Anglo-Norman Studies 30: Proceedings of the Battle Conference 2007 (Anglo-Norman Studies)

ANGLO-NORMAN STUDIES XXX PROCEEDINGS OF THE BATTLE CONFERENCE 2007

The 2007 conference on Anglo-Norman Studies, the thirtieth in the annual series, was held in Wales, and there is a Welsh flavour to the proceedings now published. Five of the thirteen papers cover Welsh topics in the long twelfth century: Church reform, political culture, the supposed resurgence of Powys as a political entity, and interpreter ­families in the Marches, besides a broad and compelling historiographical survey of the place of the Normans in Welsh history. Twelfth-century England is represented by papers on chivalry and kingship (in literature and life), the Evesham surveys, lay charters, and Henry of Blois and the arts. Essays which focus on the southern Italian city of Trani and on the crusader history of Ralph of Caen explore wider Norman identities. Finally, there are two broad surveys contextualizing the Anglo-Norman experience: on the careers of the clergy and on how warriors were identified before heraldry. Chris Lewis is Reader in History at the University of London Institute of Historical Research and VCH Editor for Sussex.

ANGLO-NORMAN STUDIES XXX PROCEEDINGS OF THE BATTLE CONFERENCE 2007

Edited by C. P. Lewis

THE BOYDELL PRESS

©  Editor and Contributors 2007, 2008 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner First published 2008 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN  978–1–84383–379–6

ISSN  0954-9927 Anglo-Norman Studies (Formerly ISSN 0261-9857: Proceedings of the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies)

The Boydell Press is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

CONTENTS LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, MAPS, AND TABLES EDITOR’S PREFACE ABBREVIATIONS

The Normans in Welsh History (R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture) Huw Pryce

vi vii ix 1

William Marshal, Lancelot, and Arthur: Chivalry and Kingship Laura Ashe

19

Grades of Ordination and Clerical Careers, c. 900–c. 1200 Julia Barrow

41

Evesham J and Evesham L: Two Early Twelfth-Century Manorial Surveys Howard B. Clarke

62

Aspects of Church Reform in Wales, c. 1093–c. 1223 John Reuben Davies

85

Lay Charters and the Acta of Henry II Judith Everard

100

Reinventing Normans as Crusaders? Ralph of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi Natasha Hodgson

117

Kings, Lords, Charters, and the Political Culture of Twelfth-Century Wales Charles Insley

133

Identifying the Warrior on the Pre-Heraldic Battlefield Robert Jones

154

St Nicholas the Pilgrim and the City of Trani between Greeks and Normans, c. 1090–c. 1140 Paul Oldfield

168

The ‘Resurgence’ of Powys in the Late Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries 182 David Stephenson Interpreter Families and Anglo-Welsh Relations in the Shropshire-Powys Marches in the Twelfth Century Frederick Suppe

196

A Taste for the Antique? Henry of Blois and the Arts Jeffrey West

213

ILLUSTRATIONS, MAPS, AND TABLES Evesham J and Evesham L Fig. 1 Table 1 Table 2 Table 3 Fig. 2 Table 4 App. A App. B

The composition of Blackenhurst hundred c. 1104 Tax assessments of manors comprising Blackenhurst hundred Fiscal and manorial data in Domesday Book and Evesham J Subtenurial developments, c. 1104 to c. 1130 The manor of Beckford The manor of Beckford, 1086–c. 1126 A numbered edition of Evesham J An edition of Evesham L

67 70 71 72 74 76 83 84

The Political Culture of Twelfth-Century Wales Fig. 1 Fig. 2 Table 1 Table 2

Family politics in early twelfth-century Powys Family politics in early twelfth-century Arwystli Styles used in twelfth-century Welsh charters Titles used in the Brut y Tywysogyon

139 141 151 153

St Nicholas the Pilgrim and Trani Fig. 1 Fig. 2

Southern Italy, reproduced from P. Oldfield, ‘Urban Government in 169 Southern Italy, c. 1085–c. 1127’, EHR 122, 2007, 579–608 at 580, by permission of Oxford University Press The cathedral at Trani, photograph courtesy of Dr K. E. Oldfield 176

Interpreter Families and Anglo-Welsh Relations Fig. 1 The lineage and connections of Roger of Powys Fig. 2 The northern and central Welsh Marches Fig. 3 The dynasty of Powys and the lineage of Iorwerth Goch

198 200 208

EDITOR’S PREFACE It has long been the custom of the Battle conference to leave its usual home of Pyke House every fifth year and travel abroad. Previous expeditions have been to Caen (1987), Palermo (1992), Dublin (1997), and Glasgow (2002). Since ‘abroad’ clearly means ‘outside Anglo-Norman England’, it was possible in 2007 to visit Wales, the only one of the four nations of the British Isles (or indeed the Six Nations) previously unvisited. The thirtieth Battle conference was thus held 1–6 August at ­ Gregynog, the conference centre of the University of Wales, west of Offa’s Dyke and the river Severn, in the medieval commote of Cedewain, long ruled by an independent native dynasty (though perhaps briefly under Anglo-Norman overlordship). Holding the conference away from Battle is a reminder of quite how much work the staff of Pyke House do in preparation for our visit. This year Dr Karen Jankulak (University of Wales, Lampeter) volunteered to take bookings and liaise with ­ Gregynog, perhaps not realizing how much was involved, and certainly not knowing that she would be made head of department in the meantime. She was properly thanked at the conclusion of the conference, but the director’s relief and gratitude linger still in recalling how smoothly all the arrangements went. The staff at Gregynog were also wonderfully accommodating and helpful. Gregynog’s extraordinary architecture, lovely gardens and grounds, and atmospheric bar made for a memorable conference. All but one of the papers read there are printed here, with the addition of Howard Clarke’s paper on the Evesham surveys, read at the 2005 conference and not then available for publication. It is hoped to include Lisa Reilly’s paper on ‘The invention of tradition in Norman culture’ in a future volume. The Allen Brown Memor­ial Lecture, honouring the founder of the conference, was delivered on the first evening by Professor Huw Pryce of the University of Wales, Bangor. The lecture is supported by the R. Allen Brown Memorial Trust, a registered charity. A large group of local historians (many of them members of the Powysland Club) attended the lecture and reception at the invitation of the Trust. There were two outings during the conference. On Friday 3 August we were conducted around Anglo-Norman Shrewsbury (the former abbey church, the castle, and the townscape between) by Dr Nigel Baker, around Wigmore (parish church and castle) by Dr Carol Cragoe, and finally around Pipe Aston parish church by Dr Sally Harvey. Between Shrewsbury and Wigmore we lunched very well indeed at the Riverside Inn, Aymestrey, on the recommendation of Dr Harvey. On the afternoon of Sunday 5 August Dr David Stephenson showed us Meifod and Mathrafal, the clas and llys of the princes of Powys, about whom he had spoken in the morning. Again we were joined by many enthusiastic Montgomeryshire historians. All four tour leaders put themselves out for the conference and are warmly thanked. There were displays of new and second-hand books during the conference by Boydell & Brewer, the Castle Bookshop at Llandyssil (Nicholas and Eva Moore), and David Dumville. Many people at Boydell & Brewer — too many to name them all — performed wonders to produce the previous year’s proceedings in time for Gregynog, and ­Caroline Palmer (who had to miss the conference for the first time in years) knows

exactly how to insist that the editor delivers the volume to her in a (reasonably) timely fashion. Further information about the Battle Conference can be seen at www.battleconference.com. Chris Lewis

ABBREVIATIONS AD Add. AN ANS ASC, trans.   Swanton BAR BL BN Book of Fees Cal. Chart. R. Cal. Pat. CDF Chron. Battle Close Rolls Complete Peerage

Ctl. CUL Delisle, Recueil

Dugdale,   Monasticon Eadmer, HN

EcHR EEA EETS

Archives départementales Additional Paris, Archives nationales de France Anglo-Norman Studies The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. and ed. M. J. Swanton, London 1996 British Archaeological Reports London, British Library Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France Liber Feodorum: The Book of Fees, commonly called Testa de Nevill, 3 vols, HMSO 1920–31 Calendar of the Charter Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 6 vols, HMSO 1903–27 Calendar of the Patent Rolls preserved in the Public Record Office, 71 vols, HMSO 1891–1986 Calendar of Documents preserved in France, Illustrative of the History of Great Britain and Ireland, I, A.D. 918–1206, ed. J. Horace Round, HMSO 1899 Chronicon Monasterii de Bello: The Chronicle of Battle Abbey, ed. and trans. E. M. Searle, Oxford 1980 Close Rolls of the Reign of Henry III preserved in the Public Record Office, 14 vols, HMSO 1902–38 G. E. C[okayne], The Complete Peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom, Extant, Extinct, or Dormant, new edn by Vicary Gibbs and others, 12 vols, London 1910–59 Cartulary Cambridge University Library Recueil des actes de Henri II, roi d’Angleterre et duc de Normandie, concernant les provinces françaises et les affaires de France, ed. L. Delisle and E. Berger, 4 vols and separate Introduction, Paris 1906–27 William Dugdale, Monasticon Anglicanum, new edn by Henry Ellis and Bulkeley Bandinel, 6 vols, London 1817–30 Eadmer, Historia Novorum in Anglia, in Eadmeri Historia Novorum in Anglia, et Opuscula Duo: De Vita Sancti Anselmi et Quibusdam Miraculis Ejus, ed. Martin Rule, RS 81, 1884 Economic History Review English Episcopal Acta Early English Texts Society

EHD II EHR EPNS FSI GDB

Gesetze, ed.   Liebermann Gesta Stephani Giraldi Cambrensis   Opera Handbook of Brit.   Chron. HMSO Howden, Chronica Howden, Gesta   Regis HSJ Huntingdon IE JEH JMH John of Worcester Jumièges Malmesbury, De   Gestis Pontificum Malmesbury, Gesta   Regum

English Historical Documents, 1042–1189, ed. David C. Douglas and George W. Greenaway, 2nd edn, London 1981 English Historical Review English Place-Name Society Fonti per la storia d’Italia Great Domesday Book, followed by folio number, a or b (for recto or verso), and 1 or 2 (for the column), cited from Domesday Book, seu Liber Censualis Willelmi Primi, 2 vols, London 1783, I, or from Great Domesday Book: Library Edition, ed. Ann Williams and R. W. H. Erskine, Alecto Historical Editions, London 1986–92; followed in parentheses by the abbreviated county name and the entry number (substituting an oblique for a comma between the first and second parts) used in Domesday Book, ed. John Morris and others, 34 vols, Phillimore, London 1974–86 Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen, ed. Felix Liebermann, 3 vols, Halle 1903–16 Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis, Oxford 1976 Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and George F. Warner, 8 vols, RS 21, 1861–91 Handbook of British Chronology, 3rd edn, ed. E. B. Fryde, D. E. Greenway, S. Porter, and I. Roy, London 1986 Her (His) Majesty’s Stationery Office Chronica Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols, RS 51, 1868–71 Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi [now attributed to Roger of Howden], ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 49, 1867 Haskins Society Journal Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum: The History of the English People, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway, Oxford 1996 Inquisitio Eliensis, in Inquisitio Comitatus Cantabrigiensis [and] Inquisitio Eliensis, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, London 1876 Journal of Ecclesiastical History Journal of Medieval History The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk, II–III, Oxford 1995–8 The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis, and Robert of Torigni, ed. and trans. Elisabeth M. C. van Houts, 2 vols, Oxford 1992–5 Willelmi Malmesbiriensis Monachi de Gestis Pontificum Anglorum Libri Quinque, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, RS 52, 1870 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum: The History of the English Kings, ed. and trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols, Oxford 1998–9

Marshal MGH ODNB Orderic P&P PL Poitiers PR

Regesta II Robertson,   AS Charters RS S s.a. s.n. SRG s.v. TRE TRHS VCH ×

History of William Marshal, ed. A. J. Holden, trans. S. Gregory, notes by D. Crouch, 3 vols, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications 4–6, 2002–6 Monumenta Germaniae Historica Oxford Dictionary of National Biography The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, 6 vols, Oxford, 1969–80 Past & Present Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. J.-P. Migne, 221 vols, Paris 1844–65 The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. and trans. R. H. C. Davis and Marjorie Chibnall, Oxford 1998 The Great Roll of the Pipe for [regnal year, king], Pipe Roll Society, except for 31 Henry I, HMSO 1929; 2–4 Henry II, ed. Joseph Hunter, London 1844; 1 Richard I, ed. Joseph Hunter, London 1844; 26 Henry III, ed. Henry Louis Cannon, London 1918 Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, 1066–1154, II: 1100– 1135, ed. Charles Johnson and H. A. Cronne, Oxford 1956 Anglo-Saxon Charters, ed. and trans. A. J. Robertson, Cambridge 1939 Rolls Series (Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland during the Middle Ages, Published under the Direction of the Master of the Rolls) P. H. Sawyer, Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, London 1968 sub anno, annis (‘under the year, years’) sub nomine (‘under the name’) Scriptores Rerum Germanicarum [in MGH] sub verbo, verbis (‘under the word, words’) tempore regis Eadwardi (‘in King Edward’s time’), i.e. 1066 Transactions of the Royal Historical Society The Victoria History of the Counties of England [with county name], in progress [The form 1066 × 1087 indicates an uncertain date within the range]

R. Allen Brown Memorial Lecture

THE NORMANS IN WELSH HISTORY Huw Pryce Although Allen Brown did not write extensively about Wales, he was certain that the Normans had made a big difference to its history by inaugurating a conquest that was completed, some two centuries later, by Edward I. Members of the Battle Conference, on its visit to Gregynog, about eight miles west of the motte of Hen Domen near Montgomery, will hardly need persuasion that Norman conquest and settlement were significant in Wales. After all, in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries the Normans and their allies established control over a substantial swathe of the country, extending in an arc along its eastern borders and southern coast, and created marcher lordships that enjoyed extensive autonomy until the reign of Henry VIII. Yet precisely how much difference the Normans made is a matter for continuing debate. Now, I should explain at the outset that my aim is not to try and assess the nature and impact of Norman conquest and settlement in Wales. Rather, what follows will focus on how historians have viewed the place of the Normans in Welsh history, and especially how and how far these conquerors have been integrated into narratives of national history. In other words, this paper is essentially historiographical in its approach. True, Allen Brown was somewhat impatient of the efforts of previous scholars, who, he believed, had muddied the waters by their partisan stance in relation to the Norman conquest of England. Yet, as he clearly saw, his own work responded to those earlier interpretations and in turn contributed to continuing debates about the extent and significance of the Normans in English history. Historiographical reflection is valuable, indeed inescapable, in any serious effort to offer new interpretations of a given subject. That, then, is one justification for my topic: by looking at the work of previous historians, we may gain a clearer understanding of the premises and frameworks underpinning more recent studies of the Norman impact on Wales. But there is more to the enterprise than that. While looking back to previous historians’ work provides a background and context for the present state of the subject, it does not follow that we should adopt a Whiggish view that tends to deprecate earlier scholars for their lack of rigour or understanding in order to celebrate the allegedly higher standards of our own day. Instead, an investigation of earlier interpretations of the Normans’ place in the history of



R. Allen Brown, The Normans, Woodbridge 1984, 5, 73, 153; idem, The Normans and the Norman Conquest, 2nd edn, Woodbridge 1985, 11, 226. I am grateful to all those at the Battle Conference who provided feedback on the lecture at Gregynog, to Neil Evans and J. Beverley Smith for their comments on a draft of the published version, and to Nancy Edwards for her encouragement and support.  Cf. Philip Barker and Robert Higham, Hen Domen Montgomery: A Timber Castle on the EnglishWelsh Border, London 1982.  Brown, Normans and Norman Conquest, 1–5.



Huw Pryce

Wales provides valuable insights into changing assumptions about the Welsh past and Welsh notions of identity, and thus contributes to wider issues in historiography and intellectual history. The Normans are particularly interesting in this regard in that they did not themselves establish a modern nation state, or even a stateless nation (unless we count the continuing regional identity of Normandy itself), of the type that formed the prime focus of modern academic history as it developed in the nineteenth century. In treating them, historians have therefore tended to adopt two types of framework, both of which, however, rest on a shared premise privileging ethnicity as the predominant category of analysis. One of these focuses on the Normans themselves as a distinctive people whose expansion had an impact on north-western France, Britain and Ireland, southern Italy and Sicily, and the Middle East. The other, more common, framework, and the one with which I shall be principally concerned in the present discussion, is that of national history, in which the Normans were an intrusive element whose relationship to modern nations, be they states or not, was complex and often problematic. The nearest we get to identity between the two occurs, of course, in England; but, as I hardly need remind the audience at a Battle Conference, the extent to which the Normans created the English kingdom as it developed after 1066 remains highly controversial, even if controversy is less sharp than it was in the time of Freeman and Round, for example. Closer parallels for Wales may be found, of course, in Scotland and above all Ireland. In Scotland, extensive Norman settlement, at the instigation of the Scots kings, found its historiographical reflection in two broad schools of thought: one emphasizing the indigenous, Celtic element in the medieval Scottish kingdom and its modern successor; the other, Norman and Anglicizing tendencies. Linked to this was a periodization that drew a sharp dividing line between the Celtic and Norman eras in the age of Malcolm III and St Margaret. This historiographical polarization had a clear ideological complexion. In particular, some Lowland Scots histor­ ians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries sought to distance themselves from supposedly backward Celts or Gaels by claiming a common Teutonic identity – represented in the Middle Ages by the Saxons, Normans, and even, so John Pinkerton believed, the Picts – with the English in a wider British polity. This identification with different groups in the past was even clearer in the case of Ireland. Admittedly, we might hesitate to call the invaders from the late 1160s onwards ‘Normans’, preferring to revert to the terminology of the contemporary 

Cf. Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History, New York 1915, 1–25; Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans, Oxford 2000, 161–73.  See, e.g., Haskins, Normans in European History; David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050–1100, London 1969; Brown, Normans; Chibnall, Normans. Cf. also works which, while narrower in geographical scope, set Norman expansion in a wider context than that of the individual countries of Britain and Ireland, e.g. G. W. S. Barrow, Feudal Britain, London 1956; John Le Patourel, The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976; Robin Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1100–1400, Oxford 1990; R. R. Davies, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300, Cambridge 1990; idem, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343, Oxford 2000; David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: The Penguin History of Britain, 1066–1284, London 2003.  See, e.g., Marjorie Chibnall, The Debate on the Norman Conquest, Manchester 1999; Howard B. Clarke, ‘1066, 1169, and All That: The Tyranny of Historical Turning Points’, in European Encounters: Essays in Memory of Albert Lovett, ed. Judith Devlin and Howard B. Clarke, Dublin 2003, 11–36 at 12–25; Richard Barber, ‘The Norman Conquest and the Media’, ANS 26, 2003 (2004), 1–20; David Bates, ‘1066: Does the Date Still Matter?’, Historical Research, 78, 2005, 443–64.  Colin Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology and Scottish Nationalist Inhibition, 1780–1880’, Scottish Historical Review, 74, 1995, 45–68; Matthew H. Hammond, ‘Ethnicity and the Writing of Medieval Scottish History’, Scottish Historical Review, 85, 2006, 1–27.



