Sovereignty, Oath, and the Profane Life in the Avowing of Arthur (Exemplaria 25.1 [2013]: 36-58)

© W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2013 DOI 10.1179/1041257312Z.00000000024

exemplaria, Vol. 25 No. 1, Spring 2013, 36–58

Sovereignty, Oath, and the Profane Life in the Avowing of Arthur

Joseph Taylor University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA

This essay considers the northern Gawain romances as Anglo-Scottish border literature responding to government centralization in the late four-teenth century. Revisiting the peculiar vows made by Baldwin in The Avowing of Arthur, it contends that the uniqueness of Baldwin’s oaths to those of Arthur, Gawain, and Kay embody disparities felt by marchers towards the ruling center of England. Reading the Avowing through the lens of biopoli-tics, this essay claims that Baldwin’s seeming aloofness to Arthur’s machi-nations constitutes not a conscious resistance to Arthur’s authority, such as we see in the other northern Gawain romances, but a negligence towards sovereign power figured in what Giorgio Agamben calls a “profane life.” Through Baldwin’s profaning, the Avowing imagines a life at the border that is removed from the punishing weight of sovereign power.

keywords Avowing of Arthur, Anglo-Scottish border, biopolitics, sovereignty, profane

At the end of his 1975–76 lectures on war and society, Michel Foucault defines what

he calls “biopower” as “the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living

being, . . . the biological . . . under State control” (239–40). “Correcting,” as he might

say, Foucault’s biopolitical inquiries, Giorgio Agamben has opposed Foucault’s

implication that biopower fully emerges only in the nineteenth century, arguing

instead that “Western politics is a biopolitics from the very beginning” (Homo Sacer

181). Agamben demonstrates how the management of bodies constitutes the primary

task of sovereign power, not merely for modern politics but for the premodern as

well. In the first of his studies on sovereignty and bare life, Homo Sacer, Agamben

offers as one example of the biopolitical subject the medieval outlaw: the one who,

according to the laws of Edward the Confessor, takes on the wolf’s head. Banished

from society, the outlaw, like the sacred man, can be killed with impunity — his

murder does not constitute a crime. Because it aims to analyze the limits or limitless-

ness of sovereign power, of the sovereign’s paradoxical place both inside and outside

37SOVEREIGNTY, OATH, AND THE PROFANE LIFE IN THE AVOWING OF ARTHUR

the law, and because it further studies the methods through which sovereignty enacts

its power on marginalized subjects, Agamben’s thinking provides a useful lens through

which to view the literature of the Anglo-Scottish border in late-medieval Britain.1

Emerging from the region in arguably its most turbulent period — the late four-

teenth and fifteenth centuries — the northern Gawain romances can be seen to

illustrate the bare life of the borderlands as it confronts the biopolitical sovereign

signified, I will suggest, by Arthur. Patricia Clare Ingham claims that “northern

romances of Arthurian relations amplify the specific troubles of union during the

period . . . [and] explicitly link the troubles of union to English borderlands” (Sovereig n

Fantasies 171). Reading Sir Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, Sean Pollack finds that

these border texts challenge “modern assumptions about identity and geographic and

political boundaries” (22). Though we might expect to find a local culture staunchly

asserting its national identity against Scottish counterparts across the boundary and

ready to defend the native land against foreign incursion, this is simply not the case.

In fact, the borders had known significant autonomy from the rest of the realm since

the outset of the Anglo-Scottish Wars in 1296, and for much of the fourteenth

century that autonomy came with significant power, prestige, and wealth for a whole

class of border magnates. But the siphoning of power and independence from the

borders by increasingly centralized regimes beginning in the late fourteenth century

created significant tensions between the king and his subjects at the margins. As

Randy P. Schiff finds in comparing the Awntyrs off Arthure with Golagros and

Gawane, these texts “register regional reactions to processes of nation formation

sweeping away the borderlands society that had fed off the almost continuous armed

conflict of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries” (“Borderland Subversions”

613).2 In light of such resistance to centralization and sovereign power, key figures in

these texts adopt the ethos of the borderlands, embodying a resistance to Arthur’s

sovereign machine.

This essay will explore the relationship of the sovereign to his subject as it func-

tions in the Avowing of Arthur, a poem that performs resistance differently from

the armed confrontations and exchanges found in its northern counterparts.3 This

performance is evident, I suggest, through the poem’s engagement with the institution

of the oath. Richard Firth Green points out that the oath “bound the feudal kingdom

together . . . [as] a tool of social cohesion that seems to be omnipresent in medieval

oral culture” (230). As Agamben illustrates in his most recent addition to the Homo

Sacer series, the vow or oath is a “sacrament of power,” a sovereign mechanism

through which man becomes “the living being whose language places his life in

question” (Sacrament 69; emphasis in original). Consequently, the oath “calls into

question the very nature of man as a speaking being and a political animal” (11).

Emile Benveniste, whose work provides one of Agamben’s most significant sources,

explains, “One associates with the oath the quality of the sacred, the most formidable

thing which can affect a man: here the “oath” appears as an operation designed to

make oneself sacer on certain conditions” (437; emphasis in original). If, however, the

oath functions as a device by which man is subjected to the sovereign’s power, then

38 JOSEPH TAYLOR

it may also function, this essay will show, as a performance through which man

absents himself from subjectivity altogether.

At the outset of the Avowing, Arthur and his three companions make chivalric

oaths that seem bound up in a kind of knightly brotherhood. Arthur promises to kill

a fiendish boar rampaging through Inglewood Forest, and his vow is answered by

both Gawain and Kay. Gawain swears “to Tarne Wathelan, / To wake hit all nyȝte”

(131–32) and Kay will “ride þis forest or daye; / Quose wernes me þe waye, / Hym

to dethe diȝte” (134–36).4 But a fourth vow follows these three claims to secure

Inglewood, from the boar, from whatever might happen at the mystical waters of the

Tarn, and from errant strangers roaming about the wood. Baldwin responds:

. . . To stynte owre strife,

I avow, bi my life,

Neuyr to be ielus of my wife,

Ne of no birde bryȝte;

Nere werne no mon my mete,

Quen I gode may gete;

Ore drede my dethe for no threte,

Nauthir of king ner knyȝte. (137–44)

As though oblivious to the connectivity of the oaths made by his companions —

namely to protect the king’s forest5 — Baldwin aims at harmony in his marriage,

generosity to all men, and a rejection of the threat that death poses to his person.

Most interesting here is Baldwin’s reference to “owre strife.” To what strife does the

knight refer? Is there friction amongst these knights, within the Arthurian realm, or

between the sovereign and his subjects? As Arthur, Gawain, and Kay ride forth to

the greenwood to observe their vows, Baldwin rides home, the separation from his

companions made clear in the narrator’s, “Butte carpe we now of þer othir thre”

(158).

The disparity between the vows of Arthur, Gawain, and Kay, and those of Baldwin

illustrates the function of the oath, as well as its potentiality. Richard Southern long

ago insisted that “[m]edieval society was prolific in creating forms of association to

which entry was obtained by some form of oath” (110). For Arthur, the community

of the Round Table operates by oaths of knightly brotherhood, such as he demands

in the Avowing. Kay and Gawain follow the lead of their king in swearing to protect

portions of his realm at the peril of their own lives. In this way, their oaths intimate

the bare life to which they are relegated. Baldwin, however, ignores Arthur’s “I cum-

maunde ȝo / To do as I haue done nowe” (125–26), swearing instead, “by [his] life”

(138), to perform acts that not only contrast Arthur’s, Gawain’s, and Kay’s martial

deeds but that figuratively undermine the very effect sovereign power has over all

aspects of life in a biopolitical realm. In this way, Baldwin can be said to profane the

sacrality of Arthur’s avowing and, in so doing, defuse the sovereign’s hold over

him.

