of the new social formation. (13) Ingham and Knight make the power relations in the poem and in Wales seem more equitable and especially more palatable, I would argue, than they indeed were. As the historical discussion in this article will demonstrate, relations between the Welsh and the colonizing English--including in northeastern Wales and in the Marches in the southeast (14)--were generally bitter in the second half of the fourteenth century. Accordingly, rather than arguing for the leveling of dissimilarities and the liquidation of "ethnic heterogeneities ... into nothing more than the differences of an extended family," as Ingham holds (15) or for some collage of identities as Knight maintains, this article argues that SGGK insists that the Welsh and the English are two distinct groups and that the poem promoted England's conquest of Wales.
England's Conquest of Wales
As R. R. Davies explains, by the close of the twelfth century, the Anglo-Normans had entrenched themselves firmly in much of Wales, especially in the southeast, in the far southwest, and, in places along the eastern border. (16) By the end of the next century, Edward I had paid extraordinary amounts to effect and to sustain the conquest of the remaining areas of north and west Wales, areas that had more successfully resisted colonization. (17) Thereafter, the Welsh provoked constant anxiety in the English. There were occasional outbreaks of violence by the Welsh against their colonizers, including anti-English violence in the north in the 1340s. (18) The English feared Welsh uprisings, a fear that intersected with apprehension that the French and the Scots would employ Wales as a threshold for attacking England. This trepidation mounted rapidly after the resumption of the Hundred Years War in 1367, producing English garrisons at most Welsh castles in the 1370s. Tensions in Wales grew palpably in the last three decades of the fourteenth century. Ruthless English lords exploited Welsh tenants to a particularly pronounced degree, and under these conditions the indigenous community grew increasingly resentful. Relations between the rural Welsh and burgesses in English towns in Wales were fraught in places as distant as Carmarthen and Flintshire. In the 1370s, Owain Lawgoch, another in a long line of Welsh rebels emerged, proclaiming his intention to recover Wales. Lawgoch's cause attracted the support of the French, the Castilians, and some leading men in northern Wales, and in response, the English government assassinated Lawgoch. The last quarter of the fourteenth century witnessed a resumption and intensification of campaigns by English counties bordering Wales against Welsh raids and against what the English perceived to be an alarming influx of Welsh settlers into English border counties. (19)
Northeast Wales in particular generated considerable anxiety for the English near the end of the fourteenth century: in the 1390s, it was the site of both a bitter family feud and a violent demonstration that threatened to become a sizable uprising. In 1400, an insurrection, led by Owain Glyn Dwr, did erupt. Northern Wales was the seat of Glyn Dwr's power, with Glyn Dwr also enjoying the support of his powerful cousins from Anglesey. English boroughs in northern Wales were the primary targets of Glyn Dwr's followers in their initial forays, although insurgency quickly spread throughout Wales. Glyn Dwr's uprising was the longest rebellion in Wales since the Norman Conquest, and the uprising threatened to secure Welsh independence from foreign rule. However, by 1408, Welsh rebels had effectively lost the battle. (20)
Whatever their biological or cultural interminglings, the Welsh and the English understood themselves to differ greatly. This was evident on the part of the English through their pronounced divisions between themselves and the Welsh administratively and institutionally. As the thirteenth century unfolded, the categorization...
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