The story of Havelok the Dane, best known from a fourteenth-century Middle English poem which goes by that title, appears to have been well known in Eastern England from the twelfth century to the end of the Middle Ages. The earliest Anglo-Norman version occurs in Geoffrey Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis (ed. A. Bell, 1960). The plot can be summarised as follows:

During the reign of Arthur’s nephew Constantine, the Danish King Adelbriht, who has conquered Norfolk and the land from Colchester to Holland in Lincolnshire, marries Orwain, the sister of King Edelsi, a Briton, who rules Lincoln and Lindsey and the land from Humber to Rutland. Their daughter Argentille becomes the ward of her uncle after the death of her parents, and Edelsi marries her off to a scullion called Cuaran in an attempt to disinherit her. This Cuaran turns out to be Haveloc, the son of Gunter, the hereditary king of Denmark who was slain by king Arthur for withholding tribute. Haveloc discovers his lineage, returns to Denmark, and takes back the throne from one Odulf, who has occupied it illegitimately. He then invades England and forces Edelsi to surrender Argentille’s heritage. When Edelsi dies soon afterwards, Haveloc and Argentille rule his kingdom for twenty years.

The story is best known today from the fourteenth-century Middle English poem Havelok the Dane. The poem differs from Gaimar’s account in the names of its characters and many details of plot, as the following summary shows:

King Athelwold of England dies, leaving his daughter Goldeburgh in the hands of Earl Godrich of Cornwall. Meanwhile, King Birkabeyn of Denmark dies, leaving Havelok in the hands of his seneschal Godard, who orders the fisherman Grim to kill the young prince. Instead, Grim sails to England and raises Havelok in Grimsby. Havelok eventually takes a job in the kitchens at Lincoln Castle, where Godrich, thinking Havelok is a commoner, marries him to Goldeburgh in order to disinherit her. When Havelok’s royal heritage is revealed, he goes to Denmark, defeats Godard, and then returns to England and defeats Godrich to become king in both countries.

There are also a number of shorter versions of the story or references to Havelok in a variety of sources which will be surveyed below. Today these variations are usually treated as corruptions or confusions of accounts similar to one of the two main versions or as variants which developed in folk tradition. It is also generally assumed that the Havelok-legend has its origins in historical events before the Norman Conquest, but that it has been so modified by centuries of re-telling, that only a few details of the original story remain in the extant versions. The strongest evidence for a pre-Conquest origin to the story is the name Havelok itself, along with the nickname Cuaran used by Gaimar. This nickname was also applied to the tenth-century Norse king Ólafr Sigtryggson, and, since Ólafr is frequently rendered Abloyc in Welsh sources, many have concluded that the Havelok-story ultimately goes back to a tale about Ólafr Sigtryggson which passed at some point through a Celtic-speaking area of Britain, probably Cumbria. That said, there is little other resemblance between the life of the historical Ólafr and the legendary Havelok, so the story as we have it is clearly a great deal removed from any historical account of the Norse king.

Some commentators have attempted to connect other characters in the story with historical figures and the plot with various historical scenarios before the Norman Conquest; however, such attempts to trace the extant versions of the story back to historical episodes have met with some scepticism. In part this is because no scenario has emerged as more convincing than the others and in part because the names of the characters in the story are not always related to the historical figures with whom they have been connected. Hence, when Sisam considered the various theories of Deutschbein (Studien zur Sagengeschichte Englands, 1906) and others in his revision of Skeat’s edition of Havelok the Dane, he concluded that, “if these divergent views point to any result, it is that the Havelok story corresponds to no history at all. Popular romances must not be taken too seriously, even when they contain historical names” (p. xxvi).

Sisam’s comment recognises the prevalent assumption today that Havelok the Dane is more popular romance than history, an assumption which was reinforced by Nancy Mason Bradbury’s influential argument that the story itself has its origins in oral tradition (“The Traditional Origins of Havelok the Dane,” Studies in Philology 90 (1993)). This perspective is heavily influenced by comments by Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle (ed. I. Sullens, 1996), written in the 1330s. Coming across a reference to Havelok in his source, Langtoft’s Chronicle, Mannyng remarked:

Bot I haf grete ferly þat I fynd no man
þat has writen in story how Hauelok þis lond wan....
Bot þat þise lowed men vpon Inglish tellis,
right story can me not ken, þe certeynte what spellis.
Men sais in Lyncoln castelle ligges õit a stone
þat Hauelok kast wele forbi euerilkone,
& õit þe chapelle standes þer he weddid his wife,
Goldeburgh þe kynges douhter, þat saw is õit rife,
& of Gryme, a fisshere, men redes õit in ryme
þat he bigged Grymesby, Gryme þat ilk tyme. (2.519-20, 527-34)

Mannyng’s implication that Havelok was well known through local landmarks and the tales “lowed men” has encouraged the view that Havelok’s “right story” had been so modified through oral transmission and folk tradition that it is now untraceable. The view that Havelok the Dane was a popular tale has also prompted critics to resist the presence of topical references from the reigns of Edward I and Edward II in the story. Thus Thorlac Turville-Petre (England the Nation, 1996) dismisses the possibility that some names in the English poem contain topical references from the reigns of Edward I and Edward II. Instead, he suggests that the names and titles which may appear topical are merely intended to sound old and authentic. He points out that they are “familiar in English history and reasonably ancient,” so that they “help to build up an impression of an England of geographical range and familiar institutions” (149). So too A. Kabir (“Forging an Oral Style? Havelok and the Fiction of Orality,” Studies in Philology 98 (2001)) has argued recently that the poet takes pains to ground his authority in popular tradition by “forging” an oral style which is intended to go undetected. Hence, as Caroline D. Eckhardt puts it, “It is possible that the tale’s resemblance to historical events is fortuitous or retrospectively fabricated” (“Havelok the Dane in Castleford’s Chronicle,” Studies in Philology 98 (2001): 7).