The Normans in Welsh History 

sources that refer to them as ‘English’. But the use of ‘Norman’ has a fairly long pedigree, going back, as John Gillingham has recently argued, to the late eighteenth century, and is still current among some Irish historians. This usage is best exemplified by the title of Goddard Henry Orpen’s classic work, Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333. Orpen identified with the Normans, not because they facilitated political union with Britain – he was in fact strongly critical of kings of England for neglecting the interests of the resident settler lords in Ireland – but rather as the creators of the Anglo-Irish community to which he himself belonged, and thus of what he considered to be a more progressive kind of Irish nationality than that represented by the Gaelic traditions and perspective espoused by many of his critics, most notably Eoin MacNeill. For Orpen, then, the Normans were a good thing for Ireland, as he made clear in a letter written towards the end of the Irish Civil War in 1923 to the more nationalistically inclined Edmund Curtis, with reference to the latter’s History of Medieval Ireland: ‘I do not think you are always fair to the Normans, or give them due credit for the vast improvement produced in the state of Ireland, wherever and so long as their rule was effective.’10 The key point, then, is that some latter-day historians in Scotland and Ireland could identify with the settlers, and this helped to give the Normans historiographical sustenance as a positive force in national histories, even if this was strongly contested by other historians who identified with the ‘natives’. In assessing how and how far historians of Wales dealt with the Normans, this paper will adopt a broadly chronological – and necessarily highly selective – approach that falls into three main sections, beginning with the age of Elizabeth I, when the first histories of Wales were written, and continuing, via some of the works produced in the eighteenth and especially nineteenth centuries, through to the seminal contribution of J. E. Lloyd in the late Victorian and Edwardian era. I shall conclude by giving fairly brief consideration to some recent views of the Normans’ place in Welsh history that mark a decisive break with interpretations that had held sway for four centuries. Before going any further, however, I should, perhaps, make clear that this is not to deny that historical writing was produced in medieval Wales.11 Nevertheless, the nearest we get to history in the strict sense, as distinct, say, from annals and chronicles, is with works that were concerned, not with Wales and the Welsh as such, but rather with 

John Gillingham, ‘Normanizing the English Invaders of Ireland’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Rees Davies, ed. Huw Pryce and John Watts, Oxford 2007, 85–97.  Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333, 4 vols, Oxford 1911–20. 10 Trinity College Dublin, MS 2452, no. 10 (19 Mar. 1923). The letter continues: ‘Perhaps I erred, on the other hand, by not displaying more sympathy with the Gaelic element, but I was writing mainly about Norman rule and trying to correct the travesties of history that had too often appeared before I wrote. On the other hand, you pass lightly over the dynastic and other conflicts that incessantly broke out among the Irish themselves, and gloss over their raids of plunder and destruction by such terms as the “Irish Resurgence” a risorgimento that led not to national unity, but to the chaos and retrogression of the 15th. century. Well they have got their “Great Deliverance” now, and all I can say is Heaven help Ireland!’ It should be stressed that Orpen and Curtis treated each other with mutual respect, and the latter was far more appreciative of Orpen’s work than MacNeill and other nationalist critics were. See further, F. J. Byrne, ‘MacNeill the Historian’, in The Scholar Revolutionary: Eoin MacNeill, 1867–1945, and the Making of the New Ireland, ed. F. X. Martin and F. J. Byrne, Shannon 1973, 15–36; Seán Duffy, ‘Historical Revisit: Goddard Henry Orpen, Ireland under the Normans, 1169–1333 (1911–20)’, Irish Historical Studies, 32, no. 126, 2000, 246–59; Robin Frame, Ireland and Britain, 1170–1450, London 1998, 2–4 (and, for subsequent historiography of ‘Norman’ Ireland, ibid. 4–7); Clarke, ‘1066, 1169, and All That’, 25–32. 11 See, e.g., R. Ian Jack, Medieval Wales, London 1972, 13–46; Thomas Jones, ‘Historical Writing in Medieval Welsh’, Scottish Studies, 12, 1968, 15–27; J. Beverley Smith, The Sense of History in Medieval Wales, Aberystwyth [1989].



Huw Pryce

the Britons and the island of Britain. This is true of the early ninth-century Historia Brittonum, and truer still of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1138), a work which became a cornerstone of medieval Welsh historiography thanks to its highly dramatic elaboration of the consoling and deep-rooted conviction, which persisted well beyond the Middle Ages, that the golden age of the Welsh lay in their distant British and ultimately Trojan past.12 Welsh historical writing of the Elizabethan age exemplifies key characteristics in the treatment of the Normans that continued to resonate down to the twentieth century. Some background to begin with. The earliest book on Welsh history was Humphrey Llwyd’s Cronica Walliae, written, despite its Latin title, in English, and completed in 1559.13 Prefaced by a description of Wales, it offered an account of Welsh history – or, more precisely, ‘the kinges and princes of Walles’ – from Cadwaladr in the seventh century to Llywelyn ap Gruffudd (d. 1282), ‘the laste of the Britishe bloodde that had the governaunce of Wales’.14 Llwyd’s aim, therefore, was to demonstrate that the Welsh, whom he believed, following Geoffrey of Monmouth, to be an ancient people ultimately descended from the Trojans, had had a distinctive political history of their own that ended with the Edwardian conquest. ‘After this’, Llwyd concluded, ‘there was nothinge done in Wales worthy memory, but that is to bee redde in the English Chronicle.’15 To achieve his aim Llwyd drew extensively on a version of the medieval Welsh chronicles usually known as Brut y Tywysogyon (The Chronicle of the Princes),16 conceived in the late thirteenth century as a continuation of the Welsh versions of Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae, together with English historians such as Matthew Paris.17 Llwyd’s work remained in manuscript, however, until 1584, when David Powel published it as The Historie of Cambria.18 Powel inserted additional material from other sources, mostly printed in a smaller typeface, including a final section on ‘The Princes of Wales of the English blood’ that took the story down from the Edwardian conquest to the author’s day;19 the book was also illustrated with woodcuts, taken from the first edition of Holinshed’s Chronicles, to represent various Welsh kings and princes.20 (Llwyd’s work was first published in its original form only in 2002.)21 It was thanks to Powel, therefore, that the history of medieval Wales 12 Cf. David N. Dumville, ‘Historia Brittonum: An Insular History from the Carolingian Age’, in Histor­ iographie im frühen Mittelalter, ed. Anton Scharer and Georg Scheibelreiter, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Österreichische Geschichtsforschung 32; Munich and Vienna 1994, 406–34; Brut y Brenhinedd, Llanstephan MS. 1 Version: Selections, ed. Brynley F. Roberts, Dublin 1971, 55–74 (‘Appendix: The Historia Regum Britanniae in Wales’). 13 Humphrey Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, ed. Ieuan M. Williams, Cardiff 2002. 14 Ibid. 64. 15 Ibid. 224. 16 Cf. J. E. Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 14, 1928, 369–91; Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. Thomas Jones, Cardiff 1952, pp. xxxv–xliv. For a recent critique of the title Brut y Tywysogyon, on the grounds that it appears in no medieval manuscript of the Welsh chronicles, see Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ‘The Kings of the English’, A.D. 682–954: Texts P, R, S in Parallel, ed. David N. Dumville, Basic Texts for Mediaeval British History 1, Aberdeen 2005, p. v. 17 Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 12–59. 18 David Powel, The Historie of Cambria, Now Called Wales: A Part of the Most Famous Yland of Brytaine, Written in the Brytish Language aboue Two Hundreth Yeares Past: Translated into English by H. Lhoyd Gentleman: Corrected, Augmented, and Continued out of Records and Best Approoued Authors, London 1584; facsimile repr. Amsterdam 1969. 19 Ibid. 376–401. 20 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Powel’s Historie (1584)’, Archaeologia Cambrensis, 97 (1), 1942, 96–7. 21 See n. 13 above.



The Normans in Welsh History 

became more widely known, and his book remained very influential, with revised versions appearing as late as 1832.22 One important legacy of Llwyd and Powel was the notion that Welsh history was essentially that of its native rulers, whose reigns provided the basic chronological framework for the events narrated.23 Though, like Llwyd, he accepted the Edwardian conquest and the Union with England, and was indeed commissioned to write his Historie by Sir Henry Sidney, Lord President of Wales, Powel made it clear in his preface that he had strong patriotic motives for accepting the commission: namely, to remedy the neglect of the history of the Welsh, the earliest inhabitants of Britain, and also to defend the Welsh from what he called ‘the slanderous report’ of their actions by English historians.24 So, how did the Normans fit into the story presented by Llwyd and Powel? The first point to emphasize is that Norman conquests in Wales were not presented as a major turning point in the history of that country. Instead, following the lead supplied by the medieval Chronicle of the Princes, the key changes were, first, the ending of British rule over the whole island of Britain as a result of the AngloSaxon conquests, and, second, the extinction of native rule over Wales by Edward I. Nevertheless, the success of the Normans in conquering substantial parts of Wales was recognized, and, following the Chronicle of the Princes, the Norman threat was sometimes presented as a tribulation which the Welsh faced through putting their trust in a protective God.25 At the same time, the Normans had one great advantage that allowed them to be treated with some sympathy: they had caused the downfall of the English. Thus in his account of Æthelred II’s marriage to Emma of Normandy Powel offered an interpretation of the Norman conquest of England, which, while based on Henry of Huntingdon, adapted this source to echo a crucial leitmotiv of medieval Welsh historical tradition, attested as early as Gildas’s De excidio Britanniae in the sixth century, namely the Britons’ loss of their sovereignty of Britain to the Anglo-Saxons:

22 R. T. Jenkins, ‘William Wynne and the History of Wales’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 6, 1931–3, 153–9 at 157–9. 23 J. Beverley Smith and Llinos Beverley Smith, ‘Wales: Politics, Government and Law’, in A Companion to Britain in the Later Middle Ages, ed. S. H. Rigby, Malden MA and Oxford 2003, 309–34 at 311. This framework was not fundamentally undermined by Powel’s attempt to synchronize the reigns of Welsh rulers with those of English kings by adding the names of the latter to the head of each page beside that of the appropriate Welsh king or prince. 24 Powel, Historie of Cambria, ‘To the Reader’ (not paginated). For a judicious assessment of the work of Llwyd and Powel ‘as propaganda for a nascent Welsh protestant patriotism as well as for a resurgent dynasticism’, see Peter Roberts, ‘Tudor Wales, National Identity and the British Inheritance’, in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed. Brendan Bradshaw and Peter Roberts, Cambridge 1998, 8–42 at 23–9. Cf. also idem, ‘The “Act of Union” in Welsh History’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1972–3, 1974, 49–72, esp. 54–5; Glanmor Williams, ‘Haneswyr a’r Deddfau Uno’, in Cof Cenedl X: Ysgrifau ar Hanes Cymru, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Llandysul 1995, 31–60, esp. 34–9; Philip Schwyzer, Literature, Nationalism and Memory in Early Modern England and Wales, Cambridge 2004, 40 and n. 83. 25 e.g. Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 129: ‘But the Britons, fearinge the great streingth of the Kinge [William II], put their hope onely in the almightie Lorde, turned to him in fastinge and prayer, and repentaunnce of their sinnes, and he, that never forsaketh the penitent and contrite herte, herde their prayer, so that the Normaines and Englishmen durst never enter the lande but suche as entred were all slaine and the Kinge returned with small honor after he had builte certaine castelles in the Marches.’ The passage in fact places greater emphasis on God’s support than its medieval source: cf. Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, 20 (1095=1097); Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones, 2nd edn, Cardiff 1973, 36–7 (1095=1097). See also Smith, Sense of History, 9.



Huw Pryce God intending to punish the great sinnes and enormities of the Saxons, did moue the king thereto, that like as they being instruments of Gods wrath, vnder the colour of friends and hired soldiours, had traiterouslie and cruellie slaine the Brytaines, and driuen them out of their land, so should the Normanes by colour of this affinitie, first enter the land as friends, and bring succour against the Danes, and afterward come as foes, and be the vtter destruction of the Saxons and Angles.26

Powel added, moreover, that the destruction of the Anglo-Saxon nobility meant ‘that all the ancient noble men, and gentlemen within this land, are descended either from the Normans and French, or from the Brytaines’.27 One of the sources which Powel inserted into Llwyd’s text was Sir Edward Stradling’s account of the conquest of Glamorgan by Robert Fitzhamon and his twelve knights.28 This brings us to another important aspect of historical writing about the Normans in the Elizabethan era, namely texts that focused on the Norman conquerors rather than on Welsh history more generally. This writing was motivated by two related concerns: a pride in the origins of settler families in areas of Wales conquered by the Normans, and a desire to explain the anomalous legal and constitutional status of the lordships of the Welsh march abolished by Henry VIII’s Union legislation. Stradling’s work, composed in the 1560s at the request of Sir William Cecil, appears to draw on legendary material already circulating in Glamorgan by the fifteenth century, but first given full literary expression by him and other writers in the sixteenth.29 The principal impulse behind the composition of this tale was to establish the antiquity of the Stradling family and of other families in Glamorgan claiming Norman or English ancestry,30 and, as Ralph Griffiths has demonstrated, the text bristles with anachronisms and cannot be taken as an accurate account of Norman settlement in Glamorgan, although the role of Robert Fitzhamon himself is not in doubt.31 The earliest attempt to cite and compare different versions of the legend was made by the antiquary Rice Merrick (d. 1587), whose work on Glamorgan, Mor­ganiae Archaiographia, was largely completed in 1578 and was influenced by the example of William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent, published two years previously.32 Merrick provides a further instance of interest in Norman settlement, this time in a county context. Unlike Llwyd and Powel, moreover, Merrick held that the arrival of the Normans marked a significant turning point, for he explained that I have taken in hand to entreat of the private estate of Glamorgan, which in laws, customs and usages is known to be twice altered: first, upon the winning thereof from the Britons or Welshmen, the most ancient inhabitants thereof, by strangers, which is 26

Powel, Historie of Cambria, 75–6; cf. Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 105. Huntingdon, 338–9, likewise states that God had decided to exterminate the English for their crimes, but lacks the implicit criticism of their treatment of the Britons, merely commenting that the latter had been ‘humbled when their sins accused them’. For the heavy debt of Llwyd (and hence Powel) to Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, see Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 39–42. 27 Powel, Historie of Cambria, 117. 28 Ibid. 121–41. For a modern edition of the text, see Sir Edward Stradling, ‘Winning of the Lordship of Glamorgan’, in Rice Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, ed. Brian Ll. James, South Wales Record Soc. 1, 1983, 150–64. 29 A version of the legend was included in Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 126 (followed by Powel, Historie of Cambria, 119–21, immediately preceding Stradling’s version). 30 Powel, Historie of Cambria, 147–9; Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 237–8. 31 Ralph A. Griffiths, ‘The Norman Conquest and the Twelve Knights of Glamorgan’, in idem, Conquerors and Conquered in Medieval Wales, Stroud 1994, 19–29. 32 Merrick, Morganiae Archaiographia, 15–23; for a full assessment of the work, see the Editor’s Introduction, ibid. pp. xi–xxxvii.



The Normans in Welsh History  commonly termed the Conquest of Glamorgan: secondarily, by the famous King Henry the eighth, in the 27th year of his triumphant reign, when Wales was enabled with the benefit of the laws of England.33

Yet, while paying lip service to the idea that God had punished Iestyn ap Gwrgant’s dynasty for its sins,34 Merrick was much more critical of the Normans than Llwyd or Powel and also played down their long-term impact on the county. Thus the conquest of Fitzhamon and his followers was described as a ‘facinorous act’, ‘wickedly achieved’, resulting from ‘greediness of sovereignty and dominion’ and ‘wicked intentions’.35 The account also drew a parallel with earlier Saxon treachery which was more explicit than that drawn by Powel shortly afterwards, stating that the manner of the Normans’ acquisition of Glamorgan imitated ‘the Saxons’ fraudulent manner by them practised in achieving the sovereignty of Loegria, now called England, from the Britons, whom they pretended to aid and defend’.36 In the long run, however, the Normans had mostly integrated with the Welsh through intermarriage, so that ‘Such as remain at this day of the posterity of the conquerors (which are but few) inhabit either the towns or in the low country near the sea side, who in names and speech differ from the ancient Glamorganians’.37 Another theme of Merrick’s work is the organization and government of the marcher lordship of Glamorgan under the Norman lords and their successors, including their possession of jura regalia.38 The origins and status of marcher lordships were considered in much greater detail, and on a broader canvas, by the Pembrokeshire antiquary George Owen of Henllys, in ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers in Wales’, written in the mid-1590s.39 Owen had a personal interest in the subject, as he himself was not only the holder of the marcher lordship of Cemais in northern Pembrokeshire but also claimed, albeit on very flimsy evidence, Norman ancestry. However, such lordships had been deprived of their extensive liberties as the result of Henry VIII’s so-called Acts of Union in 1536–43, so that, Owen wrote, ‘it is now growne a doubte and question wch are and were Lordships marchers in Wales & wch were not’.40 In attempting to resolve that question he argued that the kings of England, finding it difficult to carry out a full-scale conquest of Wales, devolved the task to their great lords, who, although they held the lands thus acquired from the Crown, nevertheless were allowed to enjoy extensive regalian liberties in governing them.41 In short, Owen declared, ‘to hold a Lordshipp in Wales of the kinge in cheife in Ancient time was sufficient to make him a Lord marcher, and of 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid. 5. Ibid. 35. Ibid. 21–4. Ibid. 24–5. Ibid. 34–5. Ibid. 12, 28–9, 33–4, 35–41. George Owen, ‘A Treatise of Lordshipps Marchers in Wales’, in The Description of Penbrokshire by George Owen of Henllys, Lord of Kemes, ed. Henry Owen, 4 vols, London 1892–1936, III, 127–207 (with notes by Egerton Phillimore, ibid. 207–86). On Owen, see B. G. Charles, George Owen of Henllys: A Welsh Elizabethan, Aberystwyth 1973; Dillwyn Miles, ‘ “An Exquisite Antiquary”: George Owen of Henllys (1552–1613)’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1998, new series 5, 1999, 5–23. 40 Owen, ‘Treatise’, 173. 41 Ibid. 135–40. Owen took pains to provide reasons for the lack of royal charters granting those liberties: ibid. 140. For the views of marcher magnates from the late thirteenth century onwards that their regality derived from their predecessors’ conquests in Wales, see J. Beverley Smith, ‘ “Distinction and Diversity”: The Common Lawyers and the Law of Wales’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. Pryce and Watts, 139–52 at 147–50.



Huw Pryce

necessitie the Lord thereof was forced to take vpon him the Regall authoritie of a Lord marcher’.42 Owen also offered some sensible comments on the origins of the terms ‘marchers’ and ‘marches’,43 and contrasted the way in which the Anglo-Saxon kings had integrated the Welsh territories they conquered, such as Archenfield, into the kingdom of England with the policy of the Norman kings, unable to concentrate on Wales because of their commitments in France, of allowing their nobility to undertake piecemeal conquests as best they could.44 To sum up so far, then, Welsh historiography of the Elizabethan period reveals two broad approaches to the significance of the Normans in the history of Wales. On the one hand, Llwyd and Powel, following the lead of the medieval Welsh chronicles, constructed a narrative framed by the Anglo-Saxon occupation of England in, so they believed, the seventh century and the Edwardian conquest of Wales, a narrative that tended to play down the impact of the Normans by emphasizing the ­continuity of native political rule from the late eleventh to late thirteenth cen­turies. On the other hand, antiquaries interested in areas of Wales which had formed lordships of the Welsh march paid greater attention to the Normans, though their restricted geographical and thematic focus meant that none of these writers offered an alternative interpretation of Welsh history as a whole which could challenge the national narratives that centred on the native kings and princes. The same is true of historical works written over the following three centuries.45 Admittedly, by the nineteenth century several writers gave greater prominence to the arrival of the Normans in their periodization of the history of Wales.46 Thus in 1857 R. W. Morgan designated the entire period from 1066 to 1485 as ‘The Norman Era’,47 while in 1869 Jane Williams entitled her chapters covering the years from 1091 to 1240 ‘The Cymry and the Normans’,48 and also presented the Norman conquest of Glamorgan as a major turning point in Welsh history more generally: Then, for the first time in the history of Cymru, the hereditary succession of the native landowners was wrenched away and broken up. A people, who had retained their tribal honours throughout four centuries of Roman domination, and preserved their sacred territory from the encroaching Teutons, while defending it also from invading sea-rovers for nearly seven centuries more, saw and felt in the conquest of Morganwg the worst

42

Owen, ‘Treatise’, 152. Owen’s interpretation of the origins of marcher liberties was very influential: Miles, ‘Exquisite Antiquary’, 16. See, for example, William Coxe, An Historical Tour in Monmouthshire, 2 vols, London 1801, I, 9–10 (a work kindly drawn to my attention by Nia Powell). For modern discussion of the origins of marcher lordships in Wales, see esp. J. G. Edwards, ‘The Normans and the Welsh March’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 42, 1956, 155–77; R. R. Davies, ‘Kings, Lords and Liberties in the March of Wales, 1066–1272’, TRHS 5th series 29, 1979, 41–61. 43 Owen, ‘Treatise’, 181–7. 44 Ibid. 190–1. Cf. C. P. Lewis, ‘Welsh Territories and Welsh Identities in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, in Britons in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. Nick Higham, Woodbridge 2007, 130–43. 45 For a stimulating discussion of the main themes in Welsh historiography from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, see Dafydd Glyn Jones, Un o Wŷr y Medra: Bywyd a Gwaith William Williams, Llandygái, 1738–1817, Denbigh 1999, 294–319 (whose conclusions are summarized in idem, ‘Byw gyda Hanes’, in Cymry a’r Cymry 2000: Wales and the Welsh 2000, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Aberystwyth 2001, 87–98 at 88–90). Cf. also Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Clio and Wales: Welsh Remembrancers and Historical Writing, 1751–2001’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 2001, new series 8, 2002, 119–36. 46 Theophilus Jones, A History of the County of Brecknock, 2 vols, Brecknock 1805–9, I, 66, 90–1, continued the tradition of earlier county historians such as Rice Merrick in making the arrival of the Normans a decisive turning point in one area of the Welsh march. 47 R. W. Morgan, The British Kymry, or Britons of Cambria, Caernarfon [1857], 159–230. 48 Jane Williams, A History of Wales derived from Authentic Sources, London 1869, 192, 215, 234, 263, 295 (chapters XV–XIX).