Baldwin’s exceptional vows and the life to which they speak oppose the life of

sovereign subjection; instead, they embody what Agamben has called the “profane


life.” “If ‘to consecrate’ (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things

from the sphere of human law,” he explains, “‘to profane’ meant, conversely, to

return them to the free use of men” (Profanations 73). Free usage, Leland de la

Durantaye clarifies, “is not simply a usage with a more ample or liberal legal defini-

tion, but a usage that categorically rejects the idea of legitimate possession” (Giorgio

Agamben 321).6 In other words, the profaning gesture desacralizes the sacred subject

and places him in a state not where anyone might exploit him — as in the state of

exception — but where no one may possess him. This is not so much an act of direct

resistance to power as it is, in Agamben’s words, “a special form of negligence”

(Profanations 75). I suggest here that the disparity of Baldwin’s vows to his knightly

counterparts’ calls into question the efficacy of the oath as sacrament and, conse-

quently, the potency of sovereign power in the poem.

The bare life of the North

While frequently noting the importance of Baldwin’s peculiarities both in making the

vows and explaining them, critics of the Avowing have not attended to their implica-

tions for the poem’s understanding of sovereignty. John Burrow and David Johnson

have both claimed that Baldwin signifies a kind of seasoned and mature knighthood

that has put off the youthful adventuring that Arthur, Gawain, and Kay continue to

undertake in the poem. Edwin Greenlaw long ago asserted that Baldwin’s vows “were

no new rules of conduct but were the statements of certain guiding principles

of Baldwin’s life, phrased as one may phrase New Year’s resolutions” (578). More

recently, Thomas Hahn notes that Baldwin’s oaths “more resemble prohibitions than

promises of achievement, committing Baldwin to avoid certain reactive behaviors

rather than to undertake risk or knightly deeds,” and he concludes ultimately that the

Avowing’s “alignment of incident and explanation suggests that . . . all motives are

self-interested or at least justifiable” (113, 116). These readings deftly analyze the

Avowing and, specifically, Baldwin’s vows in light of popular generic tropes and an

extant literary tradition of knightly behavior. If we understand the oath as a sacra-

ment, however, as that which calls into question the political life of man, then its

function in the Avowying compels beyond literary convention. This is, in part,

because the poem disseminates from the Anglo-Scottish border, a striking example of

the marginalized bare life addressed by Agamben’s work.7

We might view the North of England throughout the later Middle Ages as a state

of exception, a space where law has been absented by a sovereign in an act that is

paradoxically ascribed by law. Agamben explains this zone as “neither external nor

internal to the juridical order . . . where inside and outside do not exclude each other

but rather blur with each other” (State of Exception 23). As Helen Jewell points out,

“English kings, right up to 1200, showed a tendency to see the far north as expend-

able, and Henry I, Stephen, Henry the Young King and Richard I (1189–99) all

offered territory to the Scots in various crises” (37). Like the figure of homo sacer,

the sacred man who can be killed with impunity but not sacrificed, the North is

40 JOSEPH TAYLOR

excluded from the protection of law and exposed to the whims of the invader. Yet,

the northern borders became a front-line of defense in 1296, at the outset of the

Anglo-Scottish Wars, creating a paradoxical relationship with the rest of the realm.

The North was both necessary and expendable, desired and derided, simultaneously.

Disparities abound between nobles and commoners living there. The great northern

magnates, including the Percies, were consumed with both the profits of warfare and

resistance to a sovereign machine ruling from the distant capital of London — as well

as Westminster — while northern laborers and merchants pursued a sometimes bare

existence in spite of the conflicts that repeatedly threatened, or followed through, to

make them victims of politics and war. These lives ultimately conflate in their expo-

sure to the sovereign’s exceptional aims within the liminal space of the border, either

consumed with or consumed by his politics and his power. Banned by early Angevin

kings and at least partially returned to the sovereign fold during the Anglo-Scottish

Wars, the northern border took its place within the blurred space of sovereignty and

law.

From the outset of war lasting the better part of a century, the northernmost coun-

ties of England took the brunt of Scottish attack. Despite historian Frank Musgrove’s

confident assertion that “[t]he stimulus that war gave to the economy [in the North]

almost certainly outweighed the damage done by the Scots” (148), the horror of

repeated Scottish raids into northern England must have had a significant psycho-

logical and economic effect on the commoners who lacked financial or political posi-

tion to capitalize on a war economy. The Westminster Chronicle, for example, relates

how in 1389 “the Scots wrought downright havoc in the countryside about Carlisle,

slaughtering men, women, and even children, and carrying off naked to Scotland,

with their booty, those they made prisoner” (383–85). Carlisle was a key defensive

post and, consequently, an object of attention for Scottish invasion forces. It is

perhaps fitting that Carlisle figures so prominently in most of the northern Gawain

texts. As Henry Summerson explains in his substantial history of the medieval city:

Carlisle could never be an ordinary urban community living primarily by trade, industry

and the redistribution of local goods. Its geographical position put it at the mercy of

events a long way beyond its power to control, namely the normally hostile relations

existing at [the] national level between England and Scotland during the fourteenth cen-

tury, and the disturbed conditions prevailing throughout the borders of the two countries

even when they were ostensibly at peace, which together created a framework of

endemic violence within which characteristically urban functions inevitably tended to be

supplanted by military ones. (298)

War between the nations halted trade, destroyed livestock, razed domestic and

commercial structures, ravaged agriculture, and decimated populations in northern

England and upland Scotland. The Lanercost Chronicle complains, “the Scots entered

Northumberland in strength, wasting all the land, committing arson, pillage, and

murder . . . and entered the county of Carlisle . . . [where] they did as they had done

in Northumberland, destroying everything” (164). Lanercost, written just a few miles


from Carlisle, notes as well in 1315 that Robert Bruce “invested the city and besieged

it for ten days, trampling down all the crops, wasting the suburbs and all within the

bounds, burning the whole of that district, and driving a very great store of cattle for

his army from Allerdale, Copland, and Westmorland” (213). Truces did not assure

tranquility and often meant only slightly less disturbance and destruction. As

Summerson points out, “Far more common were raids and ambushes, forays by small

troops of horsemen in pursuit of livestock and prisoners suitable for ransom” (316).

Thus, the simple livelihood of the common man living at the border — his crops, his

livestock, his shabby dwelling — becomes the object of ongoing political tit-for-tat

between competing sovereignties. His life is one where, in Summerson’s words, “bare

survival had become the best that anyone could hope for” (317). In this way, border-

ers without political stakes illustrate a kind of bare life, forced against their will

into a political existence that repeatedly attacked them with impunity. Bound up in

sovereign conflicts of which they often had no agency and expendable within the

parameters of border defense, these commoners come to resemble the subject of the

biopolitical state. It is no wonder, then, that the literature emerging from this region

is often seen to fantasize resistance to the rulers who exposed its people to such a

life.

The northern Gawain romances bespeak tensions among king, subject, and region

and easily parallel the reality of power stratagems at the borders beginning in the late

fourteenth century. These texts do not call into question a collective Englishness,

embodied in Arthur’s happy subjects, so much as they affirm a regionalist identity at

the borders, and, in so doing, subvert the centralizing pull of the sovereign attempting

to empty the borderlands of power and autonomy in the later Middle Ages. In Sir

Gawain and the Carl of Carlisle, Gawain survives a strange night under the Carl’s

care, and, for his perseverance, the Carl shows Gawain a gruesome trophy room. The

Carl’s bone crypt and its tapestry of bloody shirts are not easily passed off as the

relics of a serial killer. Indeed, the heraldic emblems that adorn each of these shirts

suggest a more specific engagement between the Carl and the Arthurian realm.