My purpose here is to examine the nature of such fabrication by suggesting that many of the names associated with the Havelok-legend in its various forms do in fact suggest, if not an historical origin, then an historiographical one. I will trace the names of some of the characters in historiographical traditions about East Anglia and examine the context in which they appeared in Gaimar’s version of the Havelok-tale. Next I will examine the historiographical roots for the name changes which are found in Havelok the Dane and suggest that they imply a literary context for the transformation of the tale over time. I will argue that the names of the characters in the various versions of the tale, both early and late, are the result neither of a corrupted popular version of forgotten history nor of a crafted illusion of history by later poets. Rather, they grew out of the chronicle tradition of the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries in which writers were engaged in a process of East Anglian history-building, a learned and literate enterprise which attempted to establish an identity for the region. In short, at least certain aspects of the legend that has come down to us have as much to do with historiography as with popular romance.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to provide a brief survey the extant versions of the story. Sometime between 1190 and 1220, Gaimar’s version was transformed into a courtly poem known as the Lai d’Haveloc, and accounts similar to Gaimar’s are also to be found in a Latin chronicle of around 1300 as well as the so-called Lambeth Interpolation in one copy of Robert Mannyng’s Chronicle. A short summary in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut, written between 1272 and 1300, is also similar to Gaimar’s version of the story, but the names of Argentille and Gunter are replaced in some manuscripts with Goldeburgh and Birkebain. Further variations occur in shorter forms in the fourteenth century. Mannyng’s text was primarily a translation of the Chronicle of Pierre de Langtoft, written about 1307, which equates Havelok’s father Gunter with Guthrum, the Danish king of East Anglia. However, Mannyng’s comments suggest that he knows the tale in a form much like the Middle English Havelok the Dane. There are also two closely-related summaries of the legend preserved in Rauf de Bohun’s Petit Bruit, written about 1310, and Henry Knighton’s Chronicle, written in the late fourteenth century; these also bear some resemblances to the Middle English poem, particularly in the choice of names. The name Havelok (from a French source to go by the spellings (Haueloc, Auelot) has also been inserted in accounts of major Danish incursions in manuscripts of the Anonymous Short Metrical Chronicle dating to around the first quarter of the fourteenth century. Finally, Caroline D. Eckhardt has recently identified a passage in Castleford’s Chronicle, written around 1330, which appears to preserve features of the Havelok-story, especially the name Birkebaine.

The Names in Gaimar’s Estoire des Engleis

It is normally assumed that Gaimar encountered the Havelok-story after he moved from Hampshire to Lincolnshire and then inserted it retrospectively at the beginning of his Estoire. But, although Gaimar cites la veire estoire (ironically echoed in Mannyng’s “right story”) as his authority for Haveloc’s coronation feast (lines 755-56), it should be not be assumed that he was working with a single source containing the complete plot-line. His version has clearly been modified extensively under the influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia, and, because this text had only recently become available, these modifications are almost certainly Gaimar’s. When introducing Adelbriht and Edelsi, Gaimar states:

Se ço est veir que Gilde dit
En la geste trovai escrit
Que dous reis ot ja en Bretaine,
Quant Costentins ert chevetaine... (39-42)

(If that which Gildas says is true, I have found written in the history that there were two kings in Britain when Constantine was chieftain.)

The first line is immensely problematic, since Gaimar does not actually use Gildas, about whom he seems to have some scepticism. Indeed, if the characters in the story derive in any way from historical figures later than the sixth century, they could not have come from Gildas at all. Nevertheless, Gaimar does specify that his two kings are found in writing, whatever the precise source. By contrast, Gaimar locates the source of his information on Argentille’s upbringing in the stories of his older contemporaries:

E Argentille fud nurrie
A Ninclole e a Lindesie
Si cum dient l'antive gent,
Ele n'ot nul chevel parent
De part sun pere des Daneis. (91-95)

(And Argentille was raised at Lincoln and at Lindsey. And as the ancient folk say, she had no noble kin on her father’s side amongst the Danes.)

Here Gaimar’s source appears to be oral, suggesting that, in all likelihood, he created his Havelok-episode by combining both oral and written traditions, probably drawing Argentille from the former and Adelbriht and Edelsi from the latter. Bell wonders whether a difference in spelling is evidence for a third source later in the Estoire, when the Danes invading during the reign of the West-Saxon king Beorhtric (786-802) cite Ailbrith and Haveloc as precedents for their rule in Britain. Thus the general impression conveyed by this evidence is that Gaimar’s form of the Havelok-story is pieced together from different materials which were not necessarily originally related.

Gaimar’s source for the name Adelbriht is difficult to trace. The name comes from Old English Æthelberht, but the frequency with which this (and other character-names in the legend) occurs in early England makes it nearly impossible to identify Adelbriht with any historical figure with much certainty. Even if the character has a historical source, one has to assume that in the course of time the name of the historical figure has become independent of his deeds. This assumption is necessary to account for the considerable discrepancies between historical events and the plot of the story, and most of all for King Adelbriht’s Danish, rather than English, ethnicity. The cultural ties between East Anglia and Scandinavia did, however, create a milieu in which such ethnic jumping was possible. Evidence from the historiography both of England and Scandinavia suggests that the figure of a tradition of a King Adelbriht developed gradually in chronicles and other historical texts from the eleventh century onwards. The evolution of this King Adelbriht took place against the backdrop of attempts to define the impoverished genealogy of the East Anglian kings, particularly St Edmund. Traditions about a King Adelbriht who was related to St Edmund crossed the North Sea and are preserved in the early fourteenth-century Þáttr af Ragnars sonum.

Þa varu allir Loðbrokar synir dauðir. Eftir Ivar tok konung dom i Englandi Aðalmundr. Hann var broðor sun Itamundr ens helga ok kristnaði hann viða England. Hann tok konungdom sun hans er Adalbrigt het. Hann var goðr konungr ok varð gamall. Ofarliga a hans dogum kom Dana her til Englandz ok varu formen hersins Knutr ok Haralldr synir Gorms konungs. Þeir logðu undir sig mikið riki i Norðhumru landi þat er Ivar hafþi att. Adalbrigt konungr for moti þeim ok borduz þeir fyri nordan Kliflond ok fell þar mart af Donum ok nockyru si þar gengu Danir ypp við Skarða borg ok þeir þa ecki ad ser.

(Then all the sons of Loðbrok were dead. After Ivarr, Aðalmund took the kingdom in England. He was the nephew of St Edmund and he converted England far and wide. His son took the kingdom, who was called Adalbrigt. He was a good king and was old. In his days a Danish army came to England and at the forefront were Cnut and Harald, the sons of King Gorm. They established a great kingdom in Northumberland which Ivarr had formerly possessed. King Adalbrigt came to meet them and stayed there before the north of Cliffland and many of the Danes died there, and sometime later the Danes went up to Scarborough and laid siege there.)