The Normans in Welsh History  evils of subjugation; while fellow-warriors of the foes who triumphed there exultingly threatened to reduce the other districts of Cymru to a state of equal de­gradation.49

The furthest step in this direction was taken by the English historian B. B. Woodward, who not only referred to the reigns and Welsh campaigns of the kings of England in the titles of his chapters dealing with the period 1066–1189, but also justified the emphasis this implied by asserting that it was those kings, rather than the native rulers, who had primarily determined the course of events in Wales at that time. We have been compelled to employ the invasions and the deaths of the English sovereigns as the landmarks of our story, because by those events, rather than by the movements and succession of its native princes, the course of affairs in Wales was determined. The secondary importance of the character of these reguli (as the Norman chroniclers designate those whom the Welsh called ‘kings’) to that of the contem­ poraneous monarchs of Lloegria, must have been evident to our readers; and especially since the overthrow of the Saxon power.50

Overall, though, even among those historians who applied a Norman label to their periodization, the dominant chronological framework remained that set by the reigns of the Welsh rulers, and thus it was their conflicts with the Normans which continued to hold centre stage.51 Attitudes to those conflicts differed, however. Broadly speaking, one school of thought tended to view the invaders as preferable to the Welsh princes, while the other, which perhaps not surprisingly had more adherents, used the Normans as a foil for celebrating the courage and national spirit of the Welsh. (It should be added that all the historians in question, like their sixteenth-century predecessors, were strongly in favour of the Union with England under Henry VIII.) The proNorman attitude is best exemplified by two accounts of the history of Wales, one composed by John Jones, a Welsh barrister who had studied in Germany, the other by B. B. Woodward, already mentioned.52 While justifiably critical of some of his 49

Ibid. 193. For a recent assessment of Williams’s History, see Neil Evans, ‘Finding a New Story: The Search for a Usable Past in Wales, 1869–1930’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmro­ dorion, 2003, new series 10, 2004, 144–62 at 147–9. 50 B. B. Woodward, The History of Wales, London 1853, 274. The passage continues: ‘Their most marked influence upon the fate of their country was this, – the more patriotic (according to the common meaning of that much abused word) they were, the more surely they hurried Wales onward to its destruction; whilst the less anxious they were for nominal independence, and the more they affected the favour of the rulers of the Saxons, the more peaceful Wales was, and the less galling was the English yoke.’ 51 In addition to the works already cited, the point is illustrated by the two most important Welshlanguage histories of Wales in the nineteenth century. Although Thomas Price (Carnhuanawc) (1787– 1848) included sections entitled ‘Dyfodiad y Normaniaid’ (The Coming of the Normans) and ‘Arglwyddi y Cyffindiroedd, neu y Lords Marchers’ (The Lords of the Borderlands, or the Lords Marchers), he placed these within a lengthy chapter V entitled ‘Tywysogion Cymru’ (The Princes of Wales), thereby effectively subordinating them to a narrative focused on the native rulers: Thomas Price, Hanes Cymru a Chenedl y Cymry, o’r Cynoesoedd hyd at Farwolaeth Llewelyn ap Gruffydd; ynghyd a rhai Cofiaint Perthynol i’r Amseroedd o’r Pryd Hynny i Waered, Crickhowell 1842, 371, 472, 489, 494. At first sight, Robert John Pryse (Gweirydd ap Rhys) (1807–89) went further than Price by designating the whole period 1066–1282 as ‘Y Cyfnod Normanaidd’ (The Norman Period) and, in a manner reminiscent of David Powel’s page headings (n. 23 above), by juxtaposing the names of Welsh rulers with the Norman kings of their time in several chapter titles: Gweirydd ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, 2 vols, London 1872–4, II, 1, 20, 26, 33. Nevertheless, this labelling was not accompanied by a significant reorientation from the traditional emphasis on the native kings and princes in the chapters themselves. 52 A brief foretaste of this attitude is Theophilus Evans’s declaration, in the second edition (1740) of his ‘A Mirror of the First Ages’, that the conquest of Wales by Edward I was a thousand times better for the general benefit of the country than the rule of the native princes: Drych y Prif Oesoedd, ed.

10

Huw Pryce

predecessors for their fanciful interpretations,53 Jones himself was prone to eccentricity – illustrated, for example, by his evidently bowdlerizing reference to ‘the invasion of England by William the Bastard, so called from his being commander in chief of the Bastardi, who were armed with bows and arrows, and spears’.54 Jones was also unusual in that, unlike previous historians of Wales, he viewed the Normans as an essentially progressive force, praising their contribution as ‘artificers and husbandmen’ and church builders. Conversely, while expressing some patriotic sentiments in places, he criticized the native princes for their ‘false ideas … of a great government, namely, that it consisted in extent of jurisdiction, and thus overlooking the obvious criteria of population and produce’ as well as the greater willingness of the Welsh ‘to rebel under their princes than to receive benefits from the hands of enlightened Normans’.55 Likewise he declared that the Flemings settled in Pembrokeshire by the ‘liberal monarch’ Henry I ‘have been of great benefit to the principality, by introducing the practice of good husbandry’.56 Writing some thirty years later, Woodward was even sharper in his criticism of the Welsh, charging them with a penchant for falsehood and disunity, and argued that their eventual conquest was both inevitable and desirable.57 Lack of unity in the face of a foreign enemy is also a key theme in the work of those historians who portrayed the history of Wales in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries as a patriotic struggle for freedom against Norman aggression and oppression. On the whole, the emphasis here was on Welsh responses to the Normans rather than on the Normans themselves; moreover, while the latter were always cast as the enemy, this did not meant that they were subjected to unremitting condemnation. True, the later nineteenth-century historians Jane Williams and Gweirydd ap Rhys vented their spleen on ‘the rapacious Normans’, ‘Norman oppressors’, and ‘the oppression, arrogance and deceit of the Normans’,58 while both authors’ vehement anti-Catholicism found further grounds for hostility. Thus, according to Jane Williams, the Normans drove out the native clergy, attacked ‘the independence of the ancient British Church’ through establishing ecclesiastical courts ‘wholly

Samuel J. Evans, Bangor 1902, 140. This negative assessment is lacking in the corresponding passage of the first edition (1716), where, instead, the author complains that Edward’s conquest had brought the Welsh ‘through deceit and falseness under English law for the first time’: Theophilus Evans, Drych y Prif Oesoedd, Yn ôl yr Argraffiad Cyntaf: 1716, ed. Garfield H. Hughes, Cardiff 1961, 100–1. On Evans’s work, see further Geraint H. Jenkins, ‘Historical Writing in the Eighteenth Century’, in A Guide to Welsh Literature, c. 1700–1800, ed. Branwen Jarvis, Cardiff 2000, 23–44 at 27–9; Gwyn Thomas, ‘Two Prose Writers: Ellis Wynne and Theophilus Evans’, ibid. 45–63 at 54–62. 53 John Jones, The History of Wales, Descriptive of the Government, Wars, Manners, Religion, Laws, Druids, Bards, Pedigrees, and Language of the Ancient Britons and Modern Welsh, and of the Remaining Antiquities of the Principality, London [1824], pp. iii–iv. For a brief account of Jones, see The Dictionary of Welsh Biography down to 1940, ed. John Edward Lloyd and R. T. Jenkins, London 1959, 477. 54 Jones, History of Wales, 61. 55 Ibid. 66, 139. On the other hand, Jones highlighted the importance of the pedigrees of the Welsh ‘as the more ancient natives of the island’, and also conceded that the Welsh princes’ practice of breaking treaties with the English Crown was ‘morally excusable: for the kings of England by imposing on the princes by force, tyrannical conditions of tenure, had no right to expect the performance of treaties; because there can be no binding contract in any case where either of the parties is not in the full liberty and exercise of volition.’ Ibid. pp. viii, 67–8. 56 Ibid. 68. Cf. also the statement that, in implied contrast to the Normans and Flemings, ‘[t]he Welsh had not sufficient industry to cultivate their possessions’: ibid. 71. 57 Woodward, History of Wales, 239–40, 259, 274–5. For Welsh treachery and disunity, see also ibid. 232, 236, 251. 58 Williams, History of Wales, 193, 195 (and cf. ibid. 184, 199, 210, 234, 255); ap Rhys, Hanes y ­Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 21 (and cf. ibid. 3, 22, 28, 31).



The Normans in Welsh History

11

subservient to the interests of Rome’, and established religious houses which, ‘being supplied with foreign monks or canons, introduced for the first time into Wales transubstantiation, purgatory, communion in one kind, the idolatrous worship of saints and images, and the antichristian acknowledgement of the universal supremacy and infallibility of the Roman See’.59 Nevertheless, like a number of their predecessors, both Williams and Gweirydd ap Rhys also deplored the failure of some Welsh kings and princes to resist the Normans.60 The tendency of native rulers to dissipate their energies in internal dissension to the detriment of the national cause had been criticized, for example, by William Warrington, writing almost a century earlier: ‘These intestine divisions, too descriptive of the manners of the Welsh, were the means of accelerating the ruin of their states; destroying by degrees their union and their strength, and affording opportunities to the English kings of detaching the Welsh chieftains from the interests of their country.’61 Likewise Warrington and several of his successors branded as traitors those native rulers who sought Norman help against their Welsh enemies.62 Yet there was also another, more positive, side to the story: the heroic tale of Welsh bravery in resisting a foreign foe. This comes through particularly strongly in Thomas Price’s Hanes Cymru, an important Welsh-language history of Wales published in 1842.63 A particularly interesting aspect of his interpretation is the way it presents relations with the Normans as evidence of the superiority of the Welsh over the English – a notion already found, as we have seen, in the historians of the Elizabethan era. In part, this was simply a matter of saying that the Welsh had been far more determined and successful than the English in defending their land and liberty: thus the English were accused of ‘shameful submission to foreign oppression’ caused by their ‘cowardice and lack of energy’, whereas the Welsh were distinguished by their ‘patriotism and courage’, and did not lose their possessions without a fight.64 Even the propensity of the Welsh for disunity was almost turned into a virtue, inasmuch as it allowed Price to claim that it was not through their innate power that the Normans were able to establish themselves in Wales but rather because the Welsh princes employed them in their civil conflicts.65 But the most striking element in his anti-English sentiment picks up one of the cornerstones of Welsh historiography, mentioned earlier, namely the idea that the British ancestors of the Welsh had been unjustly deprived of their sovereignty in Britain by the Saxons, the last British king being forced into exile in Brittany. Powel had already strongly implied that the Norman conquest of England was divine vengeance for this, but Price gave the idea a further twist by asserting that William the Conqueror’s 59

Williams, History of Wales, 206. Cf. ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 243; E. J. Newell, A History of the Welsh Church to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, London 1895, 175–9, 193, 418–19. Although earlier historians of Wales had also expressed hostility to Catholicism, this hostility was usually directed at Augustine of Canterbury rather than at the Normans: see, e.g., Llwyd, Cronica Walliae, 185; Jones, History of Wales, 134–5. 60 Williams, History of Wales, 198; ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 10, 38. 61 William Warrington, The History of Wales, London 1786, 403; cf. ibid. 360. 62 e.g. ibid. 365; ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 5, 18; cf. Jones, History of Wales, 71. 63 For Price, see Dictionary of Welsh Biography, ed. Lloyd and Jenkins, 791–2; J. E. Lloyd, rev. Brynley F. Roberts, ‘Price, Thomas [pseud. Carnhuanawc] (1787–1848)’, in ODNB. Hanes Cymru appeared in fourteen parts between 1836 and 1842, and was published as a single volume in the latter year. 64 Price, Hanes Cymru, 474, 492, 500. Again like Powel, Price also argued that the willingness of the Normans to marry Welsh, but not Anglo-Saxon, noblewomen, demonstrated the honourable standing of the Welsh nation: ibid. 501 (a point for which Price was praised in ap Rhys, Hanes y Brytaniaid a’r Cymry, II, 22, n. †). 65 Price, Hanes Cymru, 492.

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Breton followers had recovered lands from which their forefathers had been exiled – ‘Yes, I say, it is a very special example of restoring the scales that these Bretons … returned to their native country, and contributed so effectively to placing the yoke of slavery on the necks of the English, as payment for violence and exile’.66 In the summer of 1876, over thirty years after it first appeared, Price’s book was read by a fifteen-year-old from Liverpool called John Edward Lloyd.67 Three and a half decades later, in 1911, Lloyd published his own magnum opus, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, a landmark work, which, to quote Rees Davies, ‘may be said, without exaggeration, to inaugurate the history of Wales as a modern academic subject’.68 One of Lloyd’s principal achievements was to draw on a much wider range of sources, and to analyse these much more critic­ally, than any of his predecessors. Yet in reading Lloyd it is important not to lose sight of the continuities and parallels with earlier works: especially his belief in the ancient origins of the Welsh, albeit as witnessed by prehistoric archaeology rather than Galfridian myth-making; his assumption that the history of Wales was synonymous with the history of the Welsh people and in particular its native leaders; and an acceptance of the Union with England, albeit a Union set in the wider context of the British Empire that left considerable space for the institutional expression of a distinctive Welsh identity. Arguably, then, Lloyd’s vision of Welsh history was, in Hayden White’s terms, essentially comic: yes, hopes of political independence had ended in 1282, or possibly with the failure of Owain Glyndŵr’s rising; nevertheless, all had turned out well in the end, for the struggles of the medieval period helped to preserve a distinctive national spirit that would not only go on to survive the next major period of change in Welsh history, namely industrialization and the rise of nonconformity from the late eighteenth century onwards, but also to flourish as never before in the late Victorian and Edwardian world Lloyd inhabited and indeed celebrated.69 So, how were the Normans accommodated in this interpretation of Welsh history? Lloyd first wrote about their impact on Wales while an undergraduate in Oxford, when, in March 1885, he read a paper on Wales and the marches in the reign of Stephen to the History Society, chaired by E. A. Freeman, an occasion described as follows by one of the participants: The point of interest was, what the chairman would say concerning so Celtic a subject as the doing of Gruffydd ap Llewelyn or Madoc ap Meredydd. Would he say that the time of the Society was wasted in recounting border frays between lawless marchers 66

Ibid. 478. This line of thought was developed further by R. W. Morgan, who claimed that the Normans had British roots as a result of intermarriage between the houses of Rollo of Normandy and Ralph of Brittany, and thus regarded their victory at Hastings as the recovery of their ancestral land from the Germanic oppressors: British Kymry, 159–60. 67 University of Wales, Bangor Archives, J. E. Lloyd Papers 336 (1876 diary, 14 June, 4 Aug.). Cf. Lloyd Papers 17, p. 5, for Lloyd’s possession of a copy of Carnhuanawc’s Hanes Cymru formerly owned by his maternal uncle Edward Jones (1830–63). 68 R. R. Davies, ‘Lloyd, Sir John Edward (1861–1947)’, in ODNB. 69 For recent discussions of Lloyd’s interpretation of Welsh history, see Neil Evans, ‘ “When Men and Mountains Meet”: Historians’ Explanations of the History of Wales, 1890–1970’, Welsh History Review, 22, 2004–5, 222–51 at 228–37; Huw Pryce, ‘Modern Nationality and the Medieval Past: The Wales of John Edward Lloyd’, in From Medieval to Modern Wales: Historical Essays in Honour of Kenneth O. Morgan and Ralph A. Griffiths, ed. R. R. Davies and Geraint H. Jenkins, Cardiff 2004, 14–29; idem, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity: J. E. Lloyd and the History of Caernarfonshire’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 66, 2005, 14–37. Cf. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Baltimore MD and London 1973, chapter 4, esp. 163–78 (apropos of Ranke).



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and Welsh savages? For there are three things Freeman hates, – Froude, hunting, and Celts. When the applause consequent on the reading of the paper was over, he began to inveigh against the method usually adapted by Eisteddfod writers in dealing with the history of Wales, and favourably compared with theirs the truly historical method taken by Mr Lloyd. … The learned professor ended by saying it was the most pleasant evening he had spent for a long time.70

Unfortunately no record survives of what precisely Lloyd said that evening. Presumably the paper drew on his prize-winning Eisteddfod essay on the history of Wales, a revised version of which he completed at the end of the same month.71 This outlined themes that would recur in his interpretation of the Normans’ place in Welsh history in publications over the following quarter of a century, including an important lecture on ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’ delivered in 1900, and culminating in the great History of 1911.72 One was the role of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, the king who died in 1063, in uniting Wales under his rule, and who thereby, Lloyd asserted in 1900, ‘did much to infuse into his fellow countrymen a greater confidence in themselves, and so helped them after his death to offer a united resistance to the invader. His successes fired them, as the Elizabethans were fired by the triumphs of Drake and the sea-dogs.’73 Another theme was the partial nature of the conquests, which led to a division of the country into two zones held, to quote Lloyd, by ‘the Norman castle holders and the native princes’.74 Yet a comparison with the History published in 1911 also suggests that Lloyd came to play down the significance of the Normans’ longer-term impact on Wales. In 1885 he not only pointed up the co-existence of Norman or marcher lords and Welsh rulers but also argued for their mutually beneficial interaction: Instead of sinking into the degradation of a subject race, as they would infallibly have done under an English conquest, the Welsh learned to look upon themselves as the equals of their conquerors, and the Normans, with that power of adaptation which is so marvellous a feature in their history, accepted the position, and became the civilisers, as well as the conquerors of Wales.75

The 1911 History also contrasts the English unfavourably with the Normans, but in a rather different way that emphasized the greater threat posed by the latter: ‘instead of a sluggish, home-keeping race, who had for ages given up colonisation, Wales must now face … the flower of a people pre-eminently gifted as colonists, men not in the least afraid of the difficulties and dangers of Welsh campaigning’.76 70

J. E. Lloyd Papers 252 (1885 diary, 2 Mar.); Owen M. Edwards, ‘An Oxford Letter’, University College of Wales Magazine, 7, 1884–5, 269–72 at 269–70. 71 John Edward Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, Transactions of the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales, Liverpool, 1884, Liverpool 1885, 341–408; cf. J. E. Lloyd Papers 252 (1885 diary, 31 Mar.). 72 He also dealt with the Normans’ impact on Wales in the third of his bilingual textbooks on Welsh history down to 1282 written for school children: John Edward Lloyd, Trydydd Llyfr Hanes, Caernarfon 1900, 11–53. 73 J. E. Lloyd, ‘Wales and the Coming of the Normans’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1899–1900, 122–79 at 123. 74 Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, 386–95, quotation at 394. 75 Ibid. 395. Cf. Lloyd, Trydydd Llyfr Hanes, 51–3: ‘Thus the great struggle between the Welsh and the Normans ended in the two nations agreeing to live side by side. … From this time forth Wales may be divided into Welsh Wales and Norman Wales. … The barons and the princes often fought fiercely after this, but it was as neighbours they quarrelled, over trivial points, and not as the leaders of two races bent on mutual extermination. The Welshman felt he had much to learn from the Norman, especially in military science; nor was the Norman too proud to acknowledge that the advantage rested with the Welsh in some respects, notably in regard to his literature.’ 76 Lloyd, History of Wales, II, 373.

