Writing History in Medieval England (c.730 - 1509): an attempt at an introduction

This post was originally written a week ago for a British Medieval History Group on Facebook that has a chronological span of 800 - 1509. As a result, a lot of it goes later than I normally would on this blog and is also essentially anglocentric, which is normally something I try to avoid being.

 

From the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, hundreds of written histories were produced in England. Some of the authors of these histories are written by famous and prolific authors whose lives and careers we know a lot about, like the Venerable Bede (c.660 - 735), William of Malmesbury (c.1090 - 1143), Matthew Paris (c.1200 - 1259) and Thomas Walsingham (c.1370 - 1422), while others remain completely anonymous and we can know almost nothing about them - like the authors of the six versions (A, B, C, D, E and F) of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the various monastic and urban annalists of the later middle ages. When we imagine a medieval chronicler, we normally imagine a monk hunched over a desk in a candle-lit scriptorium deftly putting ink onto parchment with a quill-pen. Basically, something like this twelfth century illumination here ...

And yes, a large number of chroniclers were monks. But by no means all. Plenty of secular priests and cathedral canons wrote histories too, like Hugh the Chanter (d.1140), an archdeacon at York who wrote a history of the Church of York from 1066 to 1127, Henry of Huntingdon (1088 - 1157), an archdeacon at Huntingdon who wrote a history of the kings of England from the coming of the Anglo-Saxons c.449 to the accession of Henry II in 1154, the Yorkshire priest Peter Langtoft (d.1307) who chronicled the reign of Edward I and John Rous (1411 - 1492), a royal chaplain and canon of St Mary's Collegiate Church at Warwick who wrote a history of the kings of Britain from the legendary Brutus of Troy (a great-grandson of Aeneas) down to Richard III. In the post-1300 period, we also have a number of lay men who wrote chronicles, including knights like the grizzled northern warrior Sir Thomas Grey the Younger (1310 - 1369), ex-soldiers and diplomats like the Northumbrian chronicler John Hardyng (1378 - 1465), university educated clerks not in holy orders like the early humanist William Worcester (1415 - 1482) and merchants like the London draper Robert Fayban (d.1512). Nor were the writers of history necessarily male either - to give just one example, we have a twelfth century biography of Edward the Confessor written by a nun of Barking Abbey in Essex. And they wrote in a range of languages too. Latin was always in use for historical works throughout this period, being as it was the language of the educated. But, uniquely in the early medieval West (no other vernacular chronicles survive from pre-1100 Europe), the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles were written in Old English. And from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries many chronicles from Geoffrey Gaimar's Estoire des Engleis to Thomas Grey's Scalachronica were written in Anglo-Norman French, and from the thirteenth century Middle English was increasingly adopted as a language of respectable history writing.

(Above) The deluxe first folio of the Cotton Tiberius manuscript of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, dating from the early Ninth century, currently stored in the British library

(Below) The frontispiece of the third edition of Robert Fabyan's Chronicle, published in 1542, showcasing the technological transformation in the media of history writing that came at the end of this period in the form of the printed book 

Now we must bear two things in mind when dealing with this wealth of historical writing, both of which will be discussed in more detail below.

The first is that the priorities of medieval chroniclers are NOT the same as those of modern historians. They didn't necessarily aim for objective analysis of past events. Most of the time they approached their sources very differently to those trained in modern historical methods and critical approaches today, to the point that some inserted ancient myths and legends and contemporary gossip and rumour while apparently suspending any kind of scepticism. Many wrote consciously to fulfil the expectations of certain literary genres, like hagiography (biographies of saints), or in the models provided by the Bible, classical Roman authors or early Christian writers, often directly quoting them in places. Many also consciously wrote to entertain. And they didn't always see factual truth as the most important kind of truth their readers could get out of their histories - moral, spiritual and theological truths were often just as or even more important.