The passage describes how King Adalbrigt, son of Aðalmund, is driven out of Northumbria by an invading Dane called Cnut around the year 900, but no king of that name fits this scenario or date. Smyth identifies Adalbrigt with a West Saxon prince, Æthelwold son of King Æthelred and nephew of King Alfred. On the death of his uncle, Æthelwold contested the succession with King Edward and was forced to flee from Wessex. Then, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, he “sought out the raiding-army in Northumbria, and they received him as king and submitted to him.” In 903 the people of Essex submitted to Æthelwold, and in the following year he and the Danish king Eohric of East Anglia were slain in an invasion of Mercia. Æthelwold’s acceptance by the Danes of York and his association with the Danes of East Anglia make him a good candidate for the Adalbrigt of the Scandinavian tradition. Furthermore, although the Þáttr af Ragnars sonum seems to intend Adalbrigt to be English, its statement that his father succeeds the Danish king Ivarr the Boneless portrays his ethnicity in decidedly ambiguous terms. To a later writer like Gaimar these ambiguities might well have suggested a king who was Danish.

However, the name Adalbrigt and the East Anglian genealogy applied to the king driven out of Northumbria clearly reflect a tradition which originally circulated independently of the historical figure to whom it refers in the Old Norse þáttr. The genealogy apparently derives from an English source similar to the lost Chronica Regum Angliae at Bury St Edmund’s which was consulted by Florentius abbot of Egmond in the Netherlands in 1296. According to Florentius, that source described St Adalbert (Adalbrigt) son of Adalmund as the brother of St Edmund of East Anglia (rather than his grand-nephew), who ruled for thirty-seven years before him. Dorothy Whitelock suggests that this Bury St Edmund’s tradition about Adalbert and his father Adalmund arose out of a confusion with the West-Saxon King Egberht (802-839) and his father Alcmund. Logically, this confusion would be with Egberht’s contemporary Æthelberht of East Anglia, who was slain by Offa. Hence the Adalbrigt in the Þáttr af Ragnars sonum would appear to go back, at least in name, to Æthelberht of East Anglia. This association of the two names must have grown out of attempts to provide a genealogy for St Edmund.

But the replacement of Egberht’s father Alcmund with Adalmundr suggests the operation of yet another tradition. The name probably derives from the eleventh-century Life of St Botulf, which mentions that an earlier King Æthelwold of East Anglia (655-664) was a kinsman of one Æthelmund. If, when the fictional “St Eduuoldus” appeared in the twelfth-century, he was confused with Æthelwold, then the name Æthelmund could have easily entered the genealogy from the same source. Hence, in the mid-thirteenth century, the compiler of John Wallingford’s Chronicle (who uses Life of St Botulf) points out that he finds not only Alcmund but also Æthelmund recorded for the father of both Egberht and Edmund. The process effectively collapsed the genealogy by constructing a brother for Edmund who was derived at once from the seventh-century King Æthelwold and the eighth-century Æthelberht. John Wallingford’s Chronicle shows that the collapsing was even more extensive. It gives as Edmund’s predecessor one Eatheluuold (Æthelwold), brother of Aldulf (the father of St Ethelburgh), without indicating the time gap of more than two hundred years between them. Hence there were two very similar traditions existing simultaneously: one naming Edmund’s predecessor and brother as either Adelbert or Eduuoldus and another naming Edmund’s predecessor as Eatheluuold, brother of Aldulf.

It is not possible to say whether the development of one of these fraternal relationships influenced the development of the other, but their appearance in such close proximity in twelfth- and thirteenth-century historiography may have created for later writers an association between the names Æthelberht and Æthelwold or encouraged their confusion in the later versions of the Havelok-legend. However, it seems unlikely that the name Athelwold would filter into popular versions of the tale from such sources, since it was not directly connected with the story of Havelok. Instead, if the appearance of the name Athelwold in the Havelok-story relates in any way to the presence of the name in historical literature, it must be because writers of the late thirteenth-century turned back to earlier written documents and dug it up. Such writers may even have assumed that the two names referred to the same figure.

If both the names Adelbriht and Athelwold entered the Havelok-story through these complex developments, the same may be true of other characters. The most likely candidate is Gaimar’s Odulf, whose name is similar to that of Aldulf in John Wallingford’s Chronicle. Gaimar’s Odulf is Danish, the brother of King Arthur’s underling Aschis after Arthur conquers Denmark; Gaimar has lifted merely lifted him from Geoffrey of Monmouth and combined his story with details from Geoffrey’s account of the earlier invasion of Denmark by Gurguit Barbtruc.

It is equally possible that Gaimar may have adopted an historical episode to fit the plot of the Arthurian conquest of Denmark. Looking for historical names that fit the Danish context, Gaimar may have turned to some Continental account of Danish history, and his eye (or ear) may have been drawn to the names he eventually used in his story. No such text survives, but there is some evidence that the fraternal formula from which he derived his “Danish” king Adelbriht may have influenced his choices. For instance, the Flateyjarbók entry for 860 contains a formula Aðalbrikt, bróðir Aðalúlfs, which is very similar to the formula in East Anglian genealogies which we have seen may have influenced Gaimar:

Aðalbrikt, bróðir Aðalúlfs, fimm ár ríkti hann í Englandi. Orrosta Guthorms ok Háreks Jótakungs. Þar féll allt konunga kyn nema sveinn einn, er Hárekr hét.

(Adalbrikt, Adalulf’s brother ruled in England for five years. Battle of Guthorm and Horik king of the Jutes. There all the king’s kin died except one son, who was called Horik.)

The Adalbrikt here refers to Æthelberht of Wessex (860-865), and the “brother” is in fact Æthelberht’s father Æthelwulf, who has been conflated with his elder son Æthelbald, perhaps because the two reigned concurrently for a time and because Æthelbald later married his father’s widow. The formula Adelbriht, brother of Athulf, appears to have been transmitted widely in Scandinavia, occurring as Adelbrictus frater Adevulfi in the Icelandic Annals and even making an appearance in a compressed summary of the reigns of eight kings of Wessex up to Æthelstan at the end of Breta sögur, the Old Norse translation of Geoffrey of Monmouth.