The Carl’s early denouncement of Kay and Baldwin as “Euyll-tavȝt knyȝttus” (328)

intimates the Carl’s targeted animosity for Arthur’s rule, his murderous campaign

proceeding from when he “maked a vowe” (518) twenty years prior.8 Though

seemingly comic, the impetus for action in The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame

Ragnelle is the confrontation between Arthur and the errant knight, Sir Gromer

Somer Joure. Arthur, “clothyd butt in grene” (83) is surprised while out hunting alone

by the armed Sir Gromer, who alleges:

Thous hast me done wrong many a yere

And wofully I shall quytte the here;

I hold thy lyfe days nyghe done.

Thou hast gevyn my landes in certayn

With greatt wrong unto Sir Gawen. (55–59)9

The brunt of Gromer’s complaint is that Arthur has taken his lands and given them

to Gawain, for which he will condemn the king unless Arthur can answer the classic

42 JOSEPH TAYLOR

question, “whate wemen love best in feld and town” (91). The convention of the

question, and the near-comic lengths to which Arthur — and later Gawain — must

go to arrive at and pay for its answer, obfuscate the initial accusation of Gromer’s

charge. Arthur has seized lands from an unaffiliated knight and given them to his

favorite. A similar case can be found in the second episode of the Awntyrs, when the

Scottish knight Galeron enters a court feast and accuses Arthur of wrongfully taking

his lands: “Þou has wonen hem in werre with a wrange wile / And geuen hem to Sir

Gawayn” (421–22).10 Galeron and Gawain then fight for lands Galeron claims were

his in the first place. Noting the regional determinism of this poem and its use of the

Scottish antagonist, Ingham explains, “[a]s a metaphor for regional concerns,

Scotland offers a means at once to resist English moves toward centralization and at

the same time to deny that English centralization complicates northern loyalties

at all” (Sovereign Fantasies 188). In other words, the far northwest community of

England could safely channel its frustrations of government consolidation through the

figure of the Scottish knight Galeron, fighting for what is rightfully his against the

English monarch’s imperial reach.

These characters’ defiance of Arthurian power is, however, momentary. The Carl’s

pleasure at Gawain’s courtesy seems to offer him a way “back” to Arthur in a man-

ner that strictly opposes the murder he has perpetrated in Arthur’s forest and against

Arthur’s retainers, whose bloody shirts adorn the Carl’s walls. And he makes this

more explicit in his redemptive turn at the narrative’s conclusion. He will, as he

claims, “forsake my wyckyd lawys” (541) for the laws of Arthur, to whom he anx-

iously kneels, testifying to his eagerness to be drawn into Arthur’s rule. Sir Gromer’s

plot in the Wedding is foiled by the intense desire of his sister, Ragnelle, to be

part of the Arthurian family, to wed Gawain. In the Awntyrs, when Gawain defeats

Galeron in combat, Arthur presents Gawain with substantial lands elsewhere so that

Gawain might give Galeron his lands back. But this is not a restoration. As a sover-

eign endowing lands to Galeron, Arthur subjugates the knight to the Arthurian feudal

machine. Galeron takes Arthur’s, or rather Gawain’s, offer, serving the Round Table

“To his lyues ende” (702). These knights’ pronounced resistance is brief and eventu-

ally undone by vows to God and king — the wedding vows of Ragnelle and Sir

Gawain, and the investitures of the Carl (“A dubbyd hym knyght on þe morne” [628])

and Galeron (“Thei made Sir Galeron that stonde / A knight of þe Table Ronde”

[700–1]).

Such is the case in the Avowing when the defiant Menealfe of the Mountain is

ceremoniously sworn into the “Rowun Tabull / As prest knyȝte and preueabull /

Wyth schild and wyth spere” (570–72). The murderer and rapist’s oath to Arthur does

not exemplify the salvific power of Arthur’s knights, nor the rehabilitative potential

of the Round Table; rather, it points to the realization that Arthur’s retainers — even

Gawain — are expendable and that another boar-ish, man-killer can be appropriated

via the oath as is necessary. Given over to the queen for judgment, Menealfe swears

“my nowne body / To do hit in þi wille” (547–48). She offers Menealfe to “my lord

þe kinge” (553), we are then told, “þay fochet furth a boke, / All þayre laes for to


loke” (565–66). Menealfe subjects himself to the laws of Arthur, after which he may

“dwellus . . . atte þe Rowun Tabull” (570). The peculiar law book that appears here

points to the ambulatory nature of Arthur’s court. These laws have travelled with the

court to Carlisle, where “Þe king . . . he lay” (29). Arthur’s seat is not Carlisle; he has

only stopped here to hunt. In this borderland, Arthur sacralizes his own knights while

appropriating other border dwellers into his fold.

The northern Gawain romances are border texts that intimate the struggles of a

culture bound up in chronic warfare and struggling to locate a distinct identity

between nations. But they also have much to say about how late-medieval England

worked through near-cataclysmic debates on sovereignty that played out in the class-

room, in the church, and on the battlefield for much of the fourteenth and fifteenth

centuries.11 They offer several figures — the Carl, Gromer, and Galeron — who stand

defiant to the centralized rule of Arthur, himself a visitor if sovereign to their region

(he is always only “comen” to Carlisle [Awntyrs 3]). Yet these knights’ resistance is

that which paradoxically upholds Arthur’s authority. They must always seek Arthur

out, and they are frequently subsumed into the Arthurian machine by the tale’s end.

As a poem emerging from the Anglo-Scottish border, the Avowing illustrates the

exploitation of bare life by Arthur’s biopolitical rule. Yet, befitting its diptych struc-

ture,12 the Avowing also fantasizes about defiance of this power born not, like its

counterparts, by direct resistance, but by the very same instrument through which

Arthur’s subjects are sacralized: the oath.

Oath as sacrament of power

If Agamben speaks of the “irreversible decline of the oath in our time,” then that

decline was already well under way in the later Middle Ages (Sacrament 1). At the

borders, national identity was precarious, but language itself was undergoing a radi-

cal questioning of its role in society as England shifted from an oral to a written

culture. Of this shift, Peter Goodrich claims that the bourgeoning document culture

of the later Middle Ages mourns the loss of what he terms “authentic sources, the

pristine immemorial law which preceded the inventions of statute, the native common

law in the Celtic and later Anglo-Saxon tongues [and] . . . the true unwritten constitu-

tions which represented an ‘honest’ England that preexisted Europe and its increas-

ingly vocal call to a written law” (7). Green expounds on this crisis, asking, “why

should a word that earlier meant something like ‘integrity’ or ‘dependability’ have

begun to take on its modern sense of ‘conformity to fact’ in the late fourteenth cen-

tury” (xiv). As Green’s study demonstrates, the oath was an essential part of medieval

discourses on truth, but oral truth could no longer be assured.

In its ongoing transition from oral to written culture and its consequent re-

evaluation of truth, the late fourteenth century presents us with a sort of return to

what Agamben views as the originary linguistic state of man. Agamben imagines the

disorientation of unproven words for the man who first encounters language and the

necessity of the oath in “guaranteeing the truth and efficacy of language” (Sacrament

4). He claims:

44 JOSEPH TAYLOR

For the living human being who found himself speaking, what must have been . . . decisive

is the problem of the efficacy and truthfulness of his word, that is, of what can guarantee

the original connection between names and things, and between the subject who

has become speaker — and, thus capable of asserting and promising — and his actions.