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However, while Lloyd acknowledged that ‘[t]he struggle with the Norman’ was ‘the topic of primary interest in Welsh history’ for thirty-five years, and delineated the extent of Norman conquests in south Wales by the reign of Henry I more fully than any previous scholar,77 the conquerors were essentially subordinated to a broader narrative of Welsh national identity and independence rather than being the subject of study in their own right – a point for which Lloyd was in fact criticized by T. F. Tout.78 More specifically, Lloyd minimized the Norman impact on Wales as a whole: though their conquests were extensive, they failed to make fundamental changes to Welsh society. True, he devoted over 100 pages of the History to the period from 1063 to 1135 in two chapters each bearing the title ‘The Norman Conquest’.79 However, the first of these chapters opened with a section, based on his 1900 lecture, which emphasized the role of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn in unifying the Welsh and thus, Lloyd believed, equipping them to resist the Norman threat; while the second was immediately followed by a chapter boldly entitled ‘The National Revival’, which related the Welsh successes against the Normans in Stephen’s reign. These interpret­ ations of both Gruffudd’s rule and the Welsh risings from 1136 onwards are now open to serious question,80 but their role in Lloyd’s narrative is clear, as they served to diminish the significance of the Norman conquests by confining them between two supposed high tides of Welsh national unity. The point was driven home several chapters later, when Lloyd concluded that, at the end of the twelfth century, ‘in essentials Wales still retained its ancient social structure, remaining a tribal and pastoral community in spite of the great wave of feudalism which beat upon its eastern flank and daily threatened to engulf the older social system’.81 Lloyd’s treatment of the Normans in Wales is consistent, then, with his aim of showing that the Welsh had a political history of their own in the Middle Ages, represented by the struggles of the native princes to establish unity and maintain independence from England, struggles that helped to explain the survival of a distinctive sense of national identity into the present. As he explicitly stated in 1932, he sought to ‘delineate the course of events which has created the Welsh people’,82 thereby implying that other peoples who had inhabited the land of Wales were of only peripheral significance. If so, he may have regarded changes brought about by Norman and other settlers as merely alien intrusions that did not count as part of Welsh history. More generally, his emphasis on both political events and, more importantly, the deep roots of Welsh nationality may have predisposed Lloyd to play down the evidence for change within medieval Welsh society – including change precipitated or accelerated by Norman conquest and settlement. Rather, in his view, the decisive changes had occurred back in prehistory, as a succession of

77 78

Ibid. 373 (quotation), 423–30. T. F. Tout, review of Lloyd, History of Wales, EHR 27, 1912, 131–5 at 135; compare Rudolf Thurneysen’s criticism of Lloyd for exaggerating the degree of conflict between the Welsh and the AngloNormans, in Historische Zeitschrift, 110, 1913, 405–8 at 408. 79 Lloyd, History of Wales, II, 357–461 (chapters XI–XII). Together these chapters (written mainly in 1906: J. E. Lloyd Papers 212) occupied almost 14 per cent of the History. 80 For recent accounts of Gruffudd, see K. L. Maund, Ireland, Wales, and England in the Eleventh Century, Woodbridge 1991, 64–8, 126–40; Mike Davies, ‘Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, King of Wales’, Welsh History Review, 21, 2002–3, 207–48. Lloyd’s notion of a ‘national revival’ is challenged in David Crouch, ‘The March and the Welsh Kings’, in The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, ed. Edmund King, Oxford 1994, 255–89 at 268–9. 81 Lloyd, History, II, 605. 82 John Edward Lloyd, Wales and the Past: Two Voices, Cardiff 1932, 9.



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racial migrations led, through a process of integration, to the creation by the Roman period of the essential features that would characterize the Welsh throughout the Middle Ages: he more than once observed that the Welsh described by Gerald of Wales at the end of the twelfth century were fundamentally the same as the Celts inhabiting the mountainous interior of Britain described by Caesar a millennium earlier.83 In sum, then, Lloyd put the Normans more firmly on the historiographical map of Wales than before, yet, like his predecessors, he concentrated attention on the Welsh response to the conquerors and was reluctant to accord the latter a central role in his narrative as actors who had made a positive contribution in their own right.84 As we shall see shortly, this perception has only been significantly challenged in the last thirty years or so. True, attention continued to be paid through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the Norman and other settlers in individual counties, especially Glamorgan,85 and also more widely in the march of south Wales – the pioneering work of William Rees is a notable case in point, although this focused mainly on the period after the Edwardian conquest.86 Moreover, already in the early twentieth century one of Lloyd’s younger contemporaries, E. A. Lewis (1880–1942), had argued, in a manner reminiscent of John Jones a century earlier, that Norman conquest ‘gradually revolutionised the primitive conditions of Welsh economy’ and that ‘tribal Wales … had definitely passed into feudal hands’.87 For Lewis, the Normans made a welcome contribution to the history of Wales in general through the introduction of the manor, industry, trade, towns, and Cistercian monasteries; likewise, he asserted that the plantation boroughs established in north Wales by Edward I were ‘apostles of a new liberty and the avenues of economic development’.88 While Lloyd shared similar progressionist assumptions, he seems 83

Lloyd, ‘History of Wales’, 365, 383–5; idem, Early Welsh Agriculture, Bangor 1894, 3; and cf. n. 81 above. 84 Lloyd did acknowledge, though, that the conquerors had made a significant impact on south Wales through their foundation of castles, towns, and religious houses and on Wales as a whole through their subjection of the Welsh bishoprics to the authority of Canterbury: History of Wales, II, 423–59. 85 See, e.g., Cartae et alia munimenta quae ad dominium de Glamorgancia pertinent, ed. G. T. Clark, 6 vols, 2nd edn, Cardiff 1910 (and discussion of the editor’s scholarly contribution in G. T. Clark: Scholar Ironmaster in the Victorian Age, ed. Brian Ll. James, Cardiff 1998, esp. chapters 5–7); John Stuart Corbett, Glamorgan: Papers & Notes on the Lordship and its Members, ed. D. R. Paterson, Cardiff 1925; Lewis D. Nicholl, The Normans in Glamorgan, Gower and Kidweli, Cardiff 1936; J. Beverley Smith, ‘The Lordship of Glamorgan’, Morgannwg, 2, 1958, 9–37; idem, ‘The Kingdom of Morgannwg and the Norman Conquest of Glamorgan’, in Glamorgan County History, III: The Middle Ages, ed. T. B. Pugh, Cardiff 1971, 1–43. 86 William Rees, ‘The Mediaeval Lordship of Brecon’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1915–16, 165–224; idem, South Wales and the March, 1284–1415, Oxford 1924, esp. 1, 25–6. See further Gwynedd O. Pierce, ‘Obituary: William Rees (1887–1978)’, Welsh History Review, 9, 1978–9, 486–92; Evans, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’, 240–2. Lynn H. Nelson, The Normans in South Wales, 1070–1171, Austin TX 1966, a work influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis on the frontier in American history, is also probably better seen as a further instance of marcher historiography than as an attempt to integrate the Normans into the history of Wales more generally. 87 Edward A. Lewis, ‘A Contribution to the Commercial History of Mediaeval Wales’, Y Cymmrodor, 24, 1913, 86–188 at 87–8, 90. See further Evans, ‘When Men and Mountains Meet’, 237–40. 88 Lewis, ‘Contribution to Commercial History’, 87–90; quotation from idem, The Mediaeval Boroughs of Snowdonia, London 1912, 275–6. William Rees later took a similar view in a brief essay, in which he stated that the Norman impact ‘left a deep imprint on the course of the development of the country’, through introducing ‘large-scale farming … towns and trade’ and reorganizing the Welsh Church: William Rees, ‘The Norman Conquest’, in Wales through the Ages. Volume I: From the Earliest Times to 1485, ed. A. J. Roderick, Llandybïe 1959, 81–7 at 81. The decisive influence of the Normans on the development of the Church in Wales had already been accepted by Lloyd (above, n. 84), and this interpretation was elaborated in the detailed introduction to Episcopal Acts and Cognate Documents Relating to Welsh

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to have seen economic progress as a purely modern phenomenon, originating with the Industrial Revolution; the Middle Ages mattered above all as a crucible for the forging of an enduring Welsh nationality.89 By contrast, Lewis, as an economic historian, was readier to detect medieval foundations for the thriving commercial and industrial Wales of his own day. Yet it was only in the last decades of the twentieth century that historians began to provide a sustained analysis of the Norman impact on Wales, a development signalled by the decision of the editors of a series called ‘A New History of Wales’ to include a volume by David Walker entitled The Norman Conquerors, which was published in 1977.90 Another indication of changing perceptions came in 1985, when Gwyn A. Williams opened the chapter covering the High Middle Ages in his history of Wales with the bold declaration that ‘The Normans made the Welsh a European people.’91 However, the most comprehensive and nuanced attempt to allow the Normans and their marcher successors a central role in Welsh history appeared two years later, in 1987, with the publication of Rees Davies’s magis­ terial Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415.92 This was the first large-scale synthesis of medieval Welsh history since the second volume of Lloyd’s classic work, and, as befitted the author of an earlier major book on the march of Wales,93 Davies adopted a more inclusive view than Lloyd by allotting considerable space in his account to the marcher lordships and their settler communities and by treating these as integral parts of Wales. In other words, his concept of Wales was essentially geographical, and its history was thus more than that of one ethnic group, the Welsh. Indeed, he listed ‘the making of the March of Wales’ and ‘the impact of Anglo-Norman colonization’ among the issues on which he had deliberately chosen to focus in order to try and reflect the ‘shift in the gravity of historical interest’ since Lloyd’s day.94 Why, in conclusion, did it take so long for the Normans to be viewed as a positive element that could be integrated into broader accounts of Welsh history? One way of approaching the question is to turn it round and ask why the framework devised by Llwyd and Powel in the sixteenth century, with its emphasis on the struggles of native kings and princes, proved so durable. The issue requires far fuller consideration than is possible within the scope of the present discussion. However, part of the answer lies in the framework’s adaptability, exemplified, for instance, by the utilization of additional primary and secondary sources as well as by the willingness of some later historians to follow David Powel’s example and extend the coverage of events down to their own time.95 Yet such adaptation, even when, as with J. E. Lloyd, Dioceses, 1066–1272, ed. James Conway Davies, 2 vols, Cardiff 1946–8. Cf. also Glanmor Williams, The Welsh Church from Conquest to Reformation, Cardiff 1962, 3: the subordination of the Welsh bishoprics to Canterbury and the English Crown ‘was a change big with consequences for Church and people in Wales, comparable in scope and magnitude with those later to be brought about by the Reformation or the Methodist Revival’. 89 Cf. Lloyd, History, II, 764; J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales, London 1930, 53, 59–60; Pryce, ‘From the Neolithic to Nonconformity’, 23–4. 90 David Walker, The Norman Conquerors, Swansea 1977. 91 Gwyn A. Williams, When was Wales? A History of the Welsh, Harmondsworth 1985, 62. 92 R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1987; reissued as The Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1991; revised edn, Oxford 2000. 93 R. R. Davies, Lordship and Society in the March of Wales, 1282–1400, Oxford 1978. 94 Davies, Conquest, p. vii. 95 See n. 19 above. Owen M. Edwards, Wales, London 1901, was the first book on the history of Wales in which more space was allotted to the period after 1282 than to that before it: J. G. Edwards, ‘Sir John Edward Lloyd, 1861–1947’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 41, 1955, 319–27 at 321.



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it involved analysing the evidence with unprecedented thoroughness and rigour, did not suffice in itself radically to subvert the established narrative; indeed, a more critical approach to the sources could help to give that narrative greater legitimacy. Arguably, then, the most important reason for the longevity of the framework established in the age of Elizabeth was the continuing appeal of its key premise that what historians of Wales needed to explain was the survival of a distinctive Welsh identity within the wider ambit of the British state. Comparison with Wales’s neighbours points up two further factors that help to account more specifically for the historiographical sidelining of the Normans. First, Norman conquest and settlement were, on the whole, not seen as a political and constitutional turning point in the way they were in England as well as, to a lesser extent, in Scotland and Ireland: the alleged transformation of Scotland from a Gaelic to a ‘feudal’ polity was attributed to the invitation of Norman settlers by the sons of Malcolm III and St Margaret, while the arrival of ‘Normans’ in Ireland in the late 1160s was perceived as inaugurating centuries of subjection to the English Crown. Historians of Wales, by contrast, seem to have regarded the Norman conquests of the late eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries as too piecemeal and geographically limited to have made a decisive difference, and invested other periods of Welsh history with greater significance, notably the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, the Edwardian conquest, and the Union with England under Henry VIII. A second consideration is this: the absence in Wales from the early modern period onwards of historians who strongly identified themselves as successors of the Norman settlers and who were therefore ready to give the invaders a starring role in accounts of their nation’s past that would challenge narratives which put the Welsh centre stage.96 There was no Welsh equivalent of the Anglo-Irish Orpen or of the Lowland Scots claiming Teutonic kinship with the English in order to distance themselves from what they came to regard as the ‘embarrassing millstone of backwardness’ repres­ ented by Highland Gaelic culture.97 This contrast serves to highlight the relatively high degree of consensus among those who wrote about the medieval Welsh past, a consensus arguably facilitated by the way in which that past was denuded of any potentially subversive implications through an acceptance of the Edwardian conquest and Henrician Union and thus of the ties that bound Wales to England. The reluctance to accord the Normans a prominent place in the history of Wales as a whole thus points up the durability of the historiographical legacy inherited from the sixteenth century. That recent decades have seen a more welcoming attitude to what Elizabethan writers termed ‘strangers’ may be attributed to a number of factors, although the relative significance of these is difficult to assess. Clearly the change was linked to the way in which the scholarly study of history increasingly became a matter for professionals in universities and, more pertinently perhaps, to the diversification of the historiographical agenda as the traditional emphasis on political and constitutional history was complemented by social and economic ­analysis that opened up the possibility of looking at Norman conquest from a broader perspective than merely the struggle with Welsh rulers for control of people 96

The early modern antiquaries Sir Edward Stradling and George Owen are only partial exceptions, since, although both claimed settler ancestry (above, pp. 6, 7), they strongly identified with Welsh culture (and in any case neither wrote a history of Wales as a whole). Cf. Geraint Jenkins, Richard Suggett, and Eryn M. White, ‘The Welsh Language in Early Modern Wales’, in The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution, ed. Geraint H. Jenkins, Cardiff 1997, 45–122 at 79; J. Gwynfor Jones, ‘The Welsh Language in Local Government: Justices of the Peace and the Courts of Quarter Sessions, c. 1536–1800’, ibid. 181–206 at 193–4; Charles, George Owen of Henllys, 107–16, 123–6. 97 Kidd, ‘Teutonist Ethnology’, 68.

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and territory, important though that was. Another crucial development that needs to be taken into account is a wider readiness on the part of historians of Wales to reconceptualize ‘national’ history as something far less exclusively the preserve of the Welsh than it had previously tended to be. This may simply reflect the exercise of scholarly detachment, but could also be related to attempts to promote a sense of civic – or, as one scholar has recently advocated, ‘post-national’ – identity among the people of Wales that is based on shared institutions rather than a common ethnicity.98 If so, in allowing a greater measure of self-government than at any time since the Middle Ages, devolution for Wales may facilitate a more inclusive idea of nationality, defined by citizenship rather than membership of one particular ethnic group, and thus help to encourage a greater appreciation of the role of immigrants, including the Normans, in the country’s history.99 Be that as it may, it would, I hope, have given Allen Brown satisfaction that the prospects today look brighter than ever for giving the Normans their due as key players in Welsh history.

98 Cf. R. Merfyn Jones, ‘Beyond Identity? The Reconstruction of the Welsh’, Journal of British Studies, 31, 1992, 330–57, esp. 352–7; Chris Williams, ‘Problematizing Wales: An Exploration in Historiography and Postcoloniality’, in Postcolonial Wales, ed. Jane Aaron and Chris Williams, Cardiff 2005, 3–22, esp. 15–16; and, for recent comment on the challenges posed by this greater pluralism and diversity among the peoples of Wales for an understanding of the Welsh past, see Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales, Cambridge 2007, 305–6. 99 Cf. also recent work on immigrants and ethnic minorities in modern Wales, e.g. Paul O’Leary, ­Immigration and Integration: The Irish in Wales, 1798–1922, Cardiff 2000; A Tolerant Nation? Exploring Ethnic Diversity in Wales, ed. Charlotte Williams, Neil Evans, and Paul O’Leary, Cardiff 2003; Irish Migrants in Modern Wales, ed. Paul O’Leary, Liverpool 2004. For a broader perspective on the contrasts between ethnically and territorially exclusive forms of citizenship, see Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge MA 1992.

WILLIAM MARSHAL, LANCELOT, AND ARTHUR: CHIVALRY AND KINGSHIP Laura Ashe On his deathbed in May 1219, according to the History of William Marshal, the elderly Marshal spoke feelingly of the fate of his soul: ‘Li clerc sunt vers nos trop engrés, Trop nos vunt barbiant de pres; Car j’ai pris .v. cenz chevaliers, Dont j’ai e armes e destriers E tot lor herneis retenu; Se por ço m’est contretenu Li reignes Dé, n’i a que prendre, Car je nel porreie pas rendre. Je ne puis plus fere, ce cui, A Deu, fors rendre mei a lui Repentant de toz mes mesfez, De toz les mals que je ai fez. S’il ne me volent eschacier, Avant ne me poent eschacier; Ou lor argument est ci fals, Ou nuls hom ne puet estre sals.’ [‘Churchmen are too hard on us, shaving us too closely. If, simply because I’ve taken five hundred knights and kept their arms, horses, and all their equipment, the kingdom of heaven is closed to me, then there’s nothing to be done, for I am unable to return these things. I can do no more as regards God but surrender myself up to him, repentant for all my misdeeds and all the wrongs I have done. If they don’t want to destroy me, they can pursue me no further; either their argument is false about this or no man can be saved.’]

This speech captures the disarming frankness and pragmatism of the biographical poem, its apparent ease with the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the lives of twelfth- and thirteenth-century secular aristocrats. If this form of Christianity seems lacking in proper humility, however, one must nevertheless account for the poet’s reverence for his subject. No cynicism or irony is here intended, and nor is the Marshal being judged; this speech is included in the account of his ‘good death’, his properly pious end. The Marshal’s faith held genuine importance, in his own mind and that of his biographer, but it remained a component of his knightly identity. This is a man who promised himself to the Templars, brought silk cloths back from 

Marshal, lines 18481–96. Translations have occasionally been amended to be more literal, with the generous aid of Judy Weiss. An earlier version of this paper was read at the Institute of Historical Research; I am grateful for the comments of David Carpenter, John Gillingham, Sally Harvey, Karen Pratt, and Susan Reynolds.  See also Richard W. Kaeuper, ‘William Marshal, Lancelot, and the Issue of Chivalric Identity’, Essays in Medieval Studies, 22, 2005, 1–19 at 14–15.

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the Holy Land, and kept them for his death more than thirty years later; and yet, while dying, angrily rejected the suggestion that all his fine clothing be sold to fund a donation to the Church, instead insisting it be distributed among his knights and retainers. The History was written with the patronage and aid of family eyewitnesses, whose testimony would be unimpeachable if it were not also so partial. In this context, the poem’s representation of a life is the framework which contains a continuous negotiation between contemporary realities and ideals. William Marshal was born during King Stephen’s reign, and began his adult life as a landless knight seeking a patron; he ended it as regent of England during the minority of Henry III. He is famously the knight who brought all the superlatives out of Georges Duby (and, some have acerbically noted, a degree of pure invention). His reputation as the exemplary chivalric knight was apparently well established within his lifetime; this is certainly the impression given by the History, written around 1226, at the behest of the Marshal’s elder son William and his companion and retainer John of Earley, who had first become his ward and squire in 1187. David Crouch has examined the poem as a historical source for the period, identifying its inaccuracies and revealing its value; meanwhile, literary critics have elucidated the poem’s apparent debts, in its numerous descriptions of tournaments, to the Arthurian romances of Chrétien de Troyes, and to the ideologies of chivalrous conduct expounded in those fictional narratives.10 Such parallels have created doubt about the status of the text as a historical source, but in one sense at least, these doubts are misplaced: because the History is one of the most important sources for the flourishing culture of chivalry, an ideology which exerted its force in literature and in history alike. As John Gillingham has argued, the History reveals much about the nature of contemporary ‘chivalrous warfare’, and what emerges is a helpful corrective: that there is much less of a gap between the ‘ideal and reality’ of chivalrous behaviour than has often been assumed, not because the reality was any less bloody, but because the ideal, as represented in fictional narratives and in manuals of chivalry, was surprisingly flexible.11 The poet, indeed, has some claim to be regarded as a historian, in the sense that he drew upon disparate documentary, chronicle, and oral sources; substantial research lies behind his narrative.12 In particular, the meticulously detailed accounts of the Young King Henry’s tournament circuit, and the poet’s self-conscious references to the difficulties of versifying lists, tallies, and accounts,13 suggest that he    

Marshal, lines 18217–60. Marshal, lines 18680–18716. Marshal, III, 26–32. John Gillingham, ‘War and Chivalry in the History of William Marshal’, Thirteenth Century England, 2, 1988, 1–13 at 1–2, discussing Georges Duby, Guillaume le Maréchal, ou, Le meilleur chevalier du monde, Paris 1984.  David Crouch, William Marshal: Knighthood, War and Chivalry, 1147–1219, Harlow 2002, 179 [first publ. as William Marshal: Court, Career and Chivalry in the Angevin Empire, 1147–1219, London 1990].  Marshal, lines 19169–92.  See his historical introduction and notes to the text, Marshal, III, 23–195; also David Crouch, ‘The Hidden History of the Twelfth Century’, HSJ 5, 1993, 111–30; and Crouch, William Marshal. 10 See Larry D. Benson, ‘The Tournament in the Romances of Chrétien de Troyes and L’Histoire de Guillaume Le Maréchal’, in Chivalric Literature: Essays on Relations between Literature and Life in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Larry D. Benson and John Leyerle, Kalamazoo 1980, 1–24; Kaeuper, ‘Marshal, Lancelot, and Chivalric Identity’. 11 Gillingham, ‘War and Chivalry’, 6–13. 12 Marshal, III, 32–7. 13 Marshal, lines 3414–21, 4327–8, 4443–60, 4536–40.