What is particularly intriguing about the Flateyjarbók entry is that it preserves an account of events in Britain and on the Continent which mentions the names Æthelberht and Guthrum in tandem. The passage refers to the death of King Horik, the son of the Danish king Godfrey (Guthfrith), at the hands of his nephew Guthrum in 854. There is admittedly no direct evidence to relate the material in this passage to Gaimar’s Gunter; but we may note that the material concerns a king of Denmark, and that Gaimar’s source for the name Gunter is likely to have been Continental since the form of the name is Contintental. Furthermore, if he had access to a similar version of the passage, he may have been drawn to it because it gave a king of Denmark in the same breath as a formula from which he had already derived his king Adelbriht. Of course, in this case, he would not have associated this king with Æthelberht of Wessex, an easy mistake to make if his source, like the Flateyjárbok entry, specified only that Adalbrikt ruled in England. If a passage like this was indeed the source of Gaimar’s Odulf, he was clearly willing to change the role of his character, making him the brother of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Aschis rather than of his own Adelbriht. Since, as suggested above, Gaimar was starting out with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s scenario and was willing to make history fit his story, rather than the other way around, it would be a small step for him to replace a name like Adalbrikt with Aschis as part of his attempt to situate the story after the death of Arthur. However, he does preserve the fraternal formula from which he ultimately derived the names. We can conclude that Gaimar is likely to have drawn his character names as he felt appropriate from historical sources at his disposal, but that the names were generally related not by historical events but by their close proximity in those sources or by their resemblance to a few well-remembered patterns which occurred in East Anglian or Anglo-Scandinavian traditions.

Apart from the lack of an English documentary tradition for the names Gunter and Odulf, the origins of these characters are further clouded by the obvious parallelism in Gaimar’s Estoire between Odulf and the villainous Briton Edelsi. Given that Gaimar appears to have transformed an Anglo-Saxon name into the Danish Odulf to place it within the context of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story about the Arthurian conquest of Denmark, we may consider his ethnicity to be inherently unstable. Odulf is made the brother of Aschis, who is present at Arthur’s Plenary Court, leads a legion of Arthur’s forces into the Battle of Saussy, and dies fighting for Arthur at Camblam. Although Geoffrey calls Aschis King of Denmark, he is an important member of Arthur’s court and fights on behalf of the Britons. Thus the writer of the Lambeth Interpolation seems to have struggled with the ethnicities of the characters. He opens his account with an apparent invasion of Denmark by Gunter:

Forþ wente Gounter & his folk al in to Denemark
Sone fel þer hym upon a werre styth & stark
þurgh a Breton kyng, þat out of Ingelond cam
& asked tribut of Denmark, þat Arthur whylom nam.

(Forth went Gunter and all his folk into Denmark. Soon there befell upon him a great and terrible war against a British king who came out of England and asked tribute of Denmark, which Arthur once won.)

Gunter is attacked by a “Breton kyng,” who can only be Arthur, Aschis, or Odulf. The term “whylom” implies that Arthur had once taken tribute from Denmark and that Arthur’s invasion had occurred prior to Gunter’s arrival in Denmark. This would make the “Breton kyng” Aschis or Odulf, perhaps the latter since Aschis dies at the same time as Arthur. Tthe Lambeth interpolator may have been building on an ambiguity already present in Gaimar, such as when he specifies that the usurper “was much hated by the Danes” (mult fud haïz de ses Daneis) (line 526).

This ambiguity between Danish and British ethnicity augments the parallelism between Odulf and Edelsi. The two characters were closely associated by later writers in the English traditions; for instance, Gaimar’s Edelsi is spelled Edelfi in some manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut (and in the Middle English translation), where Odulf disappears as a character. Whether a miswriting or a deliberate modification, the spelling is likely to relate to the similarity of the two characters, and this similarity was actively pursued by those who replaced them with the similar names of Godard and Godrich. According to Bell, Gaimar introduced the name Edelsi based on the Old English Æthelsige, but no figure of note with that name has survived. Although nothing similar is to be found in the East Anglian historiographical tradition discussed above, Gaimar seems to imply that the name Edelsi comes from the same source as Adelbriht. Hence, it appears that Gaimar’s character-names—regardless of their precise origins—derive from largely written sources, or, if oral, then learned ones, rather than from folk tradtion. Gaimar appears to have begun—at least for the political background to the Havelok-tale—with Geoffrey of Monmouth’s account of Arthur’s subjection of Denmark and then adopted names from East Anglian and Continental sources such as fit the general outline of the story. His working methodology seems to have consisted primarily of name association, particularly where he recalled seeing fraternal relationships containing the names Adelbriht or something like Athulf.

Gaimar could not fail to be interested in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story, writing as he was in East Anglia with its sizable Scandinavian-derived population. The former Danelaw areas of England had different social and legal structures from those of the south and west, and the region boasted a far higher population of freemen than anywhere else in England. Trade between East Anglia and Scandinavia continued to flourish into the twelfth century, which no doubt reinforced cultural links and led to the transmission of texts across the North Sea. Gaimar’s Estoire shows a concern for this sub-culture by drawing attention to the precedents for Danish rule in England prior to the Anglo-Saxon conquest. Hence, when the Danes invade during the reign of the King Beorhtric, they cite the earlier rules of Ailbrith and Haveloc, and, later, Cnut justifies his claim to the throne of England based on past Danish rulers (lines 4307-18), although he does not name Haveloc.

Nevertheless, Gaimar’s interest in Danish rights is somewhat surprising, given that there had been no serious Danish claimant to the English throne since Cnut III’s failed invasion plans of 1075 and 1086, some sixty or seventy years earlier. The claim was certainly still alive in people’s minds as late as the 1170s when Richard FitzNigel, discussing the recent abolishment of the danegeld in his Dialogue of the Exchequer, noted that the Danes had invaded England during the Anglo-Saxon period not only for plunder but because they claimed an ancient legal write to the kingdom, “as the history of Britain tells more fully.” However, promoting the claims of the Danish monarchy could not have had any direct benefit for this population. Rather, the strong tendency to do so in the region seems to betray concerns about threats to their cultural identity. As twelfth-century baronial politics gained momentum, there must have been concern in the Anglo-Scandinavian community for their special status. It is also possible that people from the rest of England could have resented the privileges of their eastern compatriots, so that the reasons for those privileges had to be asserted. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story appears to undermine deliberately those claims by creating precedents for British suzerainty over Denmark. In this he may reflect the views of his Anglo-Norman patrons. But, Gaimar too was also commissioned to write his history by an Anglo-Norman lady, so some further explanation is required for his interest in Danish sovereignty in England.

