LAY LE FREINE

(“Lai of the Ash Tree”)

(early 14th century)

TheLay Le Freineis an anonymous MIDDLE ENGLISH verse ROMANCE that survives only in the famous Auchinleck manuscript from the early 14th century. The story is based on one of the late 12thcentury LAIS of MARIE DE FRANCE and, like Marie’s poem, is written in octosyllabic (eight-syllable) couplets, though at only 408 lines it is briefer than Marie’s 518-line poem. In two places (lines 121–133 and 341–408) the manuscript is damaged, and thus the poem is missing some lines that have been reconstructed in modern editions. It is written in a southern dialect, with some characteristic features of the East Midland dialect of London.

The story follows Marie’s text fairly closely. In the beginning Le Freine’s mother, envious of her neighbor’s twin boys, begins a rumor that multiple births can only result from more than one father, and thus raises questions about her neighbor’s faithfulness to her husband.When she herself delivers twins, Le Freine’s mother has no choice but to destroy one of her children or face the consequences of her own vicious rumor. She gives one daughter to the midwife and tells her to kill the child and never to reveal the twin birth. But the midwife instead convinces her to abandon the child at a convent. She takes the baby to a nunnery, leaving her in a hollow ash-tree outside the convent walls.

The forsaken Le Freine is raised by the kind Abbess, who christens her “Le Freine” or “the Ash-Tree,” and represents the child as her own niece. When the girl is grown Le Freine becomes the lover of a rich nobleman named Guroun. Under pressure from the church to abandon his lover and take a wife of noble blood to give him legitimate heirs, Guroun breaks off the affair, though the generous and patient Le Freine volunteers to help prepare Guroun’s castle for his wedding celebration.When Guroun’s intended arrives with her mother, she turns out to be Le Codre (that is, “The Hazel Tree”), Le Freine’s estranged twin sister. Her mother recognizes Le Freine by the rich embroidered cloth she had wrapped the baby in when she gave her to the midwife, and in the end, Le Freine is reunited with her family, and Guroun marries Le Freine—now revealed to be of the appropriate nobility and family. Le Codre, we are reassured, marries another gentle knight of that country. The tale is in some ways reminiscent of the tale of patient Griselde, familiar from CHAUCER’sCLERK’S TALEand as the last story in BOCCACCIO’sDECAMERON, in which the patient woman is rewarded in the end after much suffering. Le Freine is a completely passive heroine, and nearly completely silent—the narrator allows her a direct speech only some 30 lines before the end of the story, when her act of generosity in adorning the bridal bed with her own rich blanket reveals to her mother who she really is. By contrast, her mother, the gossiping, garrulous woman, nearly loses her family through her own vile tongue. The folklore motifs of the abandoned twin child who is revealed in the end to be of noble blood suggest the tale’s affinity with an oral tradition. Furthermore, the fact that the 22-line prologue toLe Freinealso appears in two manuscripts as the prologue to another Middle English Bretonlai, SIR ORFEO(which also is included in the Auchinleck manuscript), suggests some affinity between the authors and perhaps the audiences of those two poems.

■ Rumble, Thomas C.The Breton Lays in Middle English. Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1965.

■ Donovan,Mortimer J.“Le Freine.” InThe Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties, 126–139. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969.

■ Freeman,Michelle. “The Power of Sisterhood: Marie de France’sLe Fresne,” inWomen and Power in the Middle Ages, edited by Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988, 250–264.

■ Auchenlick Manuscript Web site, National Library of Scotland. “Lay Le Freine.” Available online. URL: http://www.nls.uk/auchinleck/mss/freine.html. Accessed February 6, 2005.

■ “Lay le Freine.” InThe Middle English Breton Lays, edited by Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury. Kalamazoo, Mich.:Medieval Institute Publications, 1995.