(Sacrament 68)

The first oaths answered this need in a performative act, whose efficacy and truth

were beholden to the ethos of the speaking subject. Though Agamben’s study stretche s

back to ancient Greece, echoes of these originary oaths are evident in the Middle

Ages’ continued desire for orality, even as it waned. In his seminal study, From

Memory to Written Record, M. T. Clanchy notes that “without documents, the

establishment of what passed for truth was simple and personal, since it depended on

the good word of one’s fellows”; thus, “[r]emembered truth was . . . flexible and up

to date, because no ancient custom could be proved to be older than the memory of

the oldest living wise man” (296). Herein lies the true experience of speech, the oath

as sacrament of language, through which the speaking subject put himself at stake to

all men. The oath was, in the Foucauldian sense, veridictional, performing a truth-

telling that asserted truth through the speaker — through his ethos — and within

the context under which it was uttered, rather than delineating truth and lie by a

predetermined lexicon or law — the “conformity to fact” to which Green alludes.

The originary oath gave way to the verificatory vows of politics and religion. These

institutions, then, “do not preexist the performative experience of language that is in

question in the oath, but rather they were invented to guarantee . . . truth and trust-

worthiness . . . through a series of apparatuses, among which the technicalization of

the oath into a specific ‘sacrament’ — the ‘sacrament of power’ — occupies a central

place” (Agamben, Sacrament 59). Edifying their influence over societies, political and

religious bodies appropriate the oath as a sacrament of power, to delimit fact and lie,

absenting the veridictional truth-telling of the originary oath and compelling the

once-free subject to expose himself not to the discourse community of his fellow men

but to the power of the sovereign whose law determined language’s verity.

Perhaps the failure of the oath in this period is most evident at the end of Richard

II’s reign, when the paranoid king demanded not only oral vows from nearly all of

his subjects but also written evidence of vows taken. Green explains that “the rapid

spread of vernacular literacy in the Ricardian period, driven in large part by the

bureaucratic and legal demands of an increasingly authoritarian central government,

brought about a fundamental shift in popular attitudes to the nature of evidence and

proof,” a situation that moves “from a truth that resides in people to one located in

documents” (Green xiv). Green’s equation of this Ricardian moment is significant

because it demonstrates the relation of these “crises of truth” to the Anglo-Scottish

borders, whose loyalty to the crown was most precarious and whose autonomy was

most affected by a centralizing government. As Caroline Barron points out, a series

of escalating demands by Richard for oaths of obedience lead him, in January 1399,

“to issue writs to all the counties, cities and boroughs of the realm, instructing them

to proclaim publicly” oaths of support for his laws (15). A month later, Richard sent


further demands to at least two bishops “instructing them to obtain in like form the

oaths of all abbots, priors, deans, archdeacons and other ecclesiastical persons in their

dioceses and to return a schedule with the names and seals of the persons so sworn”

(Barron 15). Richard was trying to tie up the truth of these oaths through verifica-

tory testimonies — in writing — for his increasingly exceptional law.13 This oath-

making goes hand in hand with Richard’s notorious “blank charters” of the same

period. These documents, as Barron explains, “were not blank but were couched in

terms which gave the king carte blanche over the lives and possessions of his subjects”

(13). As instruments of extortion, among other treacherous actions, blank charters

offered the king nearly unrestricted power, and they were so hated by the populace

that, upon his deposition, citizens performed the ritual of a traitor’s death on the

documents themselves (Green 246). Richard II’s machinations testify to the flux of

language, oath, and law in this period.

The Avowing of Arthur illustrates a similar oathmaking in Arthur’s command for

Gawain, Kay, and Baldwin to “do as I haue done nowe” (126). Just as Arthur plans

to rid his forest of the boar, so will Gawain watch the Tarn for suspicious activity,

and Kay will literally surveil the forest, fighting to death any man who denies his way,

an oath that assumes Kay’s right to walk Inglewood unrestricted. But their vows are

even more uncannily similar to Arthur’s task than they readily appear; Gawain and

Kay come to double upon Arthur in their avowed actions. The exasperated hunter,

who warns the king of the dog-killing and man-killing boar, describes the creature

as a ferocious “corse” [corpse; 50)] and a “griselich geste” [ghost; 112], Arthur will

call it “Satenas” (120), and the narrator refers to the beast as a “fynde” (219). The

creature Arthur seeks is so ferocious, so dangerous, and so surreal that it seems

almost supernatural. Gawain’s sedentary task suggests the potential for dangerous

activity to emerge at the Tarn, and we know, of course, from the events of the

Awntyrs, a text that accompanies the Avowing in the Ireland Blackburn MS, that

paranormal activity is quite possible and even expected. Discussing the northern

romances, Ralph Hanna finds “Tarn Wadling should almost certainly be understood

as a place with spectral or magical connotations” (34). Perhaps Gawain expects to

fight a “griselich geste” as well. On his march through the wood, Kay meets the

treacherous man-killer, Menealfe, who has stolen a woman and dispatched her com-

panions (“muche blode conne I spille / And all ȝynus þayre awne wille” [314–15]).

Kay’s disastrous combat with the errant knight — in which Kay’s shield is “toschil-

durt” (329) before Kay is unhorsed (331) — is juxtaposed with Arthur’s fight with

the boar — the creature having “slayn men” (182), giving Arthur “such a dinte” (202)

in there initial blows, and felling Arthur’s horse (199–200). The sum of Gawain’s and

Kay’s tasks, then, adds up to Arthur’s own, but this is not to suggest that either of

the knights is king-like in his quest. Noting the proximity between the oath and

sacratio, Agamben contends, “The interpretation of sacertas as an originary perfor-

mance of power through the production of a killable and unsacrificeable bare life

must be completed in the sense that . . . the oath is a consecration of the living human

being through the word to the word” (Sacrament 66; emphasis in original). Like the

46 JOSEPH TAYLOR

sacred man, who stands at the threshold of law and exception with the sovereign who

has banned him, Gawain and Kay swear oaths to Arthur that curse them to the zone

of bare life.

Baldwin’s disjointed response — swearing never to be jealous of any woman,

never to deny any man his meat, and never to fear death — speaks nothing of

a concern for the king’s realm and, more importantly, he rejects an opportunity to

affirm his place in the Arthurian brotherhood. Studying the entertaining effect of

the oath of brotherhood in late medieval literature, Robert Stretter points out the

“dramatically interesting tension at the heart of sworn relationships . . . [that] can

manifest itself as anxiety about the connection between the making of an oath and

its fulfillment, between the rhetoric and the performance of fidelity” (520). Oaths

of brotherhood often included “fighting alongside the brother . . . fighting duels on

behalf of the brother . . . [and] avenging his death” (Stretter 505). Brotherhood

appears at stake in the Avowing, where, as Ingham clarifies, “Arthur’s knights

perform their masculinity as a solidarity of soldiers governed by the demands of a

centralized king” (“Masculine Military Unions” 26). But Baldwin promises no action

at all, clearly ignoring the soldiery solidarity that Arthur desires. Benveniste explains

of the oath:

placing one’s fidēs [trust] in somebody secured in return his guarantee and his support.

But this very fact underlines the inequality of the conditions. It is authority which is

exercised at the same time as protection for somebody who submits to it, in exchange for,

and to the extent of, his submission. (97–98)

The vows Arthur commands of his knights connote brotherhood, but they are meant

to signify these knights’ submission to Arthur’s rule. Baldwin does not resist the call

to oathmaking; indeed, he swears himself. But his oaths signify resistance to the

sacred context in which Arthur’s command expects to be answered. The strangeness

of Baldwin’s vows is so explicit that even the dullard Kay takes notice, pondering to

Arthur, “a mervaell thinke me / Of Bowdewyn’s avouyng / ȝustureuyn in þe eunyng”

(576–78).