Here we may draw on Odulf’s ethnic ambiguity, since he is the only evil Danish figure in Gaimar’s account. By connecting Odulf with Arthur—and with the Britons—Gaimar makes Odulf’s failure to secure his claim to the Danish throne symbolic of a translatio imperii from Briton to Dane: precisely the theme he addresses elsewhere in the Estoire. On the other side of the North Sea, where Haveloc secures the Danish right to rule in Britain from the British king Edelsi, the same point is made. The similarity between the two characters is more than that they play similar roles as usurpers and disinheritors of Haveloc and Argentille. They also represent the ancien régime whose rights will be won by the Danes. Hence Geoffrey of Monmouth’s story of British sovereignty over Denmark is reversed, and, by implication, the Anglo-Normans are the inheritors of Danish rights. Such a transformation of the story may well have appealed to an Anglo-Norman audience trying to establish hereditary rights to in an East Anglian regional context.

Given that Gaimar appears to have created the story by dipping into history for figures with whom he could construct a rival version of England’s relationship with Denmark, the story as it appears in his Estoire must be substantially one of his construction, combined as it is from diverse elements. One consequence of the conclusion that Gaimar created the Havelok-story from several sources is that the figure (or at least the name) of Haveloc need not be seen as coming from the same sources as the other characters. Gaimar may have drawn it from another story, one which was in fact of Cumbrian origin, rather than Anglo-Danish, and then integrated it with his other material. In other words, there is no need to see the entire story as a legend with its origins amongst the Cumbrians. Instead, Havelok entered East Anglian local history through Gaimar and was popularised as a hero only later as a result of his historical efforts.

The Transformation of the Story

Most likely the popularity of the tale of Havelok in East Anglia came from Gaimar’s choice to attach his story to that of Grim, whom local legend probably already held to be the founder of Grimsby. The princess Argentille to whom Havelok is married may also have been local in origin, to go by Gaimar’s own reference to l’antive gent (line 93) as the source of his knowledge about her upbringing. If the character originated in East Anglia, her name is unlikely to come from the same Celtic source as Havelok. Indeed, Argentille’s name may be no older than the Conquest, since it appears to be French and has connotations of wealth which coincide nicely with Gaimar’s specification that her father is rich (line 57). However, even if the name was older in origin, it seems likely that it would be interpreted as French after Gaimar’s time. In all probability, the French-named Argentille appears in the Havelok-story because she has been grafted onto it from an originally separate local legend. Furthermore, there is no reason to suspect that the name Goldeburgh, which first appears in the late thirteenth century in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut, was the original name of the character, since Gaimar would have no motivation to change it. But there is a plausible motive for later writers to have changed the name of Gaimar’s Argentille since she (along with Gunter, perhaps) is the only major character in Gaimar’s account whose name does not look pre-Conquest in origin.

The new name Goldeburgh is found in a Latin confirmation (c. 1160-5) of the will of one Goldburga granting 12d to Southwark Priory, and to this we may add literary usages of Goldburga in the Latin Life and Miracles of St William of Norwich (composed c. 1172-3) and Goldeburc in the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn (composed c. 1170). The Havelok-poet appears to have drawn four other female character-names from these sources: Leuiua, Gunnilda, and Leua from the Life, and Swanburc from the romance. Smithers does not seem inclined to believe that the name Goldeburgh entered the Havelok-legend from either of these sources; instead, he suggests that, “if the name Goldeburgh was already in the form of the story that was received by the author of the extant Hav., he may have been responsible for bringing the other three names into his own version as a result of finding all four in the Life. Similarly, he may well have taken over Swanborw from the AN Horn because it occurred there along with Goldeburc and in the same specific context (of the hero’s close female kin).” I am inclined to agree with Smithers and dismiss the possibility that Goldeburgh was adopted directly from either of these sources, although they may have contributed to its familiarity. The name probably entered the legend because its meaning was appropriate as an English-sounding equivalent of Argentille. The choice of the name may have also been influenced by the frequent occurrence of the ending –burh amongst names of women before the Norman Conquest in the East Anglian royal genealogies.

Furthermore, anyone who looked back at the reference to Ailbrith and Aveloc in Gaimar’s account of the eighth-century Danish invasion (line 2081) would have found several similar-sounding names in the in close proximity. The name Guereburc occurs slightly earlier (line 2035), and, Brectric (Beorhtric) marries Edburc, the daughter of King Offa of Mercia, immediately before the arrival of the invading Danes (lines 2059-63). A few lines later the arm of Saint “Oswald” (Ælfwald in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) is brought to Coledesburc el sud (line 2113), which, Bell argues convincingly, probably indicates Peterborough, elsewhere referred to as Goldborch, Gyldeneburh. Thus the name Goldeburgh may have been chosen by someone deliberately looking back at the Estoire for evidence of a more authentic name for the character than the French-sounding Argentille. If the name was originally derived from a by-name of Peterborough, it may have served to strengthen further the East Anglian credentials of the story. More than likely, Gaimar’s integration of the Havelok-story with the foundation myth of Grimsby, and its subsequent popularisation, prompted East Anglians in the thirteenth century to turn to available historiography in order to enhance still further the characters’ place in local history. Hence it is probably around this time that the Grimsby Seal was designed, portraying Grim, Havelok, and Goldeburgh with the later form of the character’s name, rather than the earlier Argentille. Chronicle accounts continued to follow Gaimar but gradually began to adopt the new name. Thus different manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut use either one name or the other, and the Argentille written in the margin of Knighton’s Chronicle opposite Goldeburgh in the text suggests that the two names were still connected in the later fourteenth century.

If the name Argentille were replaced because it did not look sufficiently pre-Conquest or “English,” the same might be true of Gunter, which is replaced with Birkabeyn in some manuscripts of the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut. Langtoft’s identification of Gunter with Guthrum was certainly problematic for later writers. The Lambeth Interpolation to Mannyng’s translation shows the interpolator’s struggle to make Gaimar’s king of Denmark fit with the ninth-century king of East Anglia by having him immigrate to Denmark, where he is attacked by a “Breton kyng.” The leap from Arthurian Britain to the ninth century is smoothed over by the omission of any relationship of Odulf (Edulf, as it is spelled in the Lambeth Interpolation) to the Arthurian Aschis. In fact, the only reference to Arthur is to his invasion in the past. Thus, whilst Gaimar was the ultimate authority for the version of the story in the Lambeth Interpolation, his chronological placement of the story has been subtly removed.

