ABSTRACT

The violence she had sought to provoke against Constance returns on her own head. Like a madman, the wrathful son forces the terror-stricken mother to confess the crime, and hacks her in pieces. The actual narration is of a piece with this required reading. The resulting blandness and impersonality of tone all but reduce disaster and joy to the accidents they presumably are in God’s eye. More important is the setting of the English episodes in the aftermath of the displacement of the Christianised Celts by the pagan Saxons in the sixth century. Trevet also gives Hermengild a speech in Middle English over the blind Briton as the nearest thing he knows to the ‘laungge Sessone’ which she would have spoken. A more important change comes with Gower’s greater emphasis on the human situation of the protagonists. When, for example, Alla learns that his wife may be still alive, Trevet says only that he became very thoughtful.