Arthur’s call for the oaths of his subjects can be viewed in the context of the

oath-in-decline. Agamben explains:

[w]hen the ethical — and not simply cognitive — connection that unites words, things,

and human actions is broken, this in fact promotes a spectacular and unprecedented

proliferation of vain words on the one hand and, on the other, of legislative apparatuses

that seek obstinately to legislate on every aspect of that life on which they seem no longer

to have any hold.” (Sacrament 70–71)

The profaning of language into a lexicon of vain words threatens to destroy lan-

guage’s efficacy altogether. One expression of this profaning is, for Agamben, parody,

which replicates a growing divide in language between words and things by juxtapos-

ing comic and serious versions of a single entity (Profanations 37–52). The mock

romance, for example, like the falsely sworn oath, can be said to undermine

language’s potency and constitutes a threat to the sovereign whose power is tied to


the word. In an effort to stem this dilution, the sovereign will respond by laboring

harder to maintain his linguistic power. The “obstinate legislation” that Agamben

sees issuing from this desperate struggle is not unlike Richard II’s final acts as king,

alluded to above. As I will show, Arthur illustrates this desperation in his marked

fascination with Baldwin’s vows and, specifically, in the truth-tests he orders against

the knight.

In his archeology of the oath Agamben reveals that overcoming this sacrament of

power does not mean simply returning to a former age in which the oath — as veri-

diction — was bound to both its performance and the ethos of the speaking being.

Such a return is not possible. The way to overcome the decline of the oath is, instead,

to make language even more vain so as to render its use as an instrument of power

mute, or in Agamben’s words, “inoperative” (Profanations 86). An awareness of this

inability to return to a purer correspondence between speaker and word informs

the crisis of language in the later Middle Ages, the residue of which we witness in the

literature of the period. Assuming the futility of a return to the originary oath, the

Avowing embraces the indeterminacy of the profane as a way to confound sovereign

power. This is nowhere more evident than in the explanations Baldwin offers for his

peculiarly expressed morality.

Profaning the sacred

Arthur sets out to verify Baldwin’s claims through a series of tests that, at first glance,

explicitly affirm the king’s biopolitical rule. In the first two trials, Arthur’s concerns

are specifically the bodies of his subjects. Arthur allows Kay and five henchmen to

attack Baldwin in the forest so as to test Baldwin’s vow that he will never fear the

threat of death, but Arthur warns Kay specifically to “saue wele my knyȝte” (592).

He wants the body of his cherished retainer, Baldwin, kept safe from the bungler Kay

and his cronies, and, as we might expect, Baldwin soundly beats them. Eager to test

Baldwin’s vow that he would “werne no mon [his] mete” (141), Arthur dispatches a

minstrel to Baldwin’s castle. In this second instance, Arthur ponders how and why

Baldwin can provide sustenance — how he can assure healthy bodies — for the men

and women arrayed across a class spectrum, who appear at his doorstep or simply

walk right in. The minstrel is ordered to see if truly “any mon go meteles away” (714),

and he finds at Baldwin’s castle an open door with no porter. Amongst a gathering

of all manner of men, “þe grete and þe smalle” (726), the minstrel experiences “riall

servys and fyne” (729), and in his first week’s stay, “Þer was no spense for to spare”

(750). Arthur, however, will not depend on his minions to test Baldwin fully. His

ominous arrival at Baldwin’s castle a few lines later marks his entrance first hand into

the testing ground of Baldwin’s promises, and his interest in bodies becomes more

pointed in a third test. While Baldwin hunts, Arthur goes to the chamber of Baldwin’s

wife, places a young knight naked in bed with her, and waits for Baldwin’s return.

He hopes to provoke a reaction that will undo Baldwin’s vow never to be jealous of

his wife or another woman. Arthur’s holding the virtue of the wife, the life of the

48 JOSEPH TAYLOR

naked knight, and the incriminating voyeurism of everyone else in the room in

his sovereign hand — as he and a “damesel dere” (862) apathetically play chess —

testifies to the king’s biopolitical rule in the text.

When asked to explain his exorbitant morality, Baldwin responds with three short

narratives about his past that seem neatly connected to the vows that have so puzzled

Arthur. Yet the content of these stories problematizes Baldwin’s willing clarity to his

king. Baldwin’s reaction to Arthur’s staged scene is not what the king intends. Arthur

thinks he has thrown his sovereign weight around the bedroom, having warned the

pitiful knight to “neghe noȝte þou þat lady, / For, and þou do, þou schall dey” (854–

55), and declaring to Baldwin of the faux-lovers that “I held hom bothe still” (889).

Responding to Arthur’s hopeful inquiry, “Art þou wroth?” (893), Baldwin muses

that “hitte was atte hur awen wille; / Els thurt no mon comun hur tille” (897–98).

Assuring Arthur that only his wife controls her bed, Baldwin both affirms his own

vow and undercuts Arthur’s self-assured power in the scene.

Of the original vows Burrow argues, “Baldwin only pretends, as it were, to join in

with the ‘avowing’ of Arthur and his companions” (105), but I would add here that

Baldwin only pretends to explain his avowing as well. Baldwin draws on his own

experiences to elucidate his morality, and, while they impart a gritty realism to the

poem, they also mock Arthur’s machinations. The king begs for explanation: “And I

hade þoȝte / Quy þat þou wrathis þé noȝte” (905–6). To satiate his curiosity, Baldwin

tells a story from the time of Arthur’s father, here King Constantine, when Baldwin

had under him “Fyue hundryth and mo; / An no wemen butte thre” (928–29). These

three laundresses serve the sexual and other needs of Baldwin’s men, though one was

more beautiful than the other two. The two less beautiful women murder the first

and then resume their services to the knights “on þe dayliȝte, / And þayre body

vch nyȝte” (950–51). The uglier of the two remaining women proceeds to kill her

counterpart and her fate is given over to Baldwin’s discretion. His judgment is to

“Loke furst qwatt hurseluun will say, / Queþer ho may serue vs all to pay” (962–63),

and the murderess, then, fulfills all the company’s wishes on her own. Critics have

puzzled over the story’s meaning and its connection to Baldwin’s expressed vow

against jealousy. Roger Dahood notes the “inconsistency” and the “disunifying” effect

of the episode for the overall poem (37), while Burrow believes “the poet made a bad

choice of story” (108). Similarly, Hanna alludes to the “poet’s crude execution” (34).

Yet, given Arthur’s actions in the text, the narrative of the murderous women befits

the scene of whoring Arthur has labored to create.

With his story of the murderesses, Baldwin, in fact, authors a parody of Arthur’s

truth-test. Baldwin seems to offer a story narrated in Arthur’s terms, a moral that

upholds brotherhood through violence and sex. In this light, what prevails in the

narrative is the constancy of a knightly pleasure of the body, undisturbed and unaf-

fected by the other bodies (living and dead) that are the price of its sustainability.