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drew upon one or more specific documents created to record and celebrate those years; in listing the prizes and booty won by the Marshal at such events, the poet evidently draws on household papers: but nevertheless, the Marshal does win everything most of the time, and it seems reasonable to assume that the process of selection from the sources was not a disinterested one. As Crouch notes, ‘the author’s intention to justify the Marshal is everywhere apparent’.14 But both Crouch and Antonia Gransden concur that the text is, on the whole, a diligent and scrupulous attempt to present historical events.15 However, an approach which concentrates on establishing the factual accuracy of the text, and the alternative analysis which addresses it in the light of its debts to contemporary literature, equally illuminate some aspects of the text while occluding others. The intention of this paper is to avoid doing an injustice to the text by pulling it in either of these directions. Instead I want to work with the notion that the History offers interesting evidence of ideals working in history; that historical individuals can be glimpsed playing out the patterns of their literature in their lives, or invoking literary formulae in order to justify their pragmatic decisions. Correspondingly, literary ideals were themselves created as an indirect justification of social practices. This is not a process which happens solely at the point of the chronicler’s writing, as we might imagine him forcing history into line with romance; it also happens, necessarily, at the time, as we must imagine historical individuals influenced by the ideals they both imbibed from the romance, and caused to be written into it. There is a constant simultaneity and reciprocal engagement between the text and the event: this is a simple and well accepted point, but it is still one whose implications can fruitfully be explored. In this context it is worth remembering the covert purposes of any ideological system: the ideals of the romance, the ideology of chivalry, evidently did not come into being merely to be pretty. The argument of Stephen Jaeger’s seminal book, that chivalry’s origins lie in a clerical project to moderate the brutal ideals of the secular aristocracy, cannot provide the whole explanation for the phenomenon’s success.16 In one reviewer’s words, ‘In Jaeger’s book we learn much of the clerical origins of courtliness, but little of their secular counterparts or of the secular purposes which courtliness also served.’17 In the History of William Marshal itself can be seen the progressive collocation of cortesie with chevalerie, which bound the manners of the courtier to the physical prowess of the mounted knight. This powerful ideological structure, an aesthetic and moral ideal arrogated solely to the secular aristocracy, evidently served to legitimate, and more profoundly to normalize, that group’s power and influence.18 Žižek makes a further observation: ‘We are within ideological space proper the moment [its] content … is functional with regard to some relation of social domination (“power”, “exploitation”) in an inherently non-transparent way: the very logic of

14 15 16

Marshal, III, 37. Ibid.; Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c. 550 to c. 1307, Ithaca NY 1974, 345, 347–8. C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210, Philadelphia 1985. 17 D. H. Green, review of Jaeger, Origins of Courtliness, in Modern Language Review, 82, 1987, 234–6 at 236. 18 ‘Ideology’ is a notoriously slippery term; for a variety of useful definitions, see the selection collected by Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction, London 1998, 1–2: ‘ideas which help to ­ legitimate a ­dominant political power … forms of thought motivated by social interests … the conjunction of discourse with power . . . the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality’.

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legitimizing the relation of domination must remain concealed if it is to be ­effective.’19 The Arthurian romance performs this act of concealment by a particular tactic newly available to twelfth-century literature: it conceals the relation of its ideals to contemporary power politics by means of declaring and celebrating its own fictionality, its lack of reference to the ‘real world’.20 But this is necessarily disingenuous, because the romance’s relation to the real world lies both in its source impulses, from an aristocracy keen to elevate its desires, and in its production, of that web of chivalric ideals which was to prove so impressively popular and influential. The romance thus conjures a symbolic, moral reality in which historical individuals also live, and by which, in part, they understood the world around them: and it is no accident that this is the moral reality of the ruling class. The relation of the romance to contemporary social domination is an intricate and complicit one. And so I want to draw some parallels between contemporary romances and the representations of the Histoire, in a manner which I hope will illuminate not only the poet’s own sense of idealized secular ethics in 1226, but also the codes and practices by which the Marshal and his companions lived. In essence, then, the aim is to push a little at that other, more difficult side of the feedback loop between text and context. To begin with, it seems worthwhile to reiterate the compelling similarities between the William Marshal of the History, and the Lancelot of the Continental French prose ‘Vulgate’ cycle, and specifically of La Mort le roi Artu (c. 1230), the text which took Chrétien’s superlative lover-knight (from Le Chevalier de la charrette, c. 1177–81) to his logical conclusion, destroying Arthur’s court in the process. This comparison is not primarily a matter of direct verbal parallels, but rather of distinctive characteristics held in common. Most important is the sense that the two are not solely similar because they share the status of aristocratic knight and central protagonist of a narrative; William Marshal ultimately emerges not as a generic chivalric hero, but as a figure of Lancelot. Significant, then, is the fact that Lancelot’s qualities are dangerously mingled; he is not only the finest knight of the court, but also its destroyer. At the simplest level, parallels lie in the description of the two knights at tournaments, where each invariably amazes bystanders, surpassing all opponents. The negotiation of reputation in each narrative, the inscription of the hero as a subject of compelled admiration, is particularly dependent upon the device of the tournament, which emerges as a field specifically created for the observation and evaluation of chivalric worth, a panopticon of prowess: ‘Chascuns a son poeir s’angoisse / De bien faire, quer en tele ovre / Se mostre proëce e descouvre.’ (Marshal, lines 4812–14) [‘Every man struggled with all his might to do well, for it is in such a situation that prowess is shown and displayed for all to see.’] Lors s’afiche Lancelos seur les estriés et se met enmi les rens et fiert un chevalier que il encontra premier en son venir si durement que il porta a terre et lui et le cheval … Por ce cop s’arresterent pluseur chevalier del tornoiement et distrent aucun qu’il avoient veü un biau coup fere au chevalier nouvel. … si dist messire Gauvains au roi: ‘Certes, sire, je ne sei qui cil chevaliers est … mes je diroie par droit qu’il a ce tornoiement veincu et qu’il en doit avoir le pris et le los.’21

19 20

Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’, in Mapping Ideology, London 1994, 1–33 at 8. See the classic argument of Erich Auerbach, ‘The Knight Sets Forth’, in Mimesis, trans. Willard R. Trask, Princeton NJ 1953, 123–42. 21 La Mort le roi Artu, ed. Jean Frappier, Geneva 1996, 14–17; trans. James Cable, The Death of King Arthur, Harmondsworth 1971, 33–6.



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[Then Lancelot dug into the stirrups and rode into the ranks. He struck the first knight he met so hard that he knocked both him and his horse to the ground … At this blow several knights present at the tournament stopped to watch, and some said that they had seen the new knight make a fine attack. … Sir Gawain said to the king ‘Indeed, my lord, I do not know who that knight is … but I should say he is justly the winner of the tournament and he should receive the honour and praise for it.’] Molt l’esgardoient li plusor, Qui ne le quenoisseient mie E aveient molt grant envie De lui grever e de lui prendre … Li Mareschals, qui d’autre terre Ert la venuz por son pris quere, I fist tant d’armes, c’est la some, Qu’el torneiement n’out halt home, Conte, baron ne bacheler, Qui d’armes nel volsist sembler. . . . Saciez que grant parole en firent Tuit cil qui l’oïrent e virent.  (Marshal, lines 2976–3002, 3375–6) [Many looked at him hard; they had no idea who he was and were very keen to do him some harm and capture him … The Marshal, who had come there from another land to seek honour, performed so many feats of arms, I can tell you, that at that tournament there was no man of high rank, be he count, baron or young knight-at-arms, who did not want to match him in feats of arms … I can tell you there was great talk of him by all those who saw or heard of his deeds.]

The History of William Marshal, and the documentary sources to which the poet frequently refers, the lists and accounts recording attendees, victors, and prizes, are themselves key evidence for the increasing importance of the tournament during the 1170s and 1180s. In combination with the celebrations of contemporary romances, and the acerbic comments of contemporary chroniclers, the tournament circuit can be seen as a limited but significant cultural practice, ‘the sport of an idle upper class, and a way of life for bachelor knights … hoping for rich pickings’.22 This duality was central to the phenomenon – it flowered in the developing idealization of knighthood, its new rituals and pageantry, under a group of youthful lords with an interest in spending their time and money on this new game; but it was driven by the numbers of landless knights-for-hire with no means of support other than to join a lord’s retinue, seeking prizes and prosperity. This essentially economic motivation was routinely concealed, and then equally frequently exposed, in literary representations of the court and tournament. The heroes of Chrétien’s romances always give all their prizes away, and refuse to accept ransoms from captives, instead magnanimously gifting them their freedom.23 Largesse, in its grandest sense, appears everywhere in the romances, as the virtuous attribute of the greatest lords. As an ideology, this is readily susceptible of explanation: both the poet and the poet’s wider, aristocratic audience, clustered around a royal or magnate household, have everything to gain from their superior’s belief in

22 23

W. L. Warren, Henry II, new edn, London 1991, 582. Less important characters, on the other hand, can be shown to be pleased to keep all the prizes and ransoms they can get: Benson, ‘Tournament in the Romances’, 16.

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the ideal of largesse.24 But in Chrétien’s romances there is limitless wealth on offer, and it is a marker of the king’s greatness, and that of his knights: Or oez, se vos commandez, La grant joie et la grant leesce, La seignorie et la hautesce, Qui fu a la cort demenee. Ainçois que nonne fust sonnee, Ot adobé li rois Artus Quatre cenz chevaliers et plus, Toz filz de contes et de rois. Chevax dona a chascun trois, Et robes a chascun deus paire, Por ce que sa corz miaudre apaire. Mout fu li rois poissanz et larges … Alixandres, qui tant conquist Que soz lui tot le monde mist Et tant fu larges et tant riches, Vers cestui fu povres et chiches. Cesar, l’empereres de Rome, Ne tuit li roi que l’en vos nomme En diz et en chançons de geste, Ne dona tant a une feste Comme li rois Artus … Ne tant n’osassent pas despendre Entre Cesar et Alixandre … En mi la cort sor un tapit Ot .xxx. muis d’esterlins blans … Illuec pristrent livroison tuit, Chascuns en porte cele nuit Tant con il vost …25 [Now hear if you will of the great joy and the great ceremony, the nobility and the magnificence that were displayed at the court. Before the hour of terce had sounded, King Arthur had dubbed four hundred knights and more, all sons of counts and kings; he gave each of them three horses and two pairs of mantles, to improve the appearance of his court. The king was very powerful and generous … Alexander, who conquered so much that he subdued the whole world and was so generous and rich, was poor and miserly compared to him. Caesar, the emperor of Rome, and all the kings you hear about in narrative and epic poems, did not give so much at a celebration as King Arthur … Caesar and Alexander put together did not dare to spend so much … On a tapestry in the middle of the courtyard there were thirty hogsheads of white sterlings … There everyone helped themselves; each person carried off that night as much as he wished …]

The point, of course, is that the romance is a world of limitless kingly wealth; unless he runs out of ink, the poet will never run out of King Arthur’s cash. And so it is an easy transference for riches to attend upon virtue, courtliness, and beauty: they are the markers of deserving. Preu is the word for both value and price – wonderfully, polysemically glossed in the Anglo-Norman dictionary as ‘profit, advantage, virtue, 24

Cf. E. Köhler, ‘Observations historiques et sociologiques sur la poésie des troubadours’, Cahiers de civilisation médiévale, 7, 1964, 27–51 at 29–30. 25 Chrétien de Troyes, Erec & Enide, ed. J. M. Fritz, in Chrétien de Troyes: Romans, Paris 1994, lines 6648–89; trans. C. W. Carroll in Arthurian Romances, Harmondsworth 1991, 118–19.



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merit’;26 and thus whatever showers of gold he receives, the hero is never materialistic; his understanding of these riches is directly concerned with their signification of spiritual value; and he in turn shows a magnificent largesse and magnanimity when in a position to do so. Thus in the aestheticization of economic desire, wealth is the same as virtue. The twin foundations which support this ambiguity, in the romance, are limitless wealth and largesse. Every knight can demonstrate his chivalry and generosity by giving away his wealth, because more will always be forthcoming, in prizes and gifts from his lord, in recognition of that very virtue which led him to give it all away. And it is just this fiction that the author of the History wrestles with as the Marshal wins every tournament: because in his world, money does not have quite the same properties of endless abundance. It was certainly the case that the Marshal did well out of tournaments, because of his prosperity and the progress of his career.27 But the poet’s desire to commem­ orate and celebrate this success is coloured by a snarled mixture of ideals. There is a typical qualification with which the poet follows each account of the Marshal’s victories: Unques al gaaing n’entendi, Mais al bien faire tant tendi Que del gaaing ne li chalut. Il gaainna qui mielz valut, Quer molt fait cil riche bargainne Qui onor conquert e gaainne.  (lines 3007–12) [He did not think of gain at all; rather his mind was so set on noble exploits that he had no concern for making profit. What he won was worth more, for a man who wins honour has by far the best of the bargain.]

– and yet the poem is forced into constant contradictions of its own statements about the purpose of tournaments, and the stuff of which reputation is made: Hui esteit li Marechals Povre d’aveir e de chivals, Ore en a il quatre e demi, Boens e beaus, Damnedé merci! Si a roncins e palefreis E boens sumers e bel herneis. … Le Mareschal molt ennorerent E molt li firent beau semblant, Plus k’il n’avoient fait devant. A itel paste tel leveim, Tant as, tant valz a ge tant t’eim.  (lines 1367–80) [Only that day the Marshal had been a poor man as regards possessions and horses, and now he had four and a half, fine mounts and handsome, thanks to God. He also had hacks and palfreys, fine pack-horses and harnesses. … They paid the Marshal great honour and treated him very courteously, more so than they had done before. Dough will rise according to the yeast you use. You are what you’ve got, and no more than that.]

26

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association 8, ed. W. Rothwell, L. W. Stone, and T. B. W. Reid, London 1992, now rev. edition online at <www.anglonorman.net>. 27 Crouch, William Marshal, 42–3, 47.

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‘Tant as, tant valz’: so much you have, so much you’re worth. It is not that this understanding was absent from the romances: rather that the chivalric romance dispenses its largesse in recognition of inner worth, so that the match is made morally rather than cynically. And the cash and the worth are equally fictional, abstract, signifieds tied to the same signifiers; the line between spiritual and material wealth is entirely blurred. The fictionality of the wealth in question – its hyperbolic excess – underlines its function as the abstract indicator of abstract value. In contrast, while the History has absorbed this notion of the workings of honour – that the chivalric knight fights for reputation and glory alone – it is nevertheless bound into a world in which reputation cannot be derived from deeds alone; it must necessarily be transmitted by, and contained within, real material possessions. The poet knows that he can communicate the height of the Marshal’s honour by, very literally, counting the number of horses he takes, right down to the slightly alarming fractions of horses.28 But each time, the poet remembers himself, and the Marshal is realigned with the ideals celebrated in the romance through the figure of largesse, and indeed precisely directed largesse: … li Mareschal out le pris E de gaaing rout il sa part; Mais molt largement le depart E as croisiez e as prisons, E molt quita de lor prisons Des chevalers qu’il aveit pris, Qu’en li torna a grant pris.  (lines 3556–62) [the Marshal had won the prize, and a large share of the booty too. He very generously shared out the booty with crusaders and prisoners, and he released from their imprisonment many of the knights he had captured; for this he was considered a very worthy man.]

Nevertheless, it is clear that William’s practice of open-handed generosity is not just a case of the poet’s attempt to make his hero fit the picture of the perfect chivalric knight of romance. Rather, this is an image which historical individuals show signs of believing that they need to live up to, and exploiting in order to raise their reputations: clearly, William actually did perform acts of largesse, on occasion – and a well timed, widely witnessed gesture was surely a shrewd investment on its own account, purchasing more symbolic capital, reputation, and glory. William had by the 1180s raised himself above his erstwhile peers by riding under his own banner at tournaments, leading his own company of knights who wore his colours: Matthew Paris tells us he wore yellow and green with a red lion rampant.29 But in order to lead such a company, he had to be wealthy enough to dispense largesse – to arm them, clothe them, feed them, accommodate them. In largesse lies the key to increasing honour; it is a transaction, a purchase. But the Marshal’s largesse never exceeded his income. In contrast, the foremost exponent – and victim – of this ideology of expense was the Young King Henry, crowned in 1170, eldest son of Henry II and the Marshal’s lord and patron for many years. The Young King was an anomaly, and perhaps an experiment on Henry

28

This is explicable because of agreements such as that made with Roger de Jouy, by which he and the Marshal fought for two years as an effective pair on the tournament field, dividing all winnings equally: Marshal, lines 3385–3424. 29 Crouch, William Marshal, 47.



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II’s part, the only crowned associate king in post-Conquest England.30 But from his coronation until his death in 1183, he showed little aptitude for government: ‘Henry II has been accused of deliberately keeping his son in leading strings and of refusing to allow him any real power or responsibility; but the fact is that Henry the Younger showed neither taste nor desire for responsibility. The real business of being a king escaped his understanding; for him kingship was conceived simply in terms of dignity, prestige, and convenient wealth.’31 His shortcomings as a future ruler can be read obliquely in the History’s gushing praise of just these characteristics: … li giemble reis, Qui fu bons e beals e corteis, Le fist puis si bien en sa vie Qu’il raviva chevalerie, Qui a cel tens ert pres de morte. Il fu us e entree e porte Par quei ele vint ariere, E il li porta sa baniere. Porta? – Veire. – Coment? – Il bien, Qu’a cel tens ne fasoient rien A nul bachiler li halt home; Mais il fu la rose e la some De retenir o sei les buens, Qu’il volt que tuit fuissent des suens. E quant li halt riche home virent, Qui a cel tens nul bien ne firent, Qu’il voleit toz les buens aveir, Si li tindrent a grant saveir, Que bien virent que reis ne quens Ne puet monter fors par les buens.  (lines 2637–56) [the Young King, who was worthy, fine, and courtly, later in his life performed such high exploits that he revived chivalry, which at that time was near extinction. He was the gate, the way and the door through which chivalry returned, and he was her standard-bearer. Standard-bearer? Truly. How? He certainly was, for at that time men of high rank were doing nothing for any young nobleman. But he was the flower and the cream of men as regards keeping worthy followers in his service; he wanted all of these to be with him. And when those wealthy and powerful men, who at that time were achieving no good, saw that he wanted to have all worthy men with him, they thought he was acting very wisely, for they saw very well that neither king nor count could raise his standing except through his worthy retainers.]

The Young King seems to have accepted the notion that his reputation resided in the quality of the men he supported: ‘Ne remainsist por nul aveir / Bon chevalier, s’il fust trovez, / Vaillanz ne d’armes esprovez / Qu’il ne voissist a sei atraire’ (lines 3202–5) [‘No amount of expense would stop him from attracting into his service any good knight who could be found, valiant and experienced in arms’]. He retained them in royal style – ‘ne faiseit pas a els bargaigne’ (line 3590) [‘he didn’t

30

On Henry II’s original plans see Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket, London 1986, 67–8; on the controversy which surrounded the eventual coronation, at the height of the Becket crisis, ibid. 202–8, and Warren, Henry II, 111. George Garnett argues that associate kingship was theoretically impossible in post-Conquest England: Conquered England: Kingship, Succession, and Tenure, 1066–1166, Oxford 2007, 185–6. 31 Warren, Henry II, 580–1.