The second thing to bear in mind is that this does NOT make medieval chroniclers necessarily any more stupid, corrupt, credulous, partisan or polemical on average than anyone who wrote histories in more modern periods, or indeed does today. These men (and much more rarely women) who wrote narrative histories, annals and biographies in medieval England were intelligent, learned and sophisticated individuals, who were at the same time subject to the same human flaws and frailties as we are. Moreover, the way they saw and made sense of the world was very different to our post-scientific revolution, post-enlightenment worldview today - their worldview was deeply informed by Christianity and a sense that God and other supernatural forces were always intervening in earthly affairs, and by the authority of ancient texts.

Chronicles aren't our only way into the medieval past. Medieval England is remarkably blessed with written documents of all kinds. If we just stick to the sources for political history, from the seventh century we have law codes like the Laws of Aethelbert of Kent (c.616), the oldest document written in the English language, and the Laws of Ine of Wessex (c.694), as well as the canons of church councils like the synod of Whitby in 664 that was held to resolve the tensions between the Roman and Celtic churches. The archives of the various monasteries and cathedrals that popped up all over lowland Britain with the Christianisation of the Anglo-Saxons also take off from about the 680s. From the beginning of the eighth century, the letters of prominent individuals like the letter written in 704 by Bishop Waldhere of London to Archbishop Bertwald of Canterbury, the oldest letter written on parchment to survive as an original copy, which describes conflict between the king of Wessex and the two joint kings of Essex. From the ninth and tenth centuries, we get Latin diplomas issued at royal assemblies which have witness lists, enabling us to know who was present at these regular gatherings of the political community, who was in favour at the royal court and who wasn't. From the reign of Aethelred the Unready (r.978 - 1016) we have royal writs - terse written instructions in Old English that would be read publicly in the shire court to all the local landowners to notify them of the royal will, with the local bishop/ abbot and the sheriff each keeping a copy.

After the Norman conquest we of course have the Domesday Book - arguably one of the most remarkable administrative documents produced anywhere in the medieval world; not even the bureaucracies of the Roman Empire (Byzantium), Fatimid Egypt or Song China, which were arguably light years ahead of anything that existed in Norman England, produced anything remotely comparable to it that survives to this day. We also get the beginning of systematic record keeping of royal revenues with the pipe roll of 1128 - 1130 in the reign of Henry I. Moving forward into the Angevin period (1154 - 1272), we see all of the main departments of state at Westminster like the Chancery, the Exchequer, the Treasury, the Privy Seal, the courts of King's Bench and Common Pleas etc take shape and with them new archives i.e. in the reign of King John, the Chancery starts producing the Charter Rolls series from 1199, the Patent Rolls from 1201 and the Close Rolls from 1204,.. Under Edward I (r.1272 - 1307), with the crystallisation of the Westminster Parliament as an institution, we start to get statute legislation and petitions to parliament, as well as the remarkable Hundred Rolls enquiry into local government in 1279 and so many other kinds of documentary sources.

By the fifteenth century, when we enter the age of what could quite genuinely be called mass politics the range of sources becomes mind-boggling. We have records of parliamentary and municipal elections. We have political sermons like those the English crown had issued in churches and court rooms to encourage support for the Hundred Years' War. Pamphlets like the Libelle of Englysche Polyce of c.1436 (a xenophobic, early mercantilist tract that called for an end to the French wars in favour waging a naval war with the Flemish and the German Hanseatic League for control of Channel and North Sea shipping) start to appear on the scene. As do manifestoes like those issued by Richard duke of York and Warwick the Kingmaker in the wars of the Roses to stir up popular support for their causes. And to get a nice grassroots view of it all, we have voluminous collections of letters by gentry families, the most famous of all being the Paston letters, that provide us with remarkable insight into the dynamics of local politics in Norfolk (as well as other aspects of life in the period) from the 1440s to the 1480s, and what the events of the Wars of the Roses actually meant for relatively ordinary people in the shires.