But if Baldwin’s tale upholds Arthurian community, it also reflects on the very scene

that Arthur has so carefully orchestrated to provoke anger in Baldwin in the first

place. Reminiscent of the misogynist tone of its fabliau analogues, Baldwin’s story


analogizes his wife to the laundresses. If Baldwin is made to think his wife is a whore

in bed with a young knight while her husband is away, then his story embraces the

thought, placing three prostitutes, then two, then one in bed with five hundred knights

of Arthurian stock — a Latin analogue from John of Garland tells of only sixty

knights.14 Baldwin’s indifference to Arthur’s sexual story pointedly confirms that,

were his wife to sleep with a whole force of knights, he would not care.15 Hahn claims

of the episodes offered by Baldwin, “their unshakable, downright practicality appears

far removed from the idealizations of knighthood associated with both aristocratic

and popular celebrations of chivalry” (116). Baldwin certainly neglects chivalric

expectations here, but in parodying the king’s actions — by calling into question the

king’s performance of power — he also neglects, or rather he profanes, the sacred

bodies that Arthur aims to affirm.

Parody can be, as Northrop Frye writes, “a sign that certain vogues in handling

conventions are getting worn out” (103). Chaucer’s Sir Thopas, a common example

of mock romance, is often seen to parody formal conventions of the genre, but such

imitations connote more than playfulness with literary form. Medieval parody, claims

Mikhail Bakhtin, “played a completely unbridled game with all that is most sacred

and important from the point of view of official ideology” (84). Indeed, Martha

Bayless has demonstrated that, while “textual parody” — parody of literary form

— garners most significant critical attention, “social parody” — which attends to

nonliterary customs, events and persons — “was by far the more popular category”

for the later Middle Ages (4–5). While Hanna finds the Avowing to be a “comic

production” and that Baldwin, in his story of the murderesses, “reveals (and is

applaude d for) some most unchivalrous sentiments about women” (34), the tale’s

awkward comedy takes on a different light if we view this “story within the story”

as parody.

As a profane performance, parody juxtaposes serious and seemingly comic versions

of the same thing, calling into question language’s ability to communicate its meaning

effectively. If the sovereign’s power is dependent on his cunning at demarcating bor-

ders and boundaries via the word (the oath), then parody weakens its very substance.

Agamben explains, “parody does not simply insert more or less comic content into a

serious form, but parodies language itself . . . [and] discovers a split in language”

(Profanations 45). Agamben offers his own medieval literary example of such profan-

ity by reading the late-twelfth-century Old French romance Audigier, which parodies

in both content and meter the chivalric poetry of its day.16 In a scene of mock knightl y

investiture, this scatalogical poem depicts the eponymous knight being dubbed with

the excrement of an old woman, Grinberge, which culminates in Audigier’s ceremoni-

ously kissing (and, consequently, cleaning) the woman’s dirty ass. Nineteenth-

century French literary historian Léon Gautier once called the poem “abominable”

and “a scatalogical pamphlet directed against chivalry” (81). But Agamben concludes

that the poem “is thus doing nothing other than making crudely explicit a parodic

intention already present in chivalric literature and love poetry: to confuse and render

indiscernible the threshold that separates the sacred and the profane, love and sexual-

ity, the sublime and the base” (Profanations 43). In other words, chivalric epic and

50 JOSEPH TAYLOR

romance are already encoded with an ambiguity that complicates what seem, at its

surface, to be clearly delineated explanations of sacred ritual, romantic love, and

martial valor. In such profane work, exemplified by Audigier and, more subtly, by

the Avowing, parody muddles the hard distinctions that sovereignty employs, via

language, to sacralize its subjects. Arguably as indulgent as Audigier, if not in the

same terms, Baldwin’s tale of the murderous women separates Arthur’s actions from

their intended meaning. Arthur’s staging of Baldwin’s bedroom is meant to serve as

an extension of the sacralizing oaths he commands of Gawain, Kay, and Baldwin, but

Baldwin’s observation of his wife’s agency and his own salacious narrative render the

king’s power inoperative, even entertaining.

Parody also informs Baldwin’s explanation of his vow never to “wernys men of his

mete” (1122). In the Avowing’s conclusion, Baldwin explains, with yet another story,

why Arthur’s minstrel-spy was bowled over by Baldwin’s hospitality. He recounts a

Spanish campaign in which the fortress he occupied was itself besieged. Baldwin notes

that, when his enemies send a messenger to request his surrender, Baldwin and his

men — though they had only enough meat for a day — “toke his leue atte mete. /

We gerutte him drinke atte þe ȝate, / And gafe him giftus grete” (1081–83). Impressed

with the feast to which he is treated, the messenger returns to his own lord, urging

him to end the siege “For þay make als mury chere / Als hit were ȝole Day!” (1099–

1100) and further, “yo heþin away, / For in ȝour oste is no play, / Butte hongur and

thurst” (1102–5). Baldwin’s ruse works and the enemy retreats. Rather than invoking

the cleverness of Arthur’s subjects, however, Baldwin’s story situates the attacking

lord with Arthur himself, who has already done the very same thing by sending the

minstrel to Baldwin’s dwelling in the first place. Parodying Arthur’s spying, Baldwin’s

siege narrative puts the king in the fitting role of the enemy encroacher and compels

Arthur to wonder whether Baldwin’s feast is also a farce. Rather than affirming

Baldwin’s place in the Arthurian fold, his story proves that Arthur’s inquiry is trivial

to Baldwin’s profane life.

In the case of the Avowing, parody is subversive, but it is also bound up with

mourning. As Corrine Saunders contends, “at their most sophisticated, romance

narratives are characterised by irony, parody, self-consciousness, and comedy — and

sometimes by a deep sense of failure and loss” (3). Parody’s mourning in the Avowing

consists not in a sense of loss of the originary oath or of an orality that has given

way to a new, documentary age, but to the impossibility of language to correspond

perfectly to the signified in any form, oral or written. Susanne Sara Thomas argues

of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that, while the poem “appears to embody a late-

medieval nostalgia for the oath-tied past,” it actually “illuminates the indeterminacy

of that past” (288). For Thomas, the poem’s ultimate message is “that there is no

ideal, mythic, legal past to which society can strive to return” (290). Indeed, this is

the revelation Agamben finds in his analysis of the oath. Poems like the Avowing and

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight suggest that a return to orality will not remedy the

scission between utterance and meaning, and the profaning of language becomes the

only answer to breaking free of language’s hold over life. Of the many kinds of oaths


heard in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Thomas concludes, “If it is difficult for

Gawain and the reader to distinguish between a promise, a threat, a joke, and a

wager, then the poem suggests that the nature and validity of social contracts is

dubious, and that all promises contain the covert threat of becoming self-defeating

enterprises” (305). The disorientation that Gawain and the poem’s reader experience

might just as well inform a reader’s confusion in the Avowing, as well as Arthur’s

own at Baldwin’s expressed morality. Arthur’s response to Baldwin’s ethos is

repeated puzzlement, but Baldwin does not intend for Arthur to learn from the stories

— though the king will claim to Baldwin, “þou says wele” (989) — rather, Baldwin’s

explicit apathy to Arthur refigures a space between two very different kinds of life in

the poem and, further, informs Baldwin’s own philosophy of living that Arthur fails

to grasp even at the Avowing’s end.