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haggle with them’] – and indeed besides rewarding his men, the poet tells us that he lavishly supported their own retainers as well: ‘qui unques portout baniere / E ert ove le giemble rei, / A toz cels qu’il menout o sei, / Aveient vinten sous lo jor’ (lines 4762–5) [‘whoever raised his banner in company with the young king received twenty shillings a day for each man he brought with him’].32 But the fulfilment of such expectations was financially disastrous. The Young King had no kingdom, and no landed income, only the allowance granted him by his father: and it was surely more than once that Henry II ‘regem filium a debitis quibus gravissime premebatur exhoneravit’33 [‘discharged his son the king from the debts which had so grievously oppressed him’]. The Young King’s lack of all governmental power – particularly in contrast with his brothers’ positions in Aquitaine and Brittany34 – was a matter of comment, or mockery, to contemporaries, and for all his expenditure and display, it seems to have been a genuine impotence, as R. J. Smith has shown: At least thirty-two texts of the Young King’s charters, ten of them originals, plus two synopses and a paraphrase of one of his letters, still survive. But as Delisle remarked, many of the Young Henry’s grants are homologues, each repeating a charter of Henry II with only the necessary grammatical variations, while others repeat substantial passages from his father’s grants and some are confirmations of charters of Henry II, carefully limited by the terms of his father’s instruments.35

It was this situation that successive kings of France were able to exploit so effect­ ively, encouraging and supporting the Young King’s rebellions. In his celebratory address to the victorious Henry II, after the civil war of 1173–4, the poet Jordan Fantosme nevertheless felt the causes of the conflict to be uncontroversial enough to state outright: Aprés icest curunement, e aprés ceste baillie, Surportastes a vostre fiz auques de seignurie, Tolistes lui ses volentés, n’en pot aver baillie. La crut guerre senz amur: Damnesdeu la maldie!36 [After this crowning and after this transfer of power you took away from your son some of his authority, you thwarted his wishes so that he could not exercise power. Therein lay the seeds of a pitiless war: God’s curse be upon it!]

According to Roger Howden, the Young King renewed his demands in 1182 that ‘sibi dari Normanniam, vel aliam terram, ubi ipse et uxor sua remanere possint; et unde ipse possit militibus suis reddere servitia sua’37 [‘Normandy be given to him, or some other territory, where he and his wife might dwell, and from where 32

This figure is wildly implausible, even allowing for variations in regional currencies: in 1168 a knight’s daily wage was only 8d.; by the reign of John it was sometimes as high as 3s.: C. Warren Hollister, ‘The Significance of Scutage Rates in Eleventh- and Twelfth-Century England’, EHR 75, 1960, 577–88 at 577–8. In 1181 the ‘archbishop of Norway’, visiting England, was granted an allowance of 10s. a day to support himself and his retinue: Dana C. Munro, ‘The Cost of Living in the Twelfth Century’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 50, 1911, 497–504 at 497. 33 Ralph de Diceto, Ymagines Historiarum, in Opera Historica, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 68, 1876, I, 404. cf. Marshal, lines 7003–7153; Henry II’s final offer, in 1182, was an allowance of 110 pounds a day in Angevin money: Warren, Henry II, 584. 34 See Warren, Henry II, 562–3. 35 R. J. Smith, ‘Henry II’s Heir: The Acta and Seal of Henry the Young King, 1170–83’, EHR 116, 2001, 297–326 at 297–8. 36 Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. and trans. R. C. Johnston, Oxford 1981, lines 17–20. 37 Howden, Gesta Regis, I, 289.



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he might be able to support knights in his service’]. Such a request, if its terms are accurate – and the History’s portrait would suggest that they are – is revealing of the Young King’s failure to understand the purposes and responsibilities of lordship and governance: little wonder that the hard-headed Henry II did not oblige.38 But the ways in which the Young King chose to spend his days, and his father’s money, are themselves culturally suggestive. In indulging his taste for a lavish lifestyle and tournaments, the Young King was engaged in an economic system drawn from the models of the romance, and hence missing some essential links. In effect, he puts money in, and gets honour and reputation out; there is no other side of the equation for the king – unlike that which exists for his knights – whereby he could convert that symbolic capital back into material wealth. Where the Young King’s leading knight, the Marshal, is himself the recipient of largesse, can hold on to most of his winnings – as long as he punctuates that with the occasional grand gesture – and always uses them to get more, the Young King in contrast is positioned like the Arthur of the romance, trapped at the top of the cascade, tasked with feeding it, in a cycle whereby his income and gains alike are simply channelled into the endless generation of display: accommodating knights and men, feeding them, arming them, providing them with horses, with gifts, with prizes. And this was, quite simply, unsustainable, as the poet admits: Del giemble rei fu veritez Que en chasteals e en citez E par tot la ou il veneit Si grant despense demeneit Que, quant veneit al departir, Qu’il n’en saveit coument partir. E quant veneit al chief del tor, Lores veneient li detor De chevals, de robes, de vivres: ‘Cist a taillié de trois cenz livres, Cist de cent e cist de deus cenz.’ … ‘Misires n’a pas ci deniers, Mais vos les avrez eins un mais.’ (lines 5073–89) [It is true that the Young King, in castle and in town, led such a lavish life that, when it came to the end of his stay, he had no idea how to take his leave. When it came to the last day, creditors would appear, men who had supplied him with horses, garments, and victuals. ‘This man is owed three hundred pounds; this one a hundred and that one two hundred.’ … ‘My lord has no cash with him, but you shall have it within a month.’]

This astonishing picture has more implications than are immediately obvious. The Young King’s ideas of chivalry serve not only to make him a perennial debtor, fleeing towns early in the morning before his creditors arrive, but more profoundly expose his lack of understanding of the whole business of lordship and rule over men. In seeking to emulate the rule of the romance king, but in the necessary absence of the impossible economic substratum which those idealized texts silently assume, the Young King rendered himself bankrupt. But the most important implication of this, for the present purposes, is offered in the poet’s proud contrast with the Marshal’s creditable reputation:

38

See Crouch, William Marshal, 41–5; Warren, Henry II, 580–3.

30

Laura Ashe ‘Par fei!’ feseient li borgeis, ‘Si le Mareschals prent an mains La dete, sanz plus e sanz mains, N’en sumes de rien esmaié, Einz nos en tenom a paié.’ … E cil en poeit le tot faire, Qui rente ne terre n’aveit Fors le bien que l’en i saveit.  (lines 5090–5104) [‘Upon our faith!’ said the burghers, ‘If the Marshal underwrites the debt, that is all it will take to reassure us completely; indeed, we shall take that as payment itself.’ … And he was well able to do all this, although he had no fixed income or land, but simply the fine qualities he was known for.]

This romance model of lordship introduces a profound imbalance, a deeply disrupt­ive effect on the hierarchy of lord and man, king and knight. Here William Marshal is trustworthy and reliable – and economically viable – in a way that his lord, the Young King, is not. The king’s creditors supposedly trust the Marshal because he is so well known for his chivalrous honour: but what that means here, evidently enough, is once again that easy slippage between cultural capital and hard cash.39 He is considered to be good for the money – trustworthy yes, but also, and much more importantly, rich enough in ready cash.40 The Marshal’s honour is an abstraction from his wealth: and as both are achieved through his prowess on the tournament field, so both are greater than those of his lord: Li Mareschals ert al rescorre, Qui si presseit de lui s’enpresse Que toz tens le getout de presse, La ou il esteit pres de pris; Mais cil qui li cresseit son pris Le rescoeit si tote veie Que toz lé mettoit a la voie, Kar toz diz li ert soz les eles.  (lines 3630–7) [The Marshal was there to the rescue; he stuck so close to him and was ever pulling him away from the press of battle at times when he was near to being captured. But he who was responsible for enhancing the king’s reputation, was constantly rescuing him and so sending his enemies on their way; he was always under the Marshal’s wings.]

This is striking because it so accurately reflects the deep conflict in the Arthurian romance, which brings about the end of the Arthurian world.

39 The poet is devoted to puns in general (Marshal, III, 9), and cannot have been unaware of the multiple meanings of bien and its homophone biens: ‘good quality, goodness, virtue’; ‘good name, reputation’; ‘well-being, prosperity’; ‘wealth, property, possession’: Anglo-Norman Dictionary, s.v. bien. 40 That the Marshal was unusually wealthy in terms of his access to cash is illustrated by an anecdote: disputing the share of a horse with another man, he allowed the other to place a value on the animal, and then instantly produced half the cash, to the man’s chagrin: he had not expected the Marshal to have any such amount in cash, and had apparently named much too low a figure for the horse (lines 4219–75). But the relative absence of cash in this economy of largesse and exchange seems often to have been exploited: the poet states that in giving the Marshal money to help him on crusade, Henry II took in return two horses worth far more (lines 7245–58). This gap between notional monetary value and raisable cash, seen frequently in the case of war-horses, is evidently the result of their centrality to the knight’s success, and indeed his existence.



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‘Certes, sire’, fait Lancelos, ‘de ceste guerre maintenir ne fuissiés vous pas si aaisiés comme vous estes ore, se je eüsse tant esté en vostre nuisement comme je ai esté en vostre aïde le jor que Galehols, li sires des Lontaines Illes, devint vostres hom liges en celui point meïsmes ou il avoit pooir de vous tolir terre et honour et la ou vos estiés aprochiés de toutes hontes recevoir, ce fu de perdre la courone et d’estre desiretés; e se il de cele journee vous ramenbrast, ensi comme il deüst faire, ja certes de ceste guerre bastir encontre moi ne vos entremeïssiés, ne ceste chose, sire, ne vos di je mie pour ce que je aie doute de vos, ains le di pour l’amour que vous deüssiés avoir a moi, se vous estiés si bons guerre-donerres de bontés comme rois deüst estre.’41 [‘Indeed, my lord’, said Lancelot, ‘you would not be in such a favourable position to continue the war as you are now, if I had done as much to harm you as I did to help you the day that Galeholt, the lord of the Distant Isles, became your liege man at the very moment when he had the power to strip you of lands and honour, and when you were very close to receiving the humiliation of losing your crown and your birthright. If you remembered that day as you should, you certainly would not be involved in waging this war against me. I am not saying this, my Lord, because I fear you, but because of the love you ought to feel for me if you were as grateful for good deeds done for you as a king should be.’]

The terrible clash between King Arthur and Sir Lancelot, the king and the best knight in the world, results because there is no sphere in the romance world except for the expression of chivalry: and the best knight is then necessarily superior to the king, because the king does not function as a knight at all. His sole role is to dispense the rewards of chivalric behaviour. Here all of Arthur’s power is owed to Lancelot, and hence there is a terrible justice in the knight’s words, even though he has committed adultery with the queen. In the world outside the romance text, though, this should never be the case: the Young King’s authority should not have been dependent upon the supreme prowess of his knights in tournament melée or single combat. But here, then, is the Young King Henry’s fundamental difficulty: he is trapped in a structure of his own and his father’s creation, embodying the paradox of being a landless knight with a crown. Nothing external – or real – supports his crown’s honour. Such a structure mirrors the world of the romance: his status – that high reputation for chivalry, courtliness, and generosity – is solely derived from the exploits and display of his retainers, and so his own practice of lordship, exercised entirely through largesse, skirmishes, and tournaments, offers him no role other than to be a king inferior to his own greatest knights. And sure enough, when a faction gathered together at the Young King’s court in 1182 and attempted, with temporary success, to dislodge the Marshal from favour, either they proved to be alive enough to the power of this paradigm to accuse him of adultery with the queen, or, in seeking to distract attention from more pragmatic and perhaps more harmful accusations, the poet represented them as accusing him of that crime. And he, like Lancelot, is said to have offered to prove his innocence in battle; and like Lancelot, his offer is rejected, and he leaves the court: but it is the honourable reputation of the king which is damaged.42 It is impossible to say whether this accusation was really made.43 There were myriad examples of it in literature, of which Lancelot and Tristan are only the most obvious; it was a standard trope by which the hero could be sent into exile, to meet 41 42 43

Mort Artu, 159–60; trans. Cable, 151. Marshal, lines 5243–5481, 5715–91. Cf. Mort Artu, 140; trans. Cable, 135. Crouch, William Marshal, 49–50, on balance believes it to be the poet’s invention.

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further adventures. But of course such things did happen: only seven years previously Count Philip of Flanders had apparently nastily executed a retainer found with his wife.44 Above all, this question rests in a complex cultural negotiation which exposes something serious. The frequency of the trope in literature is almost as likely to have inspired the Marshal’s enemies as his biographer: they may indeed have concocted the story because of its inherent pre-existence as a possibility. And more importantly, this trope of the adulterous queen is itself a metaphorical repres­ entation, of a difficulty central to a culture which elevated secular knighthood alongside hereditary kingship: the superiority of the king’s champion, his finest retainer, his best knight, to the king. Thus we approach something at the heart of that ideology of chivalric courtliness, as codified in the Arthurian romance: it is not a code which offers anything to the king; cannot, perhaps, properly apply to him at all. This sort of courtliness or ‘chivalry’ is an ideology of service, and of self-service, not of kingship: the two are in conflict.45 The explanations for this lie on several levels, just as its effects are felt in both literary patterns and in historical events. As a textual phenomenon, the inferiority of the king is explicable in terms of genre. The core narrative structure of the Arthurian romance definitively excluded the king from its own highest values, the currency of chivalric exploits: for the purpose of the text is the development of the lone knight, the chivalric hero, who must leave the court in order to find adventure, be tested, and prove himself; the role of the king is reduced to that of a necessary but static figurehead, whose function is to mark the point of departure and the point of return; never to act in his own right. The king’s sole purpose is to provide unlimited largesse and sustain the court in such a way that its knights can exercise their chivalric prowess in the pursuit of glory; that, then, is envisaged as the source of the king’s own reputation. And thus inevitably emerges the figure of Lancelot, himself a metaphor, the best knight in the world, whose superiority to his king is inescapable. That superiority is symbolically crystallized into his adultery with the queen, which condemns the Arthurian world to destruction. This logical progression does not in itself explain why such a literature came into being. Without engaging too deeply with questions of genre formation, it is at least possible to observe that there is an ideological explanation provided by historical context. This was primarily an aristocratic, not a royal, literature, written for a society of local baronial and knightly competition in skirmishes and tournaments; a world of ever-diminishing opportunities to acquire landed wealth, of increasingly economic and fluid exchange and commerce; one in which a man could rise from the dust, given royal favour, and be cast down into it, without. The audience for the chivalric romances was evidently made up of many more barons and knights than kings; it served to celebrate the ideals, and justify the expedients, of their way of life. At that point, the fiction makes political contact with the historical world. In these senses, then, the young William Marshal emerges, even in the idealized representation of the History, as a strangely problematic figure: a knight of unsurpassed prowess and honour, whose very excellence repeatedly draws him into 44

Ibid. 49, citing Howden, Chronica, II, 82–3; see also Ruth E. Harvey, ‘Cross-Channel Gossip in the Twelfth Century’, in England and the Continent in the Middle Ages: Studies in Memory of Andrew Martindale, ed. John Mitchell and Matthew Moran, Stamford 2000, 48–59. 45 Cf. Crouch’s comments on King Stephen and the Young King: ‘Strategies of Lordship in Angevin England and the Career of William Marshal’, in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood II, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Ruth Harvey, Woodbridge 1988, 1–25 at 2–3.



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conflict with his lord, the Young King. Meanwhile, that king is gushingly celebrated, but only as the gatekeeper, the standard-bearer of chivalry: the enabler of chivalry in other men. So essential but reduced is his role that he cannot sustain the hierarchy of lord and man; and it is seen to collapse. The alignment of the Marshal with Lancelot, and the Young King with the Arthur of the romance, is thus instructive in its negative implications, as much as in its idealizing cultural value. The chivalry of the Arthurian romance is seen to be an important player in real-world culture – but not, necessarily, a successful one. But the Marshal spent only the first part of his career in that world, on the Contin­ ental tournament circuit, and with the Young King’s death in 1183 the course of his life changed, as he continued his astonishing rise to power. He had begun as a landless knight-for-hire, a younger son unprovided for, and had, like many, found some prosperity with the Young King’s mesnie. On the younger man’s death the Marshal took up his lord’s unfulfilled promise to take the cross; returning in 1186, he found a place as a curial baron with military value, and was close to Henry II in his last days. When Henry died in 1189, the Marshal was still awaiting a long-­promised profitable marriage, and Richard I swiftly granted him the hand of Isabella, daughter of Richard fitz Gilbert, ‘Strongbow’, who brought him immense estates in Ireland, England, and Normandy, and made him a leading magnate. He weathered the storms of John’s reign, ultimately to become regent for the young Henry III in 1216, before his death in 1219. But this notable progression must be viewed within the context of an equally dramatic, much wider political change, encompassing a variety of phenomena, and most conveniently represented by a single event: the loss of Normandy in 1204. This change in circumstances has been seen as setting the seal on a long-standing separation, and as the mechanism of release for the thirteenth century’s increasing nationalism and francophobia;46 among the most powerful magnates of the Angevin world, it was a dramatic opportunity to distinguish the national, regional, and personal loyalties of particular individuals. These tensions explain a negotiation which takes place throughout the History: that is the covert dialogue between the poet’s strong English nationalism, and intermittently strident anti-French feeling, and his subject’s evidently transnational, cross-Channel sympathies and interests.47 This is particularly apparent during the Marshal’s early life; the poet never misses an opportunity to ascribe some loyalty to England to him, but all his interests are necessarily Continental: Talent lui est pris e corage De venir s’en en Engleterre, Por ce k’il fu nez en la terre E por veeir son bon lingnage. … Li Chamberlent lui otria, Meis molt le requist e preia Qu’a l’einz qu’il peüst retornast N’en la terre ne sejornast, Qu’il n’i aveit nul bon sejor, Se ce n’esteit a vavasor

46

David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284, London 2004, 8–10, 353–4; idem, ‘King Henry III’s “Statute” against Aliens: July 1263’, EHR 107, 1992, 925–44; M. T. Clanchy, England and its Rulers, 1066–1272: Foreign Lordship and National Identity, 2nd edn, Oxford 1998, 241–4. 47 I have discussed some of the vast literature relating to the question of English and Norman identities elsewhere: Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200, Cambridge 2007, esp. 7–8, 94–7.

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Laura Ashe Ou a gent qui d’esrer n’ont cure; Mais ki volt mettre peine e cure En esrer ne en tornïer, Si le soleit l’om enveier En Brutaingne on en Normandie Por hanter la chevalerie, O par tut la ou l’om turneie; Kar eissi covent tote voie Faire com vos me oez conter Qui d’armes velt en pris monter.  (lines 1526–48) [He conceived a desire and had a mind to go to England, because he was born in that country and he wished to see his worthy kin. … The chamberlain granted him leave, but he begged and prayed him insistently to return as quickly as possible and not to stay long in that country, for it was in no way a fitting place to stay, except for the minor gentry and those who had no wish to travel the world. He said that any man wishing to devote his time and effort to travelling the world and tourneying was usually sent to Brittany or Normandy to frequent the company of knights, or, indeed, anywhere where tournaments were held; for any man who seeks to increase his renown in combat must always do as you have heard me tell.]

Notably, the Arthurian romance which mirrors this world of tournaments, just like the tournaments themselves,48 was a solely Continental phenomenon. This is a well known but nevertheless surprising fact about the literature of twelfth- and thirteenth-century England. The Arthurian legend was of course a native product; but the Arthurian romance was not. King Arthur did not appear in Insular vernacular literature until Laȝamon translated Wace’s Brut into English in the early thirteenth century, and Laȝamon’s historical chronicle has an entirely different flavour from the Continental romance. Lancelot does not appear, and that absence will serve as a shorthand for an all-encompassing difference of tone. This is an intentional tactic which can be traced not only in the – necessarily conscious – decision to ignore the Continental romances, but in the process of translation itself, by which Wace’s developing emphasis upon courtliness is replaced with a focus on governance and justice.49 Þa þe Arður wes king  hærne nu seollic þing he wes mete-custi  ælche quike monne cniht mid þan bezste  wunder ane kene he wes þan ȝungen for fader  þan alden for frouer and wið þan vnwise  wunder ane sturnne woh him wes wunder lað  and þat rihte a leof.50 [When Arthur was king – now hear a marvellous thing – he was generous to every man alive, among the best of warriors, wonderfully bold; he was a father to the young, a comfort to the old, and with the rash extremely stern; wrong was most hateful to him and right was always dear.]51

48 49

Warren, Henry II, 582. An excellent example is the comparison of Wace, Roman de Brut, ed. and trans. Judith Weiss, Exeter 2002, lines 10733–72 with both manuscript versions of Laȝamon: Brut, ed. G. L. Brook and R. F. Leslie, EETS old series 250 and 277, London 1963–78, lines 12426–58. 50 Laȝamon: Brut, ed. Brook and Leslie, lines 9945–50. 51 Translated by W. R. J. Barron and S. C. Weinberg, in Layamon’s Arthur, Exeter 2001, 37–9.