It is thus possible to work primarily or exclusively with documentary sources, and English medieval historians, especially those working after c.1200, when the volume of archival material increases exponentially, have traditionally been inclined to do that and discount narrative sources as highly unreliable and of little interest to the serious historian. This approach is misguided for two reasons. The first is that narrative sources provide us with a chronological and narrative framework to help us make sense of events. Obviously, that cannot be taken on its own and we need to corroborate each narrative source with the other available narrative sources, as well as with the documentary record, to be certain about what really happened when and how. But its infinitely better than having to piece together events from the documentary record, which is what specialists on the Visigothic kingdom of Spain in the seventh century, northern Spain and Italy in the period 900 - 1050 or indeed England in the period between Bede and Alfred the Great essentially have to do due to lack of contemporary narrative sources, or to have not much at all by way of either like specialists on England and Wales before c.600 or the Pictish kingdom/s in Scotland before c.850 are faced with.

But more importantly, chronicles are sources of unparalleled richness on the mentalities of the age – irrespective of whether they get right what actually happened, they tell us so much about how literate, historically-minded individuals thought and felt about how the world they live in came to be and what was currently going on in it. They also provide a well of information for beliefs, attitudes, values and prejudices held by people more generally at the time. Its precisely because of this, that historians like Matthew Paris still attract so much interest. As any resident thirteenth century specialist can confirm for you, Matthew Paris is a fascinating man of contradictions. At once he is a highly learned man who knew a great deal of what there was to know about the history of the British Isles from earliest times, and of contemporary events going on in places as far apart as Norway, Sicily, the Holy Land, Eastern Europe and the Eurasian Steppe, and was often very transparent about his sources. At the same time, he was a deeply prejudiced man, with a deep-seated hatred for King Henry III, the queen-mother Isabella of Angouleme and her relatives, the queen-consort Eleanor of Provence and her relatives, the Papacy, foreigners, the Knights Templar and Hospitaller and the friars, and those prejudices led him to misrepresent his information, pass off his own personal views as public opinion and possibly even forge some of the original documents he copied and inserted into his chronicle. Nonetheless, the fact he was so up-front about his prejudices suggests that he expected at least some of his intended audience to share them, and indeed many of the events of the reign of Henry III seem to bear that out – the xenophobia towards foreigners at court oozing from the pages of Matthew Paris was a significant motor for stirring up support for the baronial reform movement of 1258. Similarly, his account of the Mongols engaging in cannibalism during their invasion of Poland and Hungary in 1241 – 1242 reflects both how much of a psychological shock the invasion was to thirteenth century Christian Europeans, to the point that such lurid and exaggerated accounts of the atrocities committed by the Mongol army (mass slaughter, rape and displacement of Polish and Hungarian civilians did indeed take place) could emerge from second and third hand testimony. But it also shows the influence of Classical texts on medieval thinking. Ancient Greek and Roman authors like Herodotus and Pliny the Younger had claimed that to the northeast of Scythia lived the anthropophagi, a tribe of man-eaters who wore the scalps of their dead enemies and drank from their skulls. Similarly, the first century AD Jewish historian Flavius Josephus had claimed that Alexander the Great had built a brass wall around the extreme north-eastern region of the world to keep out the flesh-eating monstrous children of the Biblical giants Gog and Magog, who would be set loose with the coming of the Apocalypse. Such ancient stereotypes about the peoples that lived in the regions beyond the known world would have doubtlessly influenced Matthew Paris and other medieval authors writing about the Mongols, who would have genuinely seemed at once exotic and terrifying to them. Thus, in an age in which historians, including those who work on the Middle Ages, are becoming increasingly interested in global history, Matthew Paris remains relevant and valuable as ever.

 

(Above) A drawing in the author's own hand of Matthew Paris kneeling as a supplicant before the enthroned Virgin Mary: a medieval selfie?