However, Mannyng’s comments, particularly his use of the names Goldeburgh and Athelwold, suggest that versions of the story which departed more significantly from Gaimar were circulating after 1300. It is unclear whether he knew the name Birkebayn, since his comments are prompted by Langtoft’s reference to Haveloc as the son of Gunter, but its occurrence in the Anglo-Norman Prose Brut and the version of the Havelok-story embedded in Castleford’s Chronicle suggests that its use was widespread from the late thirteenth century on. The Anglo-Norman Prose Brut simply replaces Gunter with Birkebein, but Castleford’s Chronicle demonstrates a more radical transformation of the tale, eliminating the Arthurian scenario by stating that “Birkebaine’s son” (which I assume refers to Havelok) actually invades England during the reign of Beorhtric. As with Gaimar, the compiler of Castleford’s Chronicle identifies this period with the beginning of the Scandinavian invasions of Britain based on the famous entry for 787 in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. However, he appears to attach later Scandinavian incursions to the same period, including, for instance, the invasions by the “Kinges of Hirlande,” presumably the Vikings of Dublin (lines 28614-17). The invocation of the Havelok-legend at this point seems to show the influence of Gaimar, whose reference to Aveloc as a past precedent for Danish rights in Britain comes at precisely this point in his Estoire. Perhaps the compiler of Castleford’s Chronicle draws on a source which had garbled Gaimar’s reference to Havelok or perhaps the compiler himself was responsible for the change; but, regardless, it reflects the perception that this historical period was an appropriate context for the Havelok-story. However, the location of the story in this period was incompatible with Langtoft’s identification of Gunter with the Guthrum who lived a century later. But, as in Langtoft, the account reflects an attempt to locate Gunter’s character in history. There was nothing in Gaimar to suggest a replacement name, but, the revisers of the legend seem to have adopted a new name, Birkebayn, which was known locally and perceived to be linguistically appropriate to the ethnicity of the character, just as they did for Argentille. This similarity of procedure suggests more than popular corruption of Gaimar’s tale; rather it suggests the making of deliberate changes based on conscious reflection on the story’s place in the historical past.

Fourteenth-century chroniclers also seem to have fixed on another feature of the Havelok-legend with its roots in Gaimar: the motif of the seneschal. This motif appears in both accounts of the Danish invasion of England and of the Havelok-story itself. For instance, Langtoft gives the Danes a leader named Duke Ebric, demonstrably a version of the Adelbriht figure used by Gaimar, since the form in MS D is Kebrith (Mannyng’s Kebriht), which shows the same changes found in the spelling Achebrit in the Lai d’Haveloc. According to Langtoft, Beorhtric has a seneschal called Herman who is slain by the Duke of Denmark. Whilst Herman does not appear to derive directly from Gaimar’s Sigar, seneschal of Gunter, it is notable that good seneschals appear with a variety of names and roles in Havelok the Dane (Ubbe, seneschal of Denmark), Rauf de Bohun’s Petit Bruit (Godard, seneschal of England), and Henry Knighton’s Chronicle (Godard, seneschal of Denmark and England). It is difficult to explain the diversity of names, but it is likely that they are the result of separate attempts to incorporate the motif from the Havelok-legend into separate historical scenarios.

The appearance of the name Ebric in Langtoft’s (and hence Mannyng’s) Chronicle may shed further light on the appearance of the character Godrich. In later versions of the story Godrich replaces Edelsi, who becomes an earl rather than a king. In part, this reflects the promotion (and ethnic jump) of Gaimar’s Adelbriht, Danish King of East Anglia, to the status of Athelwold, king of England. However, the old name was not abandoned; instead, it was reinterpreted and preserved as Ebric, Duke of Denmark. The effect was to remove the equivalency between the East Anglian king Adelbriht in Gaimar’s Havelok-episode and the Ailbrith referred to in connection with the Danish invasion. But the latter tradition continued to interact with the Havelok-story. The version of the Danish invasion given by Castleford’s Chronicle states that “Birkebaine’s son” landed on the coast of Lindsey, claimed that land by right of marriage, and then drove the dukes of Cornwall out of Mercia (lines 26,618-29). The reference to Mercia is unique to this text. It may reflect a tendency in northern and eastern chronicles to equate Lindsey and Mercia, a tendency also found in the Chronicle of Robert Mannyng, who regularly changes Mercia to Lindsey when he encounters it in this section of Langtoft’s Chronicle. If such an association between the two regions existed, then Gaimar’s treacherous Edelsi, King of Lindsey, could be equated by revisers of the tale with a treacherous Mercian lord. Such a figure was known from history in the form of Eadric Streona, ealdorman of Mercia, who, after betraying Edmund Ironside and aiding Cnut, was killed in 1017. The use of Eadric as a model for the character may have been further encouraged by the existence of the similar name Ebric in connection with the Danish presence in England. The second element in the name Godrich may thus have been adopted by revisers who found either or both the names Ebric and Eadric associated in historical literature with the Danish acquisition of power in England. Ironically, the name of the traitor Godrich could be partially from the very name which had earlier given rise to Gaimar’s Adelbriht. The title Earl of Cornwall is probably a secondary development created to disassociate the character from East Anglia, although it does preserve Edelsi’s British heritage. It is also possible that the title came from a topical reference to Richard, the brother of Henry III, who was made Earl of Cornwall in 1225. The version in Castleford’s Chronicle apparently postdates this development, since it makes the “Dukes of Cornewaile” the enemies of “Birkebaine’s son”. Regardless, it also seems to preserve some notion of the character’s connection with Mercia, and with Lindsey, if the two were equated.

The influence of Eadric Streona on the Havelok-legend is also apparent in the accounts given by Rauf de Bohun and Henry Knighton, who connect the story with the reign of King Cnut. These authors state that Havelok had four sons: Gormund, Cnut, Godard, and Thorald. These names were apparently selected from history in order to boost Scandinavian claims in England, and particularly the historical rule of King Cnut (as Knighton states explicitly). Assuming that Gormund is to be equated with Guthrum, the first two are famous Danes from early English history. Thorald may be a memory of Thorkell the Tall, who was made ealdorman of East Anglia by Cnut and later acted as Cnut’s regent in Denmark. The Petit Bruit goes to extraordinary lengths to place these Scandinavian figures within the West Saxon, and by implication English, genealogy by giving their mother Goldeburgh as the son of Athelwold, the great-great grandson of Alfred, who in turn is the grandson of Arthur. This makes Cnut not only the heir of Havelok but heir by lineage to the English throne. The attempt by these writers or their sources to locate Havelok and Cnut in close historical proximity may then have been prompted in part by the development of a villain associated with Eadric Streona. Alternatively, the reverse may have happened: the relocation of the Havelok-story to the time of Cnut may have encouraged the use of Eadric as a model for the transformation Edelsi into Godrich.