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This Arthur is an active warrior, leading his men into battle – ‘mi-seolf ic wullen on-fon / an alre freomeste þat fiht ich wulle biginnen’ (lines 10575–6) [‘I myself will engage first and foremost; I will begin the battle’ (69)] – and invincible in single combat; in governing, he is firm, just and pious: Þa hæhte hine Arður  aðelest kingen þat he rærde churechen  7 þa songes rihten and Goddes folc biwusten  7 fæire heom dihtten And he hæhte alle cnihtes  demen rihte domes and þa eorðe-tilien  teon to heore cræften 7 æuerælcne gume  oðerne i-græten. 7 wulc mon swa wurs dude  þene þe king hafde iboden he wolde hine ifusen  to ane bare walme and ȝif hit weore læð mon  he sculde hongie for þon.  (lines 11033–41) [Then Arthur, noblest of kings, exhorted [his archbishop] to build churches and to restore the singing there, and to care for God’s people and instruct them properly. And he ordered all knights to render true justice, and the farmers to follow their calling, and all men to respect each other. And whoever behaved less well than the king had commanded should be instantly condemned to death by burning; and if it were someone base, he should hang for it. (93)]

And in a fashion whose very anachronism serves as an indicator of its great cultural importance, this Arthur is associated with the promulgation of good law: he heold inne londe  ane muchele hustinge and sette alle þa laȝen  þat stoden bi his ælderne daȝen alle þa laȝen gode  þe her ær stoden He sette grið he sette frið  and alle freodomes.  (lines 11086–9) [He held a great assembly in the kingdom and confirmed all the laws which had existed in the days of his ancestors, all the good laws which once existed here. He established law and order and confirmed all rights and privileges. (95)]

Courtly and chivalric concerns are excluded; in their place is the pious elevation of corporate endeavour, God’s peace, and the king’s peace, and the defence of the land and people. This model is characteristic of the romance of England, the so-called ‘Insular’ romances, written in French in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and later in English. These texts – the romances of Horn, and Havelok, Guy of Warwick, Fulk Fitzwarren – are constructed around the ideals of lordship and landholding, inheritance and dynastic progression, in a way which marks their drastic difference from the febrile fictionality of the Continental Arthurian romance. And most importantly, they offer a strong, not to say realistic, model of lordship, kingship, and governance, a sense of the duties and the qualities of a king, and eventually, as Elizabeth I would say, of a king of England too.52

52

See also Susan Crane, Insular Romance: Politics, Faith, and Culture in Anglo-Norman and Middle English Literature, Berkeley CA 1986; Rosalind Field, ‘Romance as History, History as Romance’, in Romance in Medieval England, ed. Maldwyn Mills, Jennifer Fellows, and Carol M. Meale, Cambridge 1991, 163–73; Diane Speed, ‘The Construction of the Nation in Medieval English Romance’, in Readings in Medieval English Romance, ed. Carol M. Meale, Cambridge 1994, 135–59; Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘Havelok and the History of the Nation’, ibid. 121–34; Laura Ashe, ‘ “Exile-and-return” and English Law: The Anglo-Saxon Inheritance of Insular Romance’, Literature Compass, 3, 2006, 300–17; Ashe, Fiction and History; Ashe, ‘The Hero and his Realm in Medieval English Romance’, in Boundaries in Medieval Romance, ed. Neil Cartlidge, Cambridge 2008, 129–47.

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Thus the romance model of chivalry which was so influential in shaping the selfpresentation and representation of the young William Marshal is, like the tournament circuit, inherently a Continental phenomenon. And this maps onto that most evident strain within the portrait of the Marshal, the matter to which the poet returns again and again – his questionable loyalty to England, and to the English king. The Marshal, in fact, in the aftermath of 1204, did homage to the king of France for his Norman lands, and then refused to join King John in his wars in France.53 The political climate by the time of the History’s composition was dramatically unfavourable to such an easy-going transnationalism. Henry III was said to have posthumously declared the Marshal a traitor,54 and his son William Marshal II, around the time of the poem’s writing, was prevented from marrying a French heiress and instead betrothed to the king’s sister, in an attempt to avoid ‘a confederation with aliens’ and ‘to bind [him] more fully and more firmly in the royal service’.55 In a climate of increasingly serious hostility to foreigners, the Marshal earls were an uncertain quantity. The contemporary distinction between naturales and aliens, ‘deeply felt by the chief actors themselves’ and ‘not the preserve of poets and monastic chroniclers’, supposedly relied upon the qualification of native birth, which William Marshal II himself did not fulfil. This fact was diplomatically ignored;56 evidently the need was, above all, to identify the loyal, and preferably to increase their numbers.57 So here lay the meaty political function of the text, to make William Marshal a loyal Englishman. The poet performs the Marshal’s recuperation by degrees, in a thematic and ideological transition made possible by the progression of his career. In his new role as magnate and lord, he could be represented in a very different literary figuration from those of the Continental Arthurian romance. The role of lord and landholder aligned the Marshal with Insular historiographical concerns; as a character he escapes from the evanescent world of tourneying and chivalric exploits, and can be realigned with the stable tropes of the romances of England.58 His ‘Englishness’ remains at issue; but his purported qualities become those which the aristocratic literature of England, and not that of France, celebrates. As such, the bond between lord and man, refigured with the Marshal as lord, is suddenly a functioning bond mediated through a pious loyalty to the land. The poem’s patron, William’s retainer John of Earley, is given a speech to illustrate the point, as the narrative recounts King John’s attempts to dislodge the Marshal from his estates in Ireland: Lores si dit Johan d’Erlee Riche parole e bien membree: ‘Seignors, ce serreit molt grant honte De laissier la terre le conte Qu’il nos a baillie a garder; L’on deit a s’enor regarder, Que malveistié ne seit retraite: Plus dure hunte que soufraite. Si la terre est issi laissiee, 53 54 55

See lines 12866–98, 12944–13148. Matthew Paris, Chronica Majora, ed. H. R. Luard, 7 vols, RS 57, 1872–83, IV, 157. David Carpenter, The Minority of Henry III, London 1990, 243–5 at 245; Daniel Power, ‘The French Interests of the Marshal Earls of Striguil and Pembroke, 1189–1234’, ANS 25, 2002, 199–225 at 216. 56 Cf. the tensions raised and dismissed in Marshal, lines 16204–24. 57 Carpenter, Minority, 273. 58 Cf. Rosamund S. Allen, ‘Eorles and Beornes: Contextualising Lawman’s Brut’, Arthuriana, 8.3, 1998, 4–22, arguing that Laȝamon’s Arthur is modelled on William Marshal.



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Nostre enor en iert abaissiee. Donc nos nos la briche quere Se nos perdons enor e terre; Quant nos perdons terre e onor E l’amor de nostre seignor.’ Estiembles d’Evreues dist: ‘Ja n’ait il part en Jhesu Crist Qui la laira! Bien le ferons, Si Dieu pleist, ben le defendrons.’  (lines 13719–36) [Thereupon John of Earley delivered a magnificent speech that was full of wisdom: ‘My lords, it would be a most disgraceful thing to leave the earl’s land, land which he has committed to us to guard. One should be concerned with his honour, so that no tale of wrongdoing can be told; shame lasts longer than destitution. If the land is abandoned in this manner, our own honour will be diminished. So we are in a trap, for, on the one hand, we lose honour and land, and, on the other, we lose land and honour and the love of our lord as well.’ Stephen d’Evreux then said: ‘May the man never share in the love of Jesus Christ who leaves this land! We shall perform well, if it please God, and defend the land well.’]

This is a particularly beautiful representation of an idealized but functioning combin­ ation, an engagement both with the newly forged bonds of the mesnie, the band of knights retained by a lord, and with the codes of landholding and military service, loyal defence of the land: or, to put it another way, the ideals of the Continental Arthurian romance and the Insular baronial romance. That is, John’s clinching point of logic seems to be the love of their lord – not their lord in title of land held from him, but in recognition of their bonds as his company of retainers.59 But nevertheless, newly enfeoffed with his Irish estates, they must fight for them in his and their defence, and so their loyalty is now expressed, piously and vigorously, in terms of the land. And as the Marshal is finally engaged in the crowning struggle of his life, the defence of England and the young Henry III against the invading French in 1217, his transformation is as complete as the poet can make it. He gives the Marshal a rousing pre-battle address, as English ships sail to meet a French fleet on 24 August 1217: Li Mareschal en piez s’esta, Qui forment les amonesta De herdement e de bien faire E dist: ‘Seinor, molt nos puet plere, E devez aver en memorie Que Dex la premiere victorie Vos dona de Franceis en terre. Or revienent en Engleterre Contre Deu le reigne clamer, Mes Dex e en terre e en mer A le poeir d’aidier as buens,

59

Crouch discusses the workings of the ‘affinity’ as ‘the essence of what is called in a later period “bastard feudalism” ’: William Marshal, 160–76 at 170. cf. F. M. Powicke, ‘The Angevin Administration of Normandy’, EHR 22, 1907, 15–42 at 40. On the role of personal loyalties in identity formation in the History, see also Kim Esmark, ‘Men of Honor: Aspects of Medieval Knightly Identity in the Verse Biography of William the Marshal’, in The Birth of Identities: Denmark and Europe in the Middle Ages, ed. Brian Patrick McGuire, Copenhagen 1996, 69–91.

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Laura Ashe Donques aidera il as suens. Nuls granz enpires ne puet vivre A gent que Dex e acondire. Le mielz parti avez del giu; Vos veintrez les enemi Deu.’  (lines 17313–28) [The Marshal rose to his feet and keenly exhorted them to perform valorous exploits, saying: ‘My lords, this is very much to our liking, and you should bear in mind that God gave you the first victory over the French on land. Now they return to England to claim the land as theirs, against God’s will, but God has, both on land and sea, the power to aid good men, so he will help his own. No mighty empire can survive against men who have the guidance of God. You have the better hand in the deal; you will vanquish the enemies of God.’]

This stridently crusading tone,60 framed in nationalistic terms, may be a particularly strong piece of ventriloquy on the poet’s part: the Marshal simply never lost his cross-Channel sensibilities; in these final battles he fought men he knew and respected.61 But nevertheless, a change has taken place, as the poet is in the business of casting William Marshal as a loyal Englishman, and the movement from knight in service of the feckless prince on the Continental tournament circuit, to ultimate regent of England and defender of the Crown and land, enables him, corres­ pondingly, to move the Marshal’s imputed ideals from those which characterize the Continental romance – chivalric prowess, honour and reputation, largesse, and glory – to those which are typical of the Insular narrative – land lordship, defence of the patria, justice, and inheritance: and, we note, a holy war which brings the remission of sins with its execution. In his role as regent of England, the Marshal is finally constituted in the model of the idealized English king: the king who governs, rules, and protects: ‘Oiez, frans chevaliers leials,’ Dist Willemes li Mareschals, ‘E qui al rei estes en fei … Quant nos, por nostre pris defendre, E por nos e por noz amanz E por femes e por enfanz, E por defendre nostre tere E por tresaute enor conquere, E por la pais de sainte Glise Que cil ont enfrete e malmise, E por aveir redemption De toz noz pecchez e pardon, Sostenons des armes le fes, Gardez n’i ait ui nul malveis!’  (lines 16137–52) [‘Hear me, you noble, loyal knights,’ said William the Marshal, ‘you who keep faith with the king. … Now that we, in order to defend our name, for ourselves and for the sake of our loved ones, our wives and our children, and to defend our land and win for ourselves the highest honour, and to safeguard the peace of Holy Church which our enemies have broken and infringed, and to gain redemp60

The English were reported to have been granted full remission of their sins before battle, and the French excommunicated: lines 16226–35. 61 The Marshal is said to have been deeply distressed at the death of Thomas, count of Perche, stopping fighting in the midst of battle in order to help him, as though in a tournament: lines 16729–68. Thomas, a leading magnate on the French side, was the grandson of one of the Marshal’s cousins: see the genealogy in Crouch, William Marshal, 40.



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tion and pardon for all our sins, now that we, for all that, have taken on the burden of armed combat, let us make sure there is no coward amongst us!’]

These are universal ideals; but they play little part in the Continental romance and its ideology of chivalry, the inactive Arthur and superlative Lancelot. It was the literature of England which ideologically codified lordship, kingship, and governance, visible in Laȝamon’s Arthur, and grew to represent them – and him – as distinctively English. The History of William Marshal, then, in following its hero’s career, portrays as a lifetime’s chronological progression a distinction which, in the wider world, was really a synchronic, geographical one, between the cultures and literatures of France and England. I think this strange literary divergence has its roots in a long-standing difference between England and France, which emerged even in the cultures and literatures of a cross-Channel Francophone world. By 1204, the English nobility had at least three hundred years’ experience of comparatively strong kings. In France, in contrast, strong and wide-reaching kingship – whether imposed by the king of England or of France – must have appeared a relatively new imposition to an élite which had been long accustomed to assume primary responsibility for government: and it was one which generated traces of resistance, not celebration, in the contemporary liter­ ature.62 But to assert the comparative strength of ‘English’ kingship, under Norman and Angevin kings, is mildly paradoxical. John Gillingham has argued that Henry II, Richard, and John were all thought of by near-contemporaries as Norman, and hence effectively foreign;63 and George Garnett has recently written forcefully of the inheritance crises of the Norman and Angevin kingdom of England, locating a fundamental weakness in post-Conquest kingship; he concludes that a fatal dependence on the individual person of the king, as the source of all tenure, constantly threatened the stability of the kingdom.64 But in looking to the ideological models chosen by the Insular romances and chronicles, and eventually chosen by the History of William Marshal, I would suggest that in response to that threat, a sort of carapace had developed around the idea of the king, in conquered England, which formed a powerful nexus of ideas not necessarily bound to the individual person of any given king. This carapace was developed out of the unique institutional strength of the Anglo-Saxon state – a state which had, of course, absorbed foreign kings before – and out of the idea, if not necessarily the reality, of the inheritance of old English law;65 it was given force by the compulsive cultural necessity of a renewed national identity, which could be formulated in terms of the land and its defence, and thus efface linguistic difference; and it was a profoundly creative response to the difficulties presented by arguably foreign, often absentee, and frequently unjust, kings. In essence, I would suggest that just as English identity was reforged in a multi62

The seminal study of this phenomenon, of literary resistance to royal power, is Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-Century France, Berkeley CA 1993. A contemporary example is that of Richard’s difficulties in the 1170s and 1180s in imposing lordship on Aquitaine, and the poetic commentary of the troubadour Bertran de Born: Warren, Henry II, 564–80. 63 ‘ “Slaves of the Normans”? Gerald de Barri and Regnal Solidarity in Early Thirteenth-Century England’, in Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. Pauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson, and Jane Martindale, Manchester 2001, 160–71. 64 Garnett, Conquered England, esp. chapter 2, ‘The King as an Anomaly’, 45–135, and chapter 3, ‘The Problem of Interregnum’, 136–61. 65 See also Ashe, ‘Anglo-Saxon Inheritance’.

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lingual nation under a cross-Channel, Francophone aristocracy, so the idealization of English kingship was given renewed force under the strange circumstances of foreign rule and constantly disputed succession. Both cultural ideologies were rapacious and capacious, and as the poet-biographer sought to justify William Marshal, they proved more than sufficient to absorb the courtly Francophile tournament knight and reclothe him as a mighty English ruler.

GRADES OF ORDINATION AND CLERICAL CAREERS, c. 900–c. 1200 Julia Barrow The clergy were a central part of medieval society and medieval political activity, and were responsible for creating many surviving medieval sources; thus all medievalists, irrespective of their interests, need to know something about how they were defined, as clerics, from the rest of society, and how their careers were structured. The principal function of clergy, and the feature that principally separated them from the laity, was to perform or to help to perform sacraments, the most significant and frequently celebrated of which was mass. Clerics were licensed to celebrate mass or to assist with its celebration by a series of initiation rites, in other words ordination to a succession of clerical grades, from doorkeeper up to priest. These rites separated clergy from laity. In addition, there were visible markers – tonsure and separate clothing – but these did not go back quite so far in Christian history as ordination. Tonsure began to be adopted in the sixth century and was a requirement from the early seventh; likewise, as far as clothing was concerned, clergy in the Roman empire wore the long garments appropriate for upper-class males, and it was only in the sixth century, when upper-class laymen adopted knee-length tunics, that clerical clothing became distinct from secular clothing. Tonsure and clothing made clerics visibly different, but ordination was more important in establishing their status. Ordination to the various grades was usually spaced out over quite a long time; it therefore formed a framework marking out phases of a cleric’s life. However, it was not only ordination which provided this framework. Clerics did not only have a sacramental role; they also had a wider pastoral role as teachers and preachers. They had to be able to read and they were, indeed, supposed to be learned, as many, though not all of them, were. The educational process necessary to achieve this ran alongside the succession of grades of ordination; before being ordained to each grade, a cleric would be given a short examination to see that he had the necessary knowledge. In the study of clerical careers, education has so far aroused more interest than ordination, but the latter had a significant impact on the pattern of clerical careers and therefore the relationship between ordination and clerical career structure needs to be investigated. More than one approach could be adopted here; it would be possible to look at the development of the liturgy, at the growth of literature on ecclesiology, chiefly the genre known as De officiis ecclesiasticis, and at canon law, and these will be 

Robert Godding, Prêtres en Gaule mérovingienne, Subsidia Hagiographica 82, Brussels 2001, 27–32. Many distinctive features of clerical clothing in later periods were also survivals of outmoded lay fashions (e.g. Lutheran ruffs and Anglican bishops’ sleeves).  e.g. the Anglo-Saxon requirements for examining ordinands in Councils and Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I, AD 871–1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett, and C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols, Oxford 1981, I, 422–7.