Medieval historians wrote histories for a range of purposes. Some really did write them for nakedly propagandistic purposes, like William of Poitiers’ adulatory panegyric to William the Conqueror, the “Gesta Guillelmi” (c.1077). Here, the author also takes an opportunity to show off his learning by writing it in an extremely ornate and classicising Latin, frequently embedding quotations and paraphrases from ancient Roman authors like the first century BC historian Sallust in the text and finishing off with a lengthy comparison between the Hastings campaign and Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BC as recounted in the “Commentaries on the Gallic War” written by Caesar himself. William of Poitiers is an extreme example, and was not widely read in his own day – no medieval manuscript copy of his work survives, only an incomplete early seventeenth century printed version by the French antiquarian Andre Duchesne. Yet some much more reputable historians also engaged in a certain degree of partisan polemic. For example, the Venerable Bede did much to emphasise the singular importance of the Roman Church in the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons at the expense of the Celtic Church, which had played no small part in converting his own Northumbria.

 

Others wrote for more constructive, yet nonetheless present-centred concerns. Besides trying to promote Roman Christianity over Celtic Christianity, Bede was also trying to help construct a collective identity for the West Germanic peoples that had settled in lowland Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries and been Christianised in the seventh century – he was, after all, the first to write about the Gens Anglorum (English people), whom he portrays as having a special relationship with God and the Papacy. Most famously of all, is the line Bede attributes to Pope Gregory the Great (r.590 – 604) when he saw some fair-haired slave boys in the market at Rome and was told they were from the land of the Angles, to which he replied non Angli sed Angeli (not Angles but Angels). The three great historians of the post-conquest generation, Orderic Vitalis (1075 – 1142), William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon, all of whom were of mixed English and Norman parentage, wrote their histories both to understand why the Norman Conquest, which they saw as highly traumatic and transformative, had happened. They saw the root cause of the Norman Conquest as being divine retribution for the poor organisation of the English church, lack of discipline for its clergy and the loose morals and effeteness of the English people following cataclysm of the renewed Viking invasions of 991 – 1016, which undid all the good reformist work done by King Edgar the Peaceful and Archbishop Dunstan of Canterbury. At the same time, they wanted to preserve the memory of the great achievements of the Anglo-Saxon past, not just to ward off sceptical Normans who doubted the validity of Anglo-Saxon saints’ cults, but also to satiate the interests of many members of the twelfth century Anglo-Norman elite who were actually interested in the history of the kingdom their fathers and grandfathers had conquered. For example, Henry of Huntingdon’s patron was Bishop Alexander of Lincoln, and Geoffrey Gaimar wrote his French verse translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the Estoire des Engleis, for Constance FitzGilbert, a lady from an Anglo-Norman gentry family in Lincolnshire. Sir Thomas Gray said he began writing his history while in prison in Edinburgh in 1355 because he wanted to be of aid to those who

 

“would take delight in, or who wishes to know, how the island of Great Britain (formerly Albion, the land of giants, now England) was originally inhabited – and by what race, and of their origin, and the procession of the line of kings there has been, and their conversion.”

 

Thus, many medieval chroniclers were genuinely trying to make sense of the past and meet the demands of audiences, clerical and lay, who wanted to know more about it.

 

Medieval chroniclers were also serious about their research. For example, when writing about the history of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, William of Malmsbury, Henry of Huntingdon and John of Worcester all used Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the two narrative sources still most widely used today, and were capable of carefully and critically contrasting where the two accounts corroborated and where they differed. For example, Henry of Huntingdon noted that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provided a very different account of what happened after the death of King Cenwalh in 672 to that provided by Bede. And William of Malmsbury noted that Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gave very different lengths for the reign of Aethelbert of Kent. Indeed, some medieval chroniclers strove to provide the equivalent of modern reference works. For example, John of Worcester set out genealogies of the royal families of all the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, and by scouring seventh and eighth century hagiographies was able to determine the names of the wives of the early Anglo-Saxon kings, before arranging them out in diagrammatic family trees like we’re familiar with today. He also provided short histories of each kingdom, lists of the shires and bishoprics of his own day that were within the boundaries of these kingdoms and provides a summary account of the histories of each shire and diocese – his work was basically the prototype of the Handbook of British Chronology.

