oldest type of MS., “Messire Rustacians de Pise”?
Our knowledge of him is but scanty. Still something is known of him
besides the few words concluding his preamble to our Traveller’s Book,
which you may read at pp. 1–2 of the body of this volume.
In Sir Walter Scott’s “Essay on Romance,” when he speaks of the new
mould in which the subjects of the old metrical stories were cast by
the school of prose romancers which arose in the 13th century, we find
the following words:—
“Whatever fragments or shadows of true history may yet remain
hidden under the mass of accumulated fable which had been heaped
upon them during successive ages, must undoubtedly be sought in
the metrical romances.... But those prose authors who wrote under
the imaginary names of RUSTICIEN DE PISE, Robert de Borron, and
the like, usually seized upon the subject of some old minstrel;
and recomposing the whole narrative after their own fashion, with
additional character and adventure, totally obliterated in that
operation any shades which remained of the original and probably
authentic tradition,” &c.[6]
Evidently, therefore, Sir Walter regarded Rustician of Pisa as a person
belonging to the same ghostly company as his own Cleishbothams and
Dryasdusts. But in this we see that he was wrong.
In the great Paris Library and elsewhere there are manuscript volumes
containing the stories of the Round Table abridged and somewhat
clumsily combined from the various Prose Romances of that cycle,
such as _Sir Tristan_, _Lancelot_, _Palamedes_, _Giron le Courtois_,
&c., which had been composed, it would seem, by various Anglo-French
gentlemen at the court of Henry III., styled, or styling themselves,
Gasses le Blunt, Luces du Gast, Robert de Borron, and Hélis de Borron.
And these abridgments or recasts are professedly the work of _Le
Maistre Rusticien de Pise_. Several of them were printed at Paris in
the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries as the works of
Rusticien de Pise; and as the preambles and the like, especially in the
form presented in those printed editions, appear to be due sometimes to
the original composers (as Robert and Hélis de Borron) and sometimes to
Rusticien de Pise the recaster, there would seem to have been a good
deal of confusion made in regard to their respective personalities.
From a preamble to one of those compilations which undoubtedly belongs
to Rustician, and which we shall quote at length by and bye, we learn
that Master Rustician “translated” (or perhaps _transferred?_) his
compilation from a book belonging to King Edward of England, at the
time when that prince went beyond seas to recover the Holy Sepulchre.
Now Prince Edward started for the Holy Land in 1270, spent the winter
of that year in Sicily, and arrived in Palestine in May 1271. He
quitted it again in August, 1272, and passed again by Sicily, where in
January, 1273, he heard of his father’s death and his own consequent
accession. Paulin Paris supposes that Rustician was attached to the
Sicilian Court of Charles of Anjou, and that Edward “may have deposited
with that king the Romances of the Round Table, of which all the
world was talking, but the manuscripts of which were still very rare,
especially those of the work of Helye de Borron[7] ... whether by
order, or only with permission of the King of Sicily, our Rustician
made haste to read, abridge, and re-arrange the whole, and when Edward
returned to Sicily he recovered possession of the book from which the
indefatigable Pisan had extracted the contents.”
But this I believe is, in so far as it passes the facts stated in
Rustician’s own preamble, pure hypothesis, for nothing is cited that
connects Rustician with the King of Sicily. And if there be not some
such confusion of personality as we have alluded to, in another of the
preambles, which is quoted by Dunlop as an utterance of Rustician’s,
that personage would seem to claim to have been a comrade in arms of
the two de Borrons. We might, therefore, conjecture that Rustician
himself had accompanied Prince Edward to Syria.[8]
[Sidenote: Character of Rustician’s Romance compilations.]