Havelok’s third son Godard presents other difficulties. Godard may be no more than a made up name, modelled on Godrich and designed to replace Odulf as his Danish parallel. But this necessitates some explanation of how Godard came to be regarded by Bohun as seneschal in England and Havelok’s son, a surprising fate, if he was drawn from a version of the story where he is a villainous character, as in Havelok the Dane. Knighton says Godard was seneschal both in Denmark and in England, and this may have represented the original formulation if both come from an earlier common source. Knighton’s version seems also to be partially derived from Gaimar, not only because of the marginal notation equating Goldeburgh with Argentille but also because it states that Birkabeyn is king of the Danes of Lincoln, rather than of Denmark, as in Bohun’s account. These elements could preserve features of the original story or they could represent later modifications by someone familiar with Gaimar’s account. Regardless, both Bohun’s and Knighton’s versions agree in their interest in the office of seneschal. For instance, Bohun makes a point of stating that the seneschalship Godard receives “made up a quarter of what it is now” (n’avout tant come ore fait ly quart). Knighton’s version of this is to say that Godard was invested “in the seneschalship of Denmark and the chancellorship of England, which did not carry so much power as now” (in senescaria Daciæ et in mercimoniatu Angliæ, quæ non se extendebant ad tantum valorem quam nunc). The interest in the office of seneschal thus appears to relate to the extent of power which the king’s magnates could exercise. The poet of Havelok the Dane shows a similar concern for the constitutional implications of the social and legal practices in the story, as Turville-Petre shows, calling attention to Godrich’s oath to Athelwold (185-209), his appointment of local officials (263-67), the frequent references to manrede (“homage”), and the formality of Godrich’s execution sentence.

There are several historical scenarios in the thirteenth century which could have provoked interest in the power of the king’s magnates, the most notable of which is the regency of Richard Earl of Cornwall, whose title, it has been suggested, was applied to Godrich. The characterisation of his counterpart Godard in Havelok the Dane probably developed in tandem, so it seems pointless to try to connect the name Godard with any single historical figure. The importance of Bohun’s and Knighton’s comments about the limits of the seneschalship in Havelok’s time is that they show why Godard may have been moved away from the position of usurper. The reviser of the legend appears to think Danish rulership in the distant past provided a more ideal form of government. The presence of Godard in a position to usurp the throne would certainly have gainsaid that view of history; hence Bohun states ambiguously that Havelok is in England because he was “driven from Denmark” (chasé de Denmarche), and Knighton fails to offer any explanation at all. Instead, they change the parallel between Godrich and Godard to contrast, with the latter’s power restricted by comparison with the former.

An interest in history, then, was a motivating factor in the transformation of the Havelok-legend, and many of the changes of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries relate to attempts to adapt the story to various historical contexts. The widespread interest in the seneschal motif may reflect a growing concern on the part of the revisers of the tale with the implications of these historical contexts. This may explain the abandonment Gaimar’s Arthurian milieu. Instead, chroniclers appear to have been turning back to chronicles for their inspiration, finding new names where they could or adapting names suitable for the new scenarios in which they located the tale. These attempts may reflect regional biases. For instance, Langtoft recounts how King Egbert, upon his return from France after the death of Beorhtric, begins to persecute the Britons, who seek aid from Bernewolf of Mercia. Egbert defeats Bernewolf and seizes eastern England between Dover and Grimsby. Bernewolf’s son Wiglaf submits to Egbert and is granted the kingdom of Lindsey, in addition to his kingdom of Mercia. Then King Frithebald of the North arrives to say that he has been exiled by the pagan Danes. Battle ensues and goes badly for the English until Egbert’s sons Ethelwolf and Ethelstan (corrected to Ethelbert in most manuscripts and in Mannyng) arrive to save the day. Mannyng reproduces this fairly accurately, except that he makes Bernewolf and Wiglaf Britons and kings of Lindsey only. These modifications only serve to clarify the meaning of the story. The addition of the British subplot here demonstrates the English king’s legal sovereignty in East Anglia. The land has been granted to English or British kings, taking away the rights of future Danish invaders like Guthrum. Likewise, the Danes in the north displace the rightful king. That Egbert takes up arms on his behalf suggests that he is Frithebald’s feudal overlord. Whether this amounts to a refutation of Danish rights in East Anglia or not probably requires a broader study of Langtoft’s Chronicle, but it is notable that Castleford’s Chronicle, the other northern exemplar of the Havelok-legend, likewise accuses “Birkebaine’s son” of dwelling in Mercia and Lindsey illegally.

The Lambeth Interpolation, despite its dependence on Gaimar’s version of the story, also seems to undermine Havelok’s right to rule in England. Gunter’s status as the hereditary king of Denmark is undermined by the suggestion that he is an immigrant, that he refused to pay tribute to Arthur, and that he was defeated by the Britons. Indeed, if the “Breton kyng” is Odulf, the implication of the Lambeth Interpolation is somewhat closer to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s original design in creating precedents for British sovereignty over Denmark. The shift is slight, since Havelok still wins back his kingdom, but the subtle change of emphasis may reflect the Southwest Midland origins of the passage (see note 16). On the other hand, Rauf de Bohun had a patron from Lincolnshire and clearly works to support Cnut’s claim to the throne, along the rights of the other Danes who become his siblings. But these details also place the sons of Havelok in the direct line of English kings (through Goldeburgh), thus diminishing any sense of them as foreigners. If Bohun or his source encountered a form of the story which placed an unacceptable emphasis on Danish rule in England, then this is a neat compromise. Havelok the Dane seems to perform this compromise in another way, by stressing the legality of the process by which he becomes king.