A coming community

The last of Baldwin’s vows, never to fear death “[n]authir of king ner knyȝte” (144),

seems clear: swearing by his own life, Baldwin defies the sovereign’s power over life

— his power to kill. But the resulting test, as well as Baldwin’s narrative explanation

of his vow, complicates its seeming clarity. Arthur sends Kay and five companions to

intercept the knight, but the terms of this encounter are in no way chivalrous. Indeed,

Baldwin will not really fight king or knight here. The six men are attired in “gowuns

of grene” (610), and their task of capturing Baldwin in the forest connotes the robbers

and highwaymen made famous in Robin Hood ballads. As Hahn’s note in his edition

of the poem ponders, “the unchivalrous assault in uneven numbers, the attempt to

hide (line 621), and the assumption of an ignoble identity (uncowthe men [618;

emphasis in original]) make clear that this is not, like the combats between Kay and

Menealfe and Gawain and Menealfe, a knightly encounter” (161 n. 610ff.). After

dealing with Kay and his men, Baldwin hastens to Arthur, whom he is determined to

meet. Understanding Baldwin to have bested Kay and his men, the king desires to

hear of the knight’s exploits, whether “he hade herd any tithing / In þayre holtus

hore” (679–80). But Baldwin ignores Arthur’s inquiry for details of combat; indeed

he does not acknowledge his fight with Kay’s team at all — “Sir, as I come thro

ȝondur wode, / I herd ne se butte gode” (682–83) — to which Arthur is “ameruaylet”

(685). Much as he will ignore Arthur’s later expectations for chivalrous tales, in favor

of stories about murderous concubines, lecherous knights, knightly cowardice, and a

playfully deceptive siege feast, Baldwin fails to give Arthur a narrative that affirms

his position in the sovereign’s service — in this case, as an Arthurian subject defeating

a band of marauders in the king’s wood, the very task Kay swears to perform himself

earlier in the poem.

Later explaining why he feared nothing at the approach of Kay and his henchmen,

Baldwin relates the story of how a “caytef crope into a tunne” (1021) only to meet

his death anyway when “þere come fliand a gunne, / And lemet as þe leuyn; / Lyȝte

opon hitte” (1023–25). When Baldwin and his men return from battle unharmed, they

52 JOSEPH TAYLOR

find the coward’s corpse dissevered by the missile. Baldwin determines, here, that he

shall never fear death because “Hit is a kyndely thing” (1045). But Baldwin’s previous

story of the murderous women has already demonstrated that death is, in fact, not

always natural (“kyndely”). Upon discovering the man’s corpse Baldwin’s fellows

note, “Schall no mon dee or his day, / Butte he cast himselfe away, / Throӡh wontyng

of witte” (1038–40). In other words, man has a determined day of death that he

should not seek to know lest his lack of wit hastens his end. This maxim critiques

the aimless pursuit of, or flight from, prophecy, a profound sentiment if one

considers the prophecies of glory and failure — from Merlin’s declaration of Uther

Pendragon’s lineage in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia to the ghost’s frightful

warning of Arthur’s impending decline in the Awntyrs — that drive Arthur’s

imperial machine along an historical continuum towards the fall and resurrection of

Arthur as savior. What we glean most simply from the murdered women and the

obliterated coward of Baldwin’s first two stories is that death comes to us all, the

product of desire and treachery as much as prophecy or the divine. This sober lesson

has its basis in the poem’s unusual realism. Noting the poem’s diptych structure,

Johnson views the first half of the Avowing as grounded in chivalric idealism and the

second in a disparate realism signified by Baldwin’s “socially grounded system of

values” (199). He finds:

This structural separation of the two realms of experience is an expression of the poet’s

awareness of the dichotomy between the theory and practice of chivalry, between the

Arthurian model that was being promoted at this time, and the actuality of warfare as

our poet might have known it. (200)

But Baldwin participates in both halves of the poem, not simply by his sheer presence

but in critiquing the impractical ideologies of the fantastic and real worlds of chiv-

alry. As a third term, a profane figure, Baldwin makes clear not the separation of the

literary and the real, but their conflated end: sovereign power. If one is propaganda

and the other is practice, both serve the king and his state of exception.

Baldwin’s response to Arthur’s command for oathmaking is neither “I will,” such

as Gawain’s or Kay’s, nor is it a defiant “I will not,” such as the Carl’s, Sir Gromer’s,

and Galeron’s. What is remarkable about these bare figures of acquiescence and

resistance is not that they represent opposed positions to sovereignty, but that

they recognize sovereignty at all. In the end, they are each reconciled to its power.

Baldwin’s response to Arthur’s call is, like Melville’s persistently passive scrivener

Bartleby, “I prefer not to.” While Arthur and his knights go off to fight beast, ghost,

and man, Baldwin ignores the force and law that sovereignty claims to possess, turn-

ing instead toward town because his home lay in that direction. In his domesticity,

Baldwin simply “to bed bownus” (157). Agamben explains that “To profane means

to open the possibility of a special form of negligence, which ignores separation or,

rather, puts it to a particular use” (Profanations 75). In the case of the oath, separa-

tion is the severing of the speaking subject (his ethos) from his words, the delimitation

of truth and lie, the distinction of blessing and curse, whose uncanny resemblances


once constituted the original experience of language before politics and religion took

hold. Separation is the disparity of power between the sovereign and the bare life,

and it is the geographic and ideological distance of the king from the Anglo-Scottish

border. In a profane order, the linguistic force of that separation is made continu-

ously more vain in hopes that its meaning will be exhausted, not for the purposes of

defying sovereignty but to destroy language’s ability to create distinctions, categories,

privileges, and new forms of separation that sovereign power can then employ to

oppress, ban, and kill.

Baldwin’s oaths — “bi my life” — speak to his radical singularity divorced of

Arthurian subjectivity, while his stories confound strict ethical and generic delinea-

tions of chivalry — Baldwin is sober, discerning, and courageous, but also lecherous

and deceptive (for Dahood, a “fabliau hero” [29]). One illustration of the profane

that Agamben offers is that of the “example”:

Neither particular or universal, the example is a singular object that presents itself as

such, that shows its singularity. . . . Hence the proper place of the example is always

beside itself, in the empty space in which its undefinable and unforgettable life unfolds.

This life is purely linguistic life. (The Coming Community 10; emphasis in original)

As an example, Baldwin stands between the community of Arthurian brotherhood

and the particularly defiant figures of the Carl, Gromer, and Galeron. Baldwin’s

“purely linguistic life,” beholden only to his own ethos, is married to actions defined

neither by their acceptance of, nor resistance to, Arthur’s sovereignty. Baldwin points

to a life free from the disciplinary and regulatory holds of sovereign power, a life

that renders sovereign power mute. As Agamben suggests, an “absolutely profane

‘sufficient life’ [is that which] has reached the perfection of its own power and its

own communicability [and] over which sovereignty and right no longer have any

hold” (Means Without Ends 114–15). While sacralization of the sovereign oath is a

“removal of things from the sphere of human law, ‘to profane’ [means], conversely,

to return them to the free use of men” (Profanations 73). Freed from the context of

Arthur’s rule — from the separations that admit the limitless power of the sovereign

— Baldwin’s life connotes a pure and perfectly common use. This is how Baldwin

will “stint the strife” of the Arthurian brotherhood, by absenting the very language

that creates separation — “strife” — in the first place. This free use and pure

commonality is nowhere more evident than in the feast witnessed by Arthur’s spy at

Baldwin’s castle. Baldwin’s epicurean domain envisions a newly exceptional space, a

different community in which distinctions would not cease to exist — the minstrel

may still recognize all manner of men, “þe grete and þe smalle” (726), at Baldwin’s

tables — but they will not carry the divisive force of those sacred divisions and

privileges that the sovereign works to maintain.

If the Avowing fantasizes a kind of negligence of sovereignty in Baldwin’s profane

existence, then we find a very real example of this negligence in the everyday life of

those commoners at the Anglo-Scottish border. In lieu of chronic hostilities between

the two realms, English kings frequently banned commerce with Scotland and its

54 JOSEPH TAYLOR

citizens, a rule which no doubt sounded good in Westminster but which clearly

neglected the precarious geography within which Carlisle and other border towns

stood. Farmers and merchants on either side of the border depended on one another

for trade and capital as much as they depended on their fellow countrymen.

