ABSTRACT
In a series of recent articles on treason trials in twelfth and thirteenth–century chansons de geste and romances, Stephen D. White has shown that references to ‘treason’ (Old French traïsun, Latin proditio or traditio) in these texts refer not to ‘a clearly definable offence against so–called ‘feudal law’,’ but rather to a ‘politically and legally problematic category of wrongdoing’. 1 Although they feature less prominently in Latin historical writing than in the vernacular literature studied by White, references to treason and treason trials also appear in twelfth-century Latin and vernacular histories from Anglo–Norman England and Normandy. Geoffrey Gaimar provides an especially illuminating version of a twelfth–century treason trial in his account of the trial of Godwin, Earl of Wessex, from L’Estoire des Engleis (c.1135–40), written in the Anglo–Norman vernacular, but the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis (c.1114/15–1141), written in Latin, also contains important accounts of the trials of alleged traitors. To be sure, the trial scenes in these texts are literary confections rather than straightforward reports of unbiased legal proceedings, yet they remain a valuable source of information about treason, court politics, and aristocratic political culture under the Norman kings nonetheless. In this chapter, I will examine three treason trials from Gaimar’s L’Estoire des Engleis and Orderic’s Ecclesiastical History in order to demonstrate that treason was portrayed as a ‘politically and legally problematic category of wrongdoing’ in twelfth-century Anglo-Norman historical texts and, moreover, that the reason for this ambiguity lay with the social and political concerns of the court rather than with the crime itself.