Hence the different treatments of the intertwined stories of Havelok the Dane and the origins and settlement of the Danelaw appear to have been the subject of much interpretation and reinterpretation during the twelfth, thirteenth, and early fourteenth centuries. The motivation for this enterprise was certainly not because people thought that a return to power of the kings of Denmark was likely. The Danish claim to the throne may have briefly entered the English political agenda in 1193, when Philip Augustus married Ingeborg, the sister of Cnut VI of Denmark. Philip demanded as dowry—so William of Newburgh tells us—the antiquum ius regis Dacorum in regno Anglorum, “the ancient right of the King of the Danes in the English kingdom,” which he did not receive; and he repudiated his marriage almost as soon as the ceremony was over (although he was never able to secure an abolition). He brought Ingeborg out of prison again in 1213, when Innocent III declared King John unfit to rule in England, but does not seem to have pushed her claims explicitly. If the episode had any impact on the English Havelok-tradition, it would have been to encourage the adoption of a name ending in –burgh for the heroine. But that would make the story’s resonance not so much pro-Danish as pro-French.

Turville-Petre suggests that the story is an answer by the Anglo-Scandinavian population of East Anglia to the overwhelmingly negative representation of the Danes in the Anglo-Norman chronicle-tradition. Such an explanation seems slightly at odds with the popularity of the legend in the fourteenth century when the Scandinavian identity of the region had probably ceased to confer any legal distinction or privileges on its population and when writers in the heavily Scandinavian north, such as Langtoft and the compiler of Castleford’s Chronicle, employed aspects of the Havelok-legend to condemn Danish settlement in England. But in Eastern England, writers such as Bohun and the Havelok-poet seem more concerned with integrating the Danish population into a larger English picture. For these texts, Turville-Petre is right to point out the importance of the intermarriage between the Danish and the English characters at the end of the poem, making the Danes part of the “English national stock.” Just as Bohun’s genealogy ignores historical distinctions of ethnicity, so the Havelok-poet dispenses with historical political divisions, instead affecting a folksiness intended to convey the impression that his story is an old English tale but which at the same time divorces it from any historical scenario which implied Danish independence of English rule in East Anglia. Although he keeps the names of characters like Goldeburgh and Godrich, which may have their origins in the wider historiographical treatment of the Havelok-legend, he dips into the English tradition of secular romances, particularly the Anglo-Norman Romance of Horn, for the names of many of the other characters. This too transforms the story from the style of chronicle to the style of oral presentation, further divorcing it from historiographical attempts to identify precedents for Danish rights in England.

Havelok the Dane in fact participates in a wider process of re-examining the importance of Danish ethnicity in East Anglia and in England as whole. Langtoft uses elements of the Havelok-story to assert the English king’s right to rule in East Anglia. He does this by removing earlier precedents for Danish rule first through Egbert’s defeat of Ebric and the grant of the land to Wiglaf and second through his attribution of Havelok’s father to Guthrum, who is baptised by Alfred. Mannyng does not try to pursue the possibly weaker implications of Langtoft’s equation of Gunter with Guthrum, preferring instead the account given locally. But he does clarify the former story, placing greater emphasis on Egbert’s sovereignty over Lindsey. Castleford’s Chronicle shows a similar line of reasoning to that of Langtoft: a Danish invader arrives and illegally occupies Lindsey and Mercia, driving off the rightful rulers. The effect in both cases is to suggest that sovereignty rests ultimately with the king and that the denizens of East Anglia cannot claim rights from any other source. Bohun’s and Knighton’s versions make the Danish rulers heirs to this English royal authority, partially by de-emphasising their ethnicity. Indeed, the focus of the story is somewhat shifted away from the historical legitimacy of Danish rule in England and onto the placing of the Danish rulers within its institutional power structures and social hierarchy. In other words, the historical anglicisation of the Anglo-Danes prompted reflection on their historical place in England. Both the passing of the Havelok-story from chronicle into local legend and the continued manipulation of the tale by chroniclers narrating the origins of England reflect this absorption of the Anglo-Danes into English society.

Conclusion

It is hoped that these findings contribute to an understanding of the context in which Gaimar, the Havelok-poet, and the other tellers of the Havelok-story reproduced and modified its form, as well as the relation of the Havelok-story to historical literature about East Anglia and the methods of its historiographers. My discussion is not intended to imply that the Havelok-story did not receive widespread popular transmission but that certain elements of the tale as we have it were invented by Gaimar based on elements in historical literature about East Anglia, rather than on the folk traditions of the region. Because of the Anglo-Scandinavian culture of East Anglia, these elements can sometimes be traced in Scandinavian sources. It is likely that the sources for the names Haveloc, Argentille, and Adelbriht and Edelsi were separate, and that Gaimar’s combination of them was instrumental in the adoption of Havelok as a local legend. Later writers were then anxious to fit this legend into a recognised historical context and they turned sometimes back to Gaimar and sometimes to sources similar to those he had used for inspiration. Although it is difficult to quantify how much of a Scandinavian cultural identity East Anglia may have retained by the turn of the fourteenth century the Anglo-Norman necessity to justify foreign rule must clearly have diminished. Whereas Gaimar tried to create precedents for Danish (and by implication foreign) rule in East Anglia, later writers were more interested in the nature of its contribution to the formation of the English nation. Hence the Havelok-story gradually underwent changes to enhance its credentials as local history, and the revisers inevitably turned to the historiographical materials available to them when they could. The revision of the Havelok-story developed in tandem with, and interacted with, changes to the treatment of historical Danish invasions in narratives of the history of England. This suggests that the various extant references to Havelok are not merely garbled interpolations based on a popular local legend which in form resembled the poem Havelok the Dane but different attempts to understand anew the historical significance of a legend essentially created by Gaimar.

Gaimar’s earlier construction of the tale adopted a model of multiculturalism similar to our “tossed salad” notion by asserting the rights of ethnic groups, Danish and Anglo-Norman, within their individual province. Later writers seem to have turned towards more of a “melting pot” approach, one which argues for the contribution of different ethnicities to, but also absorption within, the whole. Hence the main interest of the revisers of the tale was to provide a new historical context for the Havelok-story which went beyond justifying the Danish presence in East Anglia. Instead, they drew attention to its greater implications by using it to show how Danish rule in East Anglia participated in and was a part of the development of English social and legal institutions. The English poet of Havelok the Dane, in exchanging historical genre for the unspecified timelessness of romance, sacrifices the historical perspective of the other writers of his period but skillfully weaves these interests into a more popular form. Perhaps his work, like Gaimar’s, provides one model of the way the ideas of the learned historiographers of the Middle Ages reached and influenced a much broader audience.