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touched on in what follows. However, the aim of this paper is to take a more pragmatic approach, grounded in social history and prosopography, to concentrate on what clerics did rather than what they were supposed to do. It will cover the period from the ninth century, when under the Carolingians the church acquired much of the institutional shape it was to retain throughout the Middle Ages, down to the early thirteenth century, by which time a significant proportion of the elite clergy were in receipt of a higher education; geographically it will concentrate on France north of the Loire, the Empire, and England. For the tenth and most of the eleventh century the sources used will be predominantly narrative ones, and thereafter predominantly charters. The paper will start with an overview of how the number of clerical orders was fixed at seven; it will proceed to discuss the ages of clergy at ordination to the various grades, and will then look generally at the ways in which individual grades might influence particular phases of clerical careers; then some individual clerical careers will be examined for information about how the system worked in practice. Finally the paper will survey the information on clerical career patterns that can be supplied by charters. By about the end of the eighth century the clerical grades had been fixed as the following: doorkeeper (ostiarius), exorcist, reader (lector), acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest. These were already the grades fixed in the Roman church in the middle of the third century, but outside Rome the process of sorting out clerical grades had lasted seven or eight centuries: during this time, several of the original grades, the grave-digger, the psalmist, and the cantor, had had to be edged out or merged with other grades (psalmists and cantors were assimilated to readers, for example) in order to attain a desirable septiformity for the whole framework. Likewise, bishops, though they had originally been included in lists of the clerical grades, had ended up outside and above the list in order to allow a total of seven. The idea that there should be seven orders began with De septem ordinibus ecclesiae, 

These are the sources chiefly used by John St H. Gibaut, The Cursus Honorum: A Study of the Origins and Evolution of Sequential Ordination, New York and Bern 2000, which sets out the framework of the topic.  These are the grades listed in the Gellone Sacramentary of the end of the eighth century, and also in a set of episcopal capitula from Mainz, probably the work of Archbishop Riculf (787–813), though this source places the reader above the acolyte: presbiter, diaconus, subdiaconus, lector, acolitus, exorcista, hostiarius: Capitula Episcoporum, III, ed. Rudolf Pokorny, MGH Capitula Episcoporum 3, Hanover 1995, 180. Also, in the earlier ninth century, the 816 Institutio Canonicorum or Rule of Aachen, Concilia aevi Karolini, ed. Albert Werminghoff, 2 vols, MGH Concilia 2, Hanover and Leipzig 1906, I, 308–421 at 319–22; Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum libri tres: Studien und Edition, ed. Detlev Zimpel, Freiburger Beiträge zur mittelalterlichen Geschichte 7, Mainz 1996, 300–7 (Book I, cc. 6–11), and Amalarius, De officiis ecclesiasticis, Book II, cc. 7–13, in Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica omnia, ed. Jean-Michel Hanssens, 3 vols, Vatican City 1967 for 1948–50, II, 215–32.  Eusebius, The Ecclesiastical History, ed. Kirsopp Lake and H. J. Lawlor, trans. Kirsopp Lake and J. E. L. Oulton, 2 vols, Cambridge MA 1926–32, II, 118 (VI, 43), citing a mid-third century letter of Pope Cornelius listing the clergy and recipients of charity in the church of Rome: 1 bishop, 46 presbyters, 7 deacons, 7 subdeacons, 42 acolytes, 52 exorcists, readers and doorkeepers, more than 1,500 widows and distressed persons.  Roger E. Reynolds, ‘The De officiis vii graduum: Its Origins and Development’, Mediaeval Studies, 34, 1972, 113–51, reprinted in Roger E. Reynolds, Clerical Orders in the Early Middle Ages: Duties and Ordination, Aldershot 1999, chapter II, retaining original pagination; J. Crehan, ‘The Seven Orders of Christ’, Theological Studies, 19, 1958, 81–93.  Priests (presbyters) had begun to celebrate the Eucharist independently from bishops in churches other than cathedrals by the early fourth century (F. Pototschnig, ‘Priester; lateinischer Westen; historische Bedeutung und kirchenrechtliche Entwicklung’, Lexikon des Mittelalters, 9 vols, Munich 1980–98, VII, 203–5 at 204); during the course of the sixth century the term sacerdos, originally used chiefly to mean ‘bishop’ in Christian sources, came to be used predominantly to mean ‘priest’ (Georg Schöllgen,



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attributed to Jerome but in fact written in Catalonia or the Roussillon in the fifth or sixth century; the desirability of having seven orders was subsequently stressed in Irish and British texts. It was also desirable to prove a link between each of the orders and the career of Christ: this helps to explain the disappearance of the cantor from the seven. Finally the subdeacon and the acolyte had to be fitted in. These two grades, for which there was no biblical precedent (unlike all the others), evolved through the necessity of creating assistants to the deacons in the city of Rome, where, thanks to the stipulation in Acts 6: 3 that there should be seven deacons in the church at Jerusalem, there was a serious bottleneck in the system by as early as the third century. At this time, according to a letter of Bishop Cornelius of Rome to Bishop Fabius of Antioch cited in Eusebius’s Historia ecclesiastica, each deacon had a subdeacon and six acolytes.10 By the time the number of deacons in Rome was finally allowed to expand beyond seven the junior positions had become firmly entrenched, and slowly penetrated into other areas of western Christendom, though acolytes only begin to be found in Gaul as late as the sixth century,11 and Isidore, who provided a definition for them in his Etymologies, omitted them from his De ecclesiasticis officiis.12 The texts establishing these positions were a mixture of the legal, the liturgical, and the expository. Sometimes the approaches overlapped; thus the Statuta ecclesiae antiqua winds up with a set of instructions for ordination rites.13 Among the liturgical texts, the late sixth-century Leonian Sacramentary gives ordination prayers for deacon, priest, and bishop; the Gellone Sacramentary, produced in the late eighth century, gives ordination prayers but not rites for all seven orders plus the bishop; the mid-tenth-century Romano-German Pontifical gives ordination prayers and rites for eight orders, beginning with the psalmist, whose order could be conferred by a priest in the bishop’s absence, and also the consecration rite for the bishop.14 The tenth-century Egbert Pontifical gives a prayer for the archdeacon to say over ‘Priester, VI: christlich’, in Der neue Pauly: Enzyklopädie der Antike, ed. Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider, 12 vols in 13, Stuttgart and Weimar 1996–2003, X, 322–3).  Roger E. Reynolds, ‘The Pseudo-Hieronymian De septem ordinibus ecclesiae: Notes on its Origins, Abridgments, and Use in Early Medieval Canonical Collections’, Revue bénédictine, 80, 1970, 238–52.  André Wilmart, ‘Les Ordres de Christ’, Revue des sciences religieuses, 3, 1923, 305–27; Crehan, ‘The Seven Orders’; Roger E. Reynolds, ‘An Ordinal of Christ in Medieval Catalan’, Harvard Theological Review, 99, 2006, 103–10. 10 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, II, 118. 11 Godding, Prêtres, 36. In the Eastern church there are only five grades–bishop, priest, deacon, subdeacon, and anagnostes, i.e. reader (Aristeides Papadakis, ‘Clergy’, in Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A. P. Kazhdan and others, 3 vols, New York and Oxford 1991, I, 471). 12 Isidori Hispalensis episcopi etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols, Oxford 1911, I, not paginated (Book VII, c. 12, ¶ 3, 29) on acolytes; for a translation, see The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof, Cambridge 2006, 170, 172; for Isidore’s Ecclesiastical Offices, see note 17 below. 13 Statuta Ecclesiae Antiqua, in Concilia Galliae A. 314–A. 506, ed. C. Munier, Corpus Christianorum, series latina 148, Turnhout 1963, 162–88 at 181–5 (date is c. 475). 14 D. M. Hope, The Leonine Sacramentary: A Reassessment of its Nature and Purpose, London 1971, 118 on dating (MS is c. 600) and 33, 91–5, 122 on ordination prayers; Liber sacramentorum gellonensis, ed. A. Dumas, 2 vols, Corpus Christianorum, series latina 159 and 159a, Turnhout 1981 contains liturgies for ordination of doorkeepers (I, 381), lectors (I, 382), exorcists (I, 382–3), acolytes (I, 383), subdeacons (I, 384–6), deacons (I, 384, 386–8, 391–2), and priests (I, 384, 388–92), and for the consecra­ tion of bishops (I, 392–5); Le Pontifical romano-germanique du dixième siècle, ed. Cyrille Vogel and Reinhard Elze, 2 vols, Studi e Testi 226–7, Vatican City 1963, I, 12–13 (brief exposition of seven grades ‘of Isidore’), 13–19 on minor orders (here five of them: psalmist or cantor, doorkeeper, lector, exorcist, and acolyte), and 20–38 on the orders of subdeacon, deacon, and priest; cf. also 4 ‘Oratio ad puerum tonsurandum’, 4–6 ‘Prefatio ad clericum faciendum’, and 6–7 ‘Oratio ad barbam tondendam’.

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the cantor and then ordination prayers for the seven orders as they had become established (doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest) but prefixes them with a text showing that Christ had performed the roles of each order in his ministry in a group of seven orders which omits the acolyte and includes the bishop.15 At first the expository texts were short, but in the early seventh century Isidore, taking as his basis Ambrose’s De officiis, a work spelling out the moral responsibil­ ities of clergy,16 wrote the De ecclesiasticis officiis, detailing the duties of the clergy in their various grades.17 Isidore’s work created a new genre and was enduringly popular, though to some extent it was supplanted by the much fuller Liber officialis of Amalarius of Metz, written in 823, which stressed the liturgical tasks of clerics.18 Within the eastern Frankish kingdom a more detailed work, the De institutione clericorum of Hrabanus Maurus, written in 819, became influential. Hrabanus was probably responding to the great body of legislation on clergy, monks, and nuns produced by the Aachen councils of 816–19 summoned by Louis the Pious. His work concentrated on how clergy should be educated, unlike the De officiis ecclesiasticis genre.19 After the mid-ninth century the writing of commentaries on the liturgy slackened for about two centuries,20 but then revived under John of Avranches (d. 1079) and flowered in the twelfth century and beyond, following the Amalarian model.21 The Carolingian period, especially the decades at the turn of the eighth and ninth centuries, was crucial in fixing the clerical grades for the rest of the Middle Ages, and this was achieved through the wide circulation of liturgical texts and Amalarius’s De officiis.

Appropriate ages for the various grades of ordination Canon law provided few guidelines about suitable ages for ordination, and what regulation it did provide was not internally consistent. In the late antique period there was a need to cope simultaneously with two very different types of entrant into the clergy. On the one hand were children and adolescents, who were expected 15

Two Anglo-Saxon Pontificals (the Egbert and Sidney Sussex Pontificals), ed. H. M. J. Banting, Henry Bradshaw Society 104, London 1989, 17–31; the explanation of how Christ had fulfilled the seven grades is on pp. 17–18. 16 Ambrose, De officiis, ed. Maurice Testard, Corpus Christianorum, series latina 15, Turnhout 2000. 17 Isidore, De ecclesiasticis officiis, ed. C. M. Lawson, Corpus Christianorum, series latina 113, Turnhout 1989. 18 Amalarius, Liber officialis, in Amalarii episcopi opera, ed. Hanssens, II. On the development of the De officiis genre, see Reynolds, ‘The De Officiis VII Graduum’, 113–51; idem, ‘The “Isidorian” Epistola ad Leudefredum: An Early Medieval Epitome of Clerical Duties’, Medieval Studies, 41, 1979, 252–320, repr. in Reynolds, Clerical Orders, ch. III. 19 Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione clericorum, ed. and trans. Detlev Zimpel, 2 vols, Fontes ­Christiani 61.1–2, Turnhout 2006, I, 17 on the probable motive for writing; Hrabanus Maurus, De institutione cleric­orum libri tres, ed. Zimpel, 95–112 on manuscript transmission. Hrabanus was influenced by the ­Institutio canonicorum: Hanns-Christoph Picker, Pastor Doctus: Klerikerbild und karolingische Reformen bei Hrabanus Maurus, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte 186, Mainz 2001, 56–7. 20 Roger E. Reynolds, ‘Liturgical Scholarship at the Time of the Investiture Controversy: Past Research and Future Opportunities’, Harvard Theological Review, 71, 1978, 109–24 at 111. 21 Le De officiis ecclesiasticis de Jean d’Avranches, archevêque de Rouen (1067–1079), ed. R. Delamare, Paris 1923; Rupert of Deutz, De divinis officiis, ed. Hrabanus Haacke, Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 7, Turnhout 1967; the thirteenth-century Sarum De officiis ecclesiasticis tractatus, in Vetus registrum Sarisberiense, ed. W. H. Rich Jones, 2 vols, RS 78, London 1883–4, I, 1–185.



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to proceed slowly through all grades, and on the other hand were adults, to whom licence had to be given to move more quickly through the system. Pope Gelasius in 494 suggested a year and a half for adult laymen – six months for a liturgical crash course, followed by three months each as lector, acolyte, subdeacon, and deacon and then ordination as priest.22 The Fourth Council of Arles in 524 (c. 1) laid down minimum ages of twenty-five for deacons and thirty for priests, clearly with adult entrants in mind, though the regulations applied to all.23 This council also proposed a year-long spell of conversio for married adult laymen (c. 2): they were required to prove their commitment by living apart from their wives for a year.24 In the seventh century Saints Eligius (d. 660) and Audoenus (d. 684) were both still laymen when they were elected as bishop and had to undergo a year’s conversio. Audoenus’s biographer says he went through the grades of clerical ordination during this time, while Eligius’s biographer merely mentions the priesthood.25 Thereafter the supply of adult laymen trying to enter the higher ranks of the clergy began to dry up, almost certainly because secular education was on its last legs and ecclesiastical education, growing to fill the gap, was coming to be more and more closely linked to the clerical cursus honorum. On the basis of surviving evidence, which is very sparse, most entrants to the clergy in the Carolingian period and the following two or more centuries were children and teenagers. The Fourth Council of Arles guidelines of twenty-five for deacons and thirty for priests remained in force. They were repeated frequently, for example in the Fourth Council of Toledo (633).26 Various canon law collections contained these rulings, including, eventually, Gratian’s Decretum, though Gratian, following proposals by some of the eleventh-century papal reformers, preferred a less severe arrangement and added his own comment, based on biblical examples, that ordination to the priesthood should be allowed in adolescentia (that is, under the age of twenty-eight).27 Likewise in the twelfth century Ivo of Chartres and Hugh of St Victor both argued for twenty as a minimum age for deacons (while, elsewhere in their writings, citing the canon law requirement for twenty-five).28 Also useful, and also to be found in Gratian, were two much older pieces of legislation. One of these was a decree of Pope Zosimus of 21 February 418 laying down that those entering the clergy from infancy (ab infantia) should spend five years each as lector and exorcist and then four years each as acolyte and subdeacon, followed by five years as deacon, before ordination as priest.29 This can be made to fit the Arles guidelines if we propose ordination as lector at seven. The second was a letter of Pope Siricius in 385 proposing that those devoting themselves to ecclesiastical service from infancy should become lectors before puberty and then proceed duly through the grades of

22 23

Godding, Prêtres, 33–4. Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, ed. Giovanni Domenico Mansi, completed by Louis Petit and Jean-Baptiste Martin, 54 vols in 59, reprinted Graz 1960–1 from Paris 1901 edition, VIII, 625–6 [hereafter Mansi]. 24 Ibid. 25 Godding, Prêtres, 45. 26 IV Toledo c. 20: Mansi, X, 625, pointing out that twenty-five was the age for Levites in Num. 8: 24; similarly thirty was the age at which Christ entered his ministry (Luke 3: 23). 27 Gratian, Decretum, Dist. LXXVIII, c. 4 (Corpus iuris canonici, ed. Emil Friedberg, 2 vols, Leipzig 1879–81, I, col. 273); in c. 5, ibid., he quoted Pope Zacharias to the effect that if there were no suitable candidates for the priesthood aged thirty or over men of twenty-five might be considered. 28 Gibaut, Cursus Honorum, 290, 292. 29 Gratian, Dist. LXXVII, c. 2 (Corpus iuris canonici, I, col. 272), a somewhat altered version of the original, for which see PL 56, 572–3.

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acolyte, subdeacon, and deacon, spending five years as deacon, and then priest, with ten years as priest before becoming bishop.30

The functions of grades of ordination We can now turn to the individual grades and how they affected what clergy did. To start with, two general observations. First of all, the sacrament which had most effect on determining what the various orders did was the Eucharist. Over the whole period from the start of the fourth century to the later Middle Ages, we can see an increase in the number of masses, partly because more churches were set up, and partly because the number of masses said in each church rose. The fourth century, with its boom in lesser churches subordinate to the episcopal churches and with its intensification in the frequency of mass from Sundays only to daily masses in the episcopal churches, marked a step change, hastening an already developing tendency for the ‘elders’, the presbyteroi, to be able to say mass independently of bishops. A further significant change began in the eighth century, though it was more noticeable from the ninth century onwards,31 with the development of private masses in major churches in response to lay demand, which was to be one of the forces driving the Benedictine reform of the tenth century; roughly parallel to this came increases in the numbers of rural churches and the gradual appearance of the parish system. Then, beginning in the twelfth century, but more noticeably from the thirteenth century onwards, came the development of chantries. As the frequency of masses rose, so did the demand for priests, who, alone among clergy, could celebrate mass. Secondly, and following from this, the original schema envisaged that a mass would involve one priest and numerous assistants, and that in consequence communities of clergy would have one bishop, a small number of presbyters and deacons, and a rather larger group of junior clergy who would be both assistants and trainees with expectation of promotion. The fewer and more ceremonial the masses, the more scope for numerous assistants. The raison d’être for junior clergy received a boost at the end of the fourth century as clerical communities began to adopt a version of the office, the daily sequence of services of prayers and psalms, in which clergy of all grades could participate jointly.32 Clergy could also undertake to chant psalms for the laity.33 However, from the tenth century onwards, the lay population steadily lost interest in having psalms chanted for them and preferred 30

According to the Liber Pontificalis, Pope Silvester I (314–35) decreed that anyone seeking preferment in the church should be a reader for thirty years, an exorcist for thirty days, an acolyte for five years, a subdeacon for five years, a guardian of the martyrs for five years, a deacon for seven years, and a priest for three years before he could hope to become bishop (The Book of the Pontiffs (Liber Pontificalis): The Ancient Biographies of the First Ninety Roman Bishops to AD 715, trans. Raymond Davis, Translated Texts for Historians 6, Liverpool 1989, 16); Pope Siricius in 385, cited by Gratian, Dist. LXXVII c. 3 (Corpus iuris canonici, I, cols 272–3), had proposed that those devoting themselves to ecclesiastical service from infancy should become lectors before puberty and then proceed duly through the grades of acolyte, subdeacon, and deacon, spending five years as deacon, and then priest, with ten years as priest before becoming bishop. 31 Otto Nussbaum, Kloster, Priestermönch und Privatmesse, Bonn 1961, 73–5, 78–80; Mayke de Jong, In Samuel’s Image: Child Oblation in the Early Medieval West, Leiden 1996, 138–41. 32 James W. McKinnon, ‘The Origins of the Western Office’, in The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages, ed. Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer, Oxford 2000, 63–73; the clerical office was heavily influenced in the fourth century and later by the monastic office. 33 e.g. S 193, 422; this could be enforced by kings, cf. V Æthelstan 3, VI Æthelstan 8, 6, and VII Æthelred II 3, 2: Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 168, 180, 261.



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private masses;34 meanwhile the endowments for new parish churches could support only a priest and perhaps at most also a clerk. Within clerical communities, there was continuing demand for a spread of grades of ordination, but the proportion of churches staffed by communities was in decline in proportion to the total and several existing ones were turned into Benedictine and, from the end of the eleventh century, Augustinian foundations. As we have seen, the orders known to and accepted by the Carolingian church were seven all told: doorkeeper, reader, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest.35 But already long before Amalarius’s time two of the junior grades, the doorkeeper and the exorcist, were dead letters. In the early church doorkeepers had had the role of excluding catechumens from the mass after the readings and the sermon, but once child baptism had become normal their duties could be performed by lay servants. Exorcists can be found in episcopal entourages at the council of Arles (314),36 but not at later councils, and it is extremely rare to find clerics mentioned as belonging to this grade in the High Middle Ages.37 The grade of reader (lector) lost status because so many children or adolescents were ordained to it: readings of Scripture became the duty of deacons and subdeacons, leaving readers with nothing to do during the mass.38 In Merovingian Gaul the grade of lector occurs often39 and tended to be held by boys or adolescents training for the higher grades, but at Rome references to lectores dry up in the sixth century, and Gregory I refers to them once only, when quoting Justinian.40 Chrodegang in his mid-eighth-century Rule for his cathedral clergy at Metz laid down that there should be separate tables in the refect­ory for the bishop and his guests, for priests, for deacons, for subdeacons, and then a table for all the other clergy of the cathedral community, meaning that he was lumping together all the junior members of the community: it was unnecessary to differentiate between doorkeepers and exorcists, for example, at Metz in the 750s.41 While the doorkeepers, lectors, and exorcists failed to matter any longer (except for surviving rites in pontificals),42 the remaining grades, the acolytes, subdeacons, deacons, and priests, all had fixed duties to perform during the mass. The priest celebrated mass, the deacon read the Gospel, the subdeacon read the Epistle, and the acolytes carried candles. Thus by the eleventh century the normal grade for a 34

e.g., at Minden in the early thirteenth century, the reuse of a prebend to fund a canon who would say the psalter to fund two minor canons: Westfälisches Urkundenbuch, 11 vols, Münster 1847– (in progess) [hereafter Westf. UB; vols 1–2 published under the title Regesta historiae Westfaliae: accedit codex diplomaticus, ed. H. A. Erhard, Münster 1847–51], VI: Die Urkunden des Bisthums Minden vom Jahre 1201–1300, ed. Hermann Hoogeweg, Münster 1898, no. 59 (1213 × 1236). 35 Amalarius, Liber officialis, 215–32. 36 Concilia Galliae, ed. Munier, 14–22, cited by Godding, Prêtres, 34–5. 37 ‘Pinewald exorc(ista)’ witnesses S 75 of 692, supposedly issued by Æthelred of Mercia for Oslaf, but this charter is a Worcester forgery of the eleventh century. 38 Gregorii I Papae registrum epistolarum, ed. Paul Ewald and Ludwig Hartmann, 2 vols, MGH Epistolarum Tomi 1–2, Berlin 1887–99, I, 363 (Book V, no. 57): Gregory I said that subdeacons should be responsible for readings other than the Gospel, but if necessary this task could be performed by clerks in minor orders; for comment see Detlef Illmer, Formen der Erziehung und Wissensvermittlung im frühen Mittelalter: Quellenstudien zur Frage der Kontinuität des abendländischen Erