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In Trevet’s version of the story of Constance, King Alla must leave Constance soon after their marriage in order to defend his land in Scotland against the people of Albany.  He employs Olda and Lucius as the protectors of his wife’s safety and comfort, particularly in view of the imminent birth of her son.  I will briefly summarize the scene from Trevet’s tale describing the exchange of letters between Olda and Lucius and the king regarding the birth of Maurice, which occurs in nearly 530 words:

By the will of God, Constance gives birth to a beautiful, healthy boy named Maurice.  Olda and Lucius quickly send the good news to the king by means of letters.  The messenger, however, must travel through Knaresborough, a place halfway between England and Scotland where the king’s evil mother, Domild, lives.  Domild mortally hates Constance.  Not only does she blame her for making the king abandon his former religion, but she also envies Constance’s reputation as the most beautiful and holy woman in the land.  When Domild hears the news from the messenger she feigns joy and “celebrates” by intoxicating the messenger to the point of delirium so that she can do her evil.  While the messenger lies insensible, Domild, by the consent of her clerk, opens the letters sent to the king and replaces them with her own fabrications.  She writes that Queen Constance revealed herself as an evil spirit in the form of a woman after the king departed for Scotland.  The child she bore, then, is not of human form but of an ugly, cursed form such that Olda and Lucius had another boy baptized as Maurice for the sake of the public and had the devilish form locked up in an iron cage.  Domild makes sure to mention at the end of the letter that the messenger knows nothing of such matters.

In his version of Trevet’s story, Gower manages this scene differently, using some 200 words fewer than Trevet does:

Constance joyfully delivers her son soon after King Allee leaves for Scotland.  Elda and Lucie send letters to the king through a messenger who must travel through Knaresburgh where the king’s evil mother, Domilde, lives.  The messenger tells Domilde the good news for which she feigns joy and showers him with gifts.  Upon nightfall Domilde takes the letters and has new ones written.  These counterfeit letters describe Constance as a fairy and her son as a changeling.  According to the letters, in order to maintain a good image, Elda and Lucie have had a poor child baptized as Moris and kept the other strange child out of the public eye.  The letter ends by asking what the king’s will is in this situation.

Although Trevet and Gower relate the same basic set of events, Gower shapes the narrative slightly differently than his source in order to achieve a didactic rather than biographical end.  I will examine three major differences in Gower’s text: the agency of Providence in Moris’s birth, the author of the counterfeit letters, and the absence of the mention of envy as a motivation for Domilde to invent such scandalous stories about her daughter-in-law.  This last change is the most interesting considering that this is a “tale of gret entendement” (CA, II, 584).  Why, in a tale that purports to be about envy, does Gower seem to miss his best chance to show envy by magnifying, rather than ignoring, the scene in Trevet that most clearly depicts a woman’s envy of Constance?

One of the first differences in Gower’s text is the absence of God in Moris’s birth.  In Trevet it was only after “Dieux et nature voleient” [“God and nature willed”] (NLC, 275-76) that Constance gave birth to her son.  Gower removes that agency and makes Constance give birth simply when the time “of kinde is come” (CA, II, 931).  Trevet further gave readers the impression that God willed not only the birth of Maurice, but also the health and beauty of the “bien engendré et bien nee” [“well-begotten and well-born”] (NLC, 276-77) boy.  Gower’s Moris is merely born “sauf and sone” (CA, II, 935), whereupon Constance is joyful and has him baptized.  Gower further removes the religious implications of Trevet’s text by later replacing Trevet’s “mauveis espirit” [“evil spirit”] (NLC, 294) with the mystical fairy and eliminating the “fourme demoniac” [“devilish form”] (NLC, 298) for the child of such a fairy.  Fairies traditionally had ugly children who whined and cried and had ill tempers.  Fairy mothers, then, would abduct human babies and exchange them for their foul-mouthed infants.  Gower is playing off of this fairy myth by having Domilde call Moris this kind of fairy child that Constance did not have the chance to replace, thereby revealing her true nature.  Gower does not need the presence of God in his moral exemplum.  While Trevet’s story had a more biographical end in which Trevet told the story of Constance and her religious journey, Gower’s version has a purely didactic goal: to exemplify moral behavior in the face of envy.

Another important change for Gower is his removal of Domilde’s agency in writing the letter to her son.  In Trevet’s version Domild herself opened the letters and counterfeited them under the same seals.  By having Domild take up the pen, a traditionally male instrument in the Middle Ages, and impersonate her son, Trevet de-feminized the king’s mother, allowing readers to differentiate between Constance’s perfect “womanly” behavior and that of the other “mannish” women in the text.  Here I do not speak of the phallic pen when calling a pen a “traditionally male instrument.”  Female literacy in medieval England was considered a threat to the patriarchal order, and most women were not given an authoritative voice even over their own work (Margery Kempe, for example, had to have two male scribes to validate her text in the male-dominated medieval tradition).  Domild’s direct agency in writing the letters, then, made her masculine.  Gower, on the other hand, maintains Domilde’s femininity by suppressing her literal authorship of the letters.  In Gower’s version, Domilde takes the letters “and let do wryten othre newe” (CA, II, 958), thus removing Domilde’s direct agency and authorship of the letters.  Later, Gower’s choice of death for Domilde further evinces his attempts to effeminize Trevet’s Domild.  In Trevet’s version, Domild was slaughtered by the sword, a traditionally male death.  Gower, however, has Domilde burned at the stake—a punishment often reserved for women guilty of witchcraft, sorcery, or plotting against a lord.  Readers sympathize more with Gower’s Domilde than with Trevet’s for other reasons as well.  Gower presents Domilde as less conniving than Trevet did by not only eliminating her as the active agent in writing the false letters, but also by restoring at least some maternal instinct in her treatment of Moris.  In Trevet, Domild had Maurice “‘[privément] fermé en un cage de fer’” [“‘shut up secretly in an iron cage’”] (NLC, 298-99) for some undefined period of time.  Readers could easily doubt the womanly kindness in Domild for such harsh treatment of a newborn babe.  Gower’s Domilde does not lock Moris up, but merely keeps him “‘out of the weie’” (CA, II, 968) to maintain a good public image.  While we still do not sympathize with her, she is more likeable in Gower’s than in Trevet’s version. 

The final way Gower softens Domilde’s masculine tendencies is by removing Trevet’s lengthy description of Domild’s motivations.  At the very opening of the passage in question, Trevet described Domild’s “grant envie” [“great envy”] (NLC, 270) of Constance.  Domild was not only angry that this foreign woman of unknown lineage had made her son abandon his ancestor’s religion, but was also jealous of Constance’s reputation as the most beautiful and holy woman in all the land.  The text went so far as to mention that the “loaunge et gloire” [“praise and glory”] of Domild “fu ja [anientie] pur le grant pris [de] Constance” [“have been brought to nothing because of the great esteem for Constance”] (NLC, 273).  Trevet, therefore, set the stage—envy—for Domild’s subsequent actions to rid herself of her biggest threat.  Gower, on the other hand, eliminates any such motivation in his version of the scene.  Envy in Gower is understood but never explicitly stated.  The night she finds out that Constance has given birth to a male heir to the throne Domilde takes action.  There is no mention of envy, no dwelling on jealousy, and no reference to diminished reputations.  Why, in a tale first and foremost about envy, does Gower leave out Domilde’s envy? 

Gower’s tale is, first and foremost, a tale about envy, and therefore any additional explanation is unnecessary.  Trevet’s tale was a history and biography of a “noble lady” named Constance.  He opened his story with claims to historical accuracy, alluding to different sources such as the old Saxon chronicles.  Trevet then went on to reconstruct Constance’s genealogy according to what was said “solonc l’estoire de Sessons avantdite” [“in the aforementioned history of the Saxons”] (NLC, 5).  Gower’s narrator, on the other hand, does not include such details as Constance’s lineage or the chronicles from which this pseudo-historical narrative has been based.  Gower’s story is “a tale of gret entendement” (CA, II, 584), “entendement” signifying French for “understanding.”  The title alone tells of a tale of Constance, in which “Constance” could refer not to a “noble lady” but to a virtue—“constancy” meaning fidelity, faithfulness, and dependability.  Gower’s tale, then, focuses on these virtues in the face of envy or detraction.  Detraction, here, is the consequence of Domilde’s envy; as a result of her envy, Domilde attempts to discredit Constance through slander (false letters).  This explanation at the beginning of the tale allows Gower to truncate Domilde’s scene and focus only on the actions taking place as a result of envy.  At the beginning, envy is introduced as the cause for every action in this tale.  Gower explicitly mentions “Envie” when describing the motivations of the sultaness (CA, II, 640) and the unfaithful knight (CA, II, 811).  After setting the stage for envy, however, Gower’s readers understand that King Allee’s mother is motivated by the same reasons as the sultaness, and, later, Theloüs will be motivated by the same reasons as the knight.  Trevet, on the other hand, did not open his story as a moral exemplum showing how to deal with envy.  He therefore had to explain the actions of his characters in terms of their emotions toward Constance.  For example, Trevet explicitly stated that Domild “plus pensa qe ne dit” [“intended more than she said”] (NLC, 285) to the messenger because, again, she had not been established as a character who would be envious of Constance and attempt to detract from Constance’s saintliness and holy reputation.

There are other minor differences in Gower’s version of the story of Constance that I have chosen not to discuss at length here.  In Trevet, for example, there was a clerk who consented to Domild’s opening of the letters and counterfeiting them.  The presence of the clerk may further explain the religious implications of the letter in Trevet as compared with the purely mythical elements of Gower’s “fairy.”  Domild’s letter in Trevet also specified the ignorance of the messenger to the reality behind Constance’s birth in order to cover all questions of the messenger’s very different perspective of the situation should he orally relay any messages to the king.  Gower does not include this information about the messenger.  Instead, Gower’s Domilde ends the letter by having Elda and Lucie ask the king what they should do about the fairy child. 

Although the differences Gower makes to Trevet’s story of Constance seem minor, they are of substantial importance when considering the purposes of each text.  In the passages I have examined regarding the substitute letters of Domilde to her son, readers may witness the very different ends Trevet and Gower hoped to achieve.  By the end of Trevet’s version Constance was established as a saintly figure through her ability to convert various heathen peoples to Christianity, as well as through her overall goodness and holiness in the most trying of situations.  Trevet’s Domild seemed to exist only to highlight the goodness and womanliness of Constance by juxtaposing her virtues with Domild’s evil and almost mannish actions.  By the end of Gower’s tale, readers have learned about the life of Constance, but only in terms of what is needed to serve as an example of how to respond to and correct immoral behavior such as envy.  The saintly nature of Constance is due neither to her ability to convert heathens nor to her virtuous, womanly behavior in any situation.  Instead, the saintliness of Constance is a result of her ability to handle envy and detraction.  Constance’s ability to convert others to Christianity is used only as an enviable trait to provide a backdrop for Domilde’s actions.  Therefore, the presence of God in Moris’s birth is not important, Domilde need not be presented as any less womanly than Constance, and envy need not be mentioned as a motivation for a particular action in a tale in which virtually every action is inspired by that very sin.

Originally Posted: April 4, 2006