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"Lynealy discendit of þe devill":Genealogy, Textuality, and Anglophobia in Medieval Scottish Chronicles Katherine H. Terrell In an anonymous sixteenth-century Scottish sonnet from the Bannatyne manuscript titled "Ane anser to ane Ingliss railar praysing his awin genalogy," the poet forcefully counters English claims of ancestral superiority: эe Inglische hursone sumtyme will avantэour perrogeny from brutus to haif taneAnd sumtyme from ane Angell or ane sanctAs Angelus and Anglus bayth war ane.Angellis in erth эit hard I few or NaneExcept þe feyndis with lucifer þat fell— avant, эow villane, of þat lord allane! Tak thy progeny frome pluto prence of hellBecauss эe vse in hoillis to hyd эor sell. Angluss Is cum frome Angulus in deid— Aboive all vderis Brutus bure þe bell,Quha slew his fader howping to succeid. Than chuss эow ane of thais I rek not Ader Tak beelэebub or brutus to эor fader. 1 Invoking a longstanding dispute over the distant past, the poem shows how stories told about genealogy can become focal points for both national pride and international dispute. The "Inglis railar"'s boasting draws upon two venerable legends of English origins: that the English [End Page 320] people descended either directly from angels or from Brutus, the supposed founder of Britain who was the grandson of the Trojan Aeneas. The first theory derives from a story told by Bede about Pope Gregory the Great, who encountered a group of handsome, fair-haired Angles being sold as slaves in a Roman marketplace; believing that they resembled angels, he was inspired to send missionaries to Britain. 2 The myth of Trojan ancestry, on the other hand, had been popularized in the twelfth century by the chronicler Geoffrey of Monmouth, who tells how Brutus discovered Britain, drove out the giants from the otherwise uninhabited island, and named it "Britain" after himself. He then divided its three portions (later Scotland, England, and Wales) among his three sons. This tale was widely (though not universally) believed and was frequently cited as a political precedent demonstrating English superiority over the Scots. Although the Norman kings of England were not directly descended from the Britons, nevertheless they invoked the legend to prove both that England was the first inhabited portion of the island and that Scotland (because originally apportioned by a southern sovereign) was a subsidiary kingdom to England. However, this poet is having none of it; instead (after economically dismissing the maternal side of English descent with the word "whoreson") he neatly traps the "Ingliss railar" in a double bind. If the "railar" invokes a spurious etymological relationship between "angels" and "Angles" to claim angelic descent, then—since the only angels on earth are those who fell with Lucifer—he has to admit that he came from the devil. If, on the other hand, he claims to be descended from Brutus, the result is no better: as the chief of the Angles (whom this author seems to have confused with the Britons) Brutus is implicated in their diabolical beginning, a debased condition compounded by his position as a parricide. 3 The concluding couplet therefore offers no real choice: in the reading of this author, descent from either Beelzebub or Brutus is equally shameful. The "Inglliss railar" is thus dispatched, and the Scottish speaker vindicated. I begin with this poem because it succinctly demonstrates the staying power and the popular appeal of a nationalist discourse that had been [End Page 321] going on in more scholarly registers since the late thirteenth century—a discourse that grounds the mutual antagonism of English and Scots in pseudo-historical arguments that provide ammunition for contemporary quarrels. From the end of the thirteenth century, which saw the English king Edward I parlay a crisis in the Scottish royal succession into a bid for the overlordship of Scotland—a claim that he justified by reference to ancient and mythical history—it became characteristic of Scottish historiography to resist English aggression by turning to a mythical past. Political developments continually reinforced the necessity of such a defense, as Edward's 1296 invasion of Scotland inaugurated a century of more or less constant warfare between the two nations. During this...
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