In the early thirteenth century, Thomas of Marlborough, abbot of Evesham, wrote a history of his abbey as part of an ongoing dispute over lands, rights and jurisdiction between his abbey and the bishop of Worcester, one that even made it to the papal curia in Rome, in which he did extensive documentary research in the archives of Evesham to prove that his abbey lawfully possessed the lands and rights that it claimed, some of them going back as far as its foundation at the beginning of the eighth century by St Egcwine, bishop of Worcester. 

In the fourteenth century, Sir Thomas Gray was able to use a range of sources for writing his Scalachronica. For the earliest bits he used the Bible, Virgil’s Aeneid and the Roman de Brut by Wace. For the history of the ancient Britons he used Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. For the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms up to 735, he used Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People. For the period 735 to 1066 he used Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, which itself was based on the meticulous research done by John of Worcester, William of Malmsbury and Henry of Huntingdon. For the period 1066 – 1272 he used John of Tynemouth’s Historia Aurea. And for the reigns of the three Edwards, he used the memories of his father, who had fought for Edward I and Edward II in Scotland, and his own memories, combined with the stories he’d heard from other soldiers on campaign, from which he got to know about events going on in places as far apart as Lithuania and Spain. He also used Scottish chronicles that he was able to access in prison, which were unavailable in England, to write about Scotland’s history prior to 1286. While some of his choices of sources were questionable, such as Geoffrey of Monmouth, many were in fact very judicious and show that he was making best use of all material available to him – like Bede, Ranulf Higden and John Tynemouth, as well as the invaluable first-hand accounts of the English campaigns in Scotland and France from his father and his own experiences. 

More than a century later after Grey, the London merchant John Fabyan made use of a range of different sources including Bede, William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Ranulf Higden and the Brut Chronicle (the most popular historical work in late medieval England, existing in many different versions, all going from the legendary Brutus of Troy to the present day), but also the civic records of the city of London and his own eyewitness testmonies to certain events, including the arrival of the first Native Americans (three men from Newfoundland) in England in 1502.

We also get a certain degree of research into archaeology and material culture. For example, in his history of English bishops, William of Malmsbury accounts for the early history of Carlisle by studying its Roman ruins, including a hall with its roof and walls still completely intact in his own day. And in the late fifteenth century, in his geneaological roll for Richard III and his queen, Anne Neville, John Rous extensively studied funerary monuments and other contemporary artworks so that their pre-1200 ancestors would be depicted in chainmail and spangenhelms/ Norman nasal helmets, her fourteenth century ancestors in partial plate and bascinets, Anne's father Richard Neville "the Kingmaker" in full articulated Gothic plate etc.

Semi legendary ancestors of the earls of Warwick in the Rous Roll

Edward the Confessor and William the Conqueror in the Rous Roll

Guy de Beauchamp (1272 - 1315), earl of Warwick depicted over the slain corpse of Piers Gaveston in the Rous Roll - the transition from mail to plate armour is nicely depicted here, even if some of the bits of armour that Rous depicts (like the visored bascinet) came in later than he thought

The Earls of Warwick 1315 - 1439 showcasing the development of plate armour

The Warwick the Kingmaker himself in the Rous Roll

And finally, medieval chroniclers were able to spot pseudohistory where they saw it. William of Newburgh (d.1202), might not have always been so sceptical and scientific in his approach to history – he did provide accounts of ghosts, vampires and green children while suspending disbelief – but he outed Geoffrey of Monmouth as a fraud, pointing out that if Arthur really had conquered Gaul and Rome, as Geoffrey of Monmouth had claimed, why is he not mentioned in Continental Latin sources from that period? More than two centuries later, fifteenth century monks also noted that King Arthur could not have been fighting with Emperor Lucius at the time of Mordred’s betrayal, because no other sources mention a Roman emperor called Lucius in the late fifth century.

 

To sum up, history writing in the Middle Ages was not like history writing today, but it was much more sophisticated, motivated by a genuine desire to get to grips with the past and, dare I say, modern than we give it credit for.