Such royal decrees were, thus, difficult to enforce for the numerous local law

officials sprouting up as representatives of the king’s centralizing government and,

consequently, these laws were often neglected.17 Anthony Goodman notes:

Tensions and hostility sometimes predominated in the complex social relationships

between lowland agriculturalists and upland pastoralists. Such hostilities weakened

defences: some communities felt an affinity with those who had similar habits and

interests on the other side of the frontier and made alliances with them directed against

neighbors of their own nationality. (246)

We are inclined to view the Anglo-Scottish border as a place where one’s nationality

might be said to be essential to identity, where an international war loomed

constantly. Yet, the reality is that the very people with whom one traded, on whom

one depended for their livelihood, were often not their so-called fellow countrymen

but their enemies. Of course, these borderers did not see it that way; they didn’t see

beyond the local transaction. They chose to live profane lives that ignored race,

nation, and a sovereign law that would reduce them to bare life. Even the great

border magnates were capable of this ignorance to sovereign power. Cynthia Neville

points out that in 1385, while both kings, Richard II and Robert II, prepared for war,

border lords Henry Percy and the Scotsman Archibald Douglas met at Esk “[acting]

entirely on their own initiative . . . to seal an indenture of ‘special Trewe and

Assurance’ for the west march” (75). Though these border lords often thrived on

hostilities between the nations, Percy’s and Douglas’s initiative here, divorced from

and seemingly unconcerned with royal approval, illustrates just how war and peace

could coalesce at the border in the absence of sovereignty. Such an autonomous

existence emerges here as neither granted by the sovereign nor taken from him but

rather born of a negligence to his authority altogether. In this instance, then, the

border is its own space wherein the sovereign’s law is either ignored or precariously

absent and this absence connotes the possibility of a profane existence.

This is perhaps the most significant effect of the profanity signified in the Avowing.

The profane life is not that which forcibly opposes; to profane is “to know how

to return things that have become subject to a state of sacred exception” (de la

Durantaye, Giorgio Agamben 354), to release things from the hold of the biopolitical

sovereign. Though it might subvert sovereign power in its conscious ignorance of it,

Baldwin’s profanation is not that aggressive resistance perpetrated by figures in other

northern romances, nor is it the armed resistance of the Percies at Shrewsbury in 1403.

The profane life that desacralizes the sacred man is, according to Agamben, “a

praxis that, while firmly maintaining its nature as a means, is emancipated from its

relationship to an end; it has joyously forgotten its goal and can now show itself as


such, as a means without an end” (Profanations 86). Like a language of vain words

that no longer strives for meaning, Baldwin does not amble towards a destiny that is

either his or Arthur’s, nor does he accumulate wealth and land for its own sake

or for that of his legacy. In his opposition to — or rather his aloofness from —

Arthurian oathmaking, in his indifference to sex, death, and the material wealth of

his household, Baldwin offers an imaginative glimpse at a different kind of border

life, a life that does not resist the pull of consolidating governments or claims

to nationalism but rather one that performs an ignorance of them, rendering the

distinctions of the sovereign and the sacred subject completely inoperative.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of Exemplaria and their two anonymous readers for

their incisive comments on this essay that helped to make its claims clearer and more

forthright. I would also like to thank Barry Rich for his conversations on this topic

and Randy P. Schiff for his careful reading of an early version of this work and for

the suggestions he offered to improve its arguments.

Notes1 For recent attention to biopolitics in medieval

studies, see Campbell; McClellan; Mills; Evans; and

Biddick. 2 For expanded discussion of these claims, see Schiff,

Revivalist Fantasy 127.3 Although the lone manuscript of the Avowing,

Ireland Blackburn, dates from the last quarter of the

fifteenth century, linguistic evidence suggests the

original poem could have been composed as early

as the last quarter of the fourteenth century; see

Dahood 29.4 All quotations from the Avowing of Arthur are

from Dahood.5 Inglewood, just southeast of Carlisle, was a royal

forest as early as 1300 and is also the setting of The

Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle and the

Awntyrs off Arthure; see Dahood 95 n. 65.6 See also de la Durantaye, “Homo Profanus” 29–31.7 The language of the Ireland Blackburn MS suggests

a South Lancashire provenance, but my argument

understands the poem itself to originate, as Dahood

explains, farther north, in “the four northernmost

counties, the northernmost tip of Lancashire, and

the northern two-thirds of Yorkshire” (29).8 All quotations of Sir Gawain and the Carl at Carl-

isle are from Kurvinen. For discussion of the date

and composition of the poem, see Kurvinen 53.9 All quotations from The Wedding of Sir Gawain

and Dame Ragnelle are from Hahn. 10 All quotations of The Awntyrs off Arthure are from

the A text in Hanna’s edition.

11 For examinations of these debates on sovereignty

among academics, theologians, legists, and politi-

cians of the Middle Ages, see, for example, Kanto-

rowicz 87–192; Hinsley 45–125; Elshtain 1–77.12 Spearing explains the Awntyrs’ structure as that of

a “pictorial diptych” within which “the two leaves

. . . are indeed separate and self-contained, but there

are numerous links between them, and when put

together they incite the reader to participate in

the creation of a meaning that is larger than either

possesses in isolation” (249). This diptych form has

been assumed of the Avowing as well in readings by

Burrow and Johnson.13 Richard had reverted to oathmaking in 1387,

following the relegation of much of his power at the

behest of Parliament in 1386. As the Westminster

Chronicle notes, Richard, feeling particularly

vulnerable, sent a sergeant to Essex, Cambridgeshire,

Norfolk, and Suffolk “to cause the more substantial

and influential inhabitants of those counties to

swear to the exclusion of all other lords whatsoever

they would hold with him as their true king, and

they were to be given badges, consisting of silver

and gilt crowns, with the intention that whenever

they were called upon to do so they should join the

king, armed and ready” (187).14 For a brief explanation of these sources, see

Kittredge. For the text of the French fabliau ana-

logue to Baldwin’s story, see Montaiglon 294–300.

For John of Garland’s version of the story, see

Lawler 130–50.

56 JOSEPH TAYLOR

15 Baldwin’s apathy towards his wife and Arthur’s

ruse makes the end of the poem — in which Arthur

orders Baldwin, in celebratory fashion, to “Take

þou þis Lady of price — / For much love in hur

lyce” (1138–39) — quite comical. At the same

time, it illustrates Arthur’s inability to comprehend

Baldwin at all.16 For an edition of Audigier, see Jodogne.17 Horrox offers a concise definition of centralization

in this period as the “deliberate effort by the king

to draw the threads of government into his own

hands,” a development that lead to “the emergence

of the royal court as the principal source of political

influence, with advancement to be sought in the

king’s service rather than in the possession of terri-

torial power blocs” (234–35). Chism, further, notes

that government consolidation of law enforcement

in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries “gave local

officials the power legally to represent the monarch

. . . . [which] strengthened the connections between

these officials and the central authority they repre-

sented, thereby making the king much more aware

of how his representatives were exercising his

authority, and giving the representatives improved

prospects at the royal court, in parliament, and

within judicial courts” (13).

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Notes on contributor

Joseph Taylor is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Alabama in

Huntsville. His current research interests center on late-medieval theories of

sovereignty, and on regionalism and environment in medieval literature, including the

English North–South divide as it emerges in Latin chronicles, vernacular poetry, and

drama.

Correspondence to: Joseph Taylor. Email: [email protected]

Sovereignty, Oath, and the Profane Life in the Avowing of Arthur (Exemplaria 25.1 [2013]: 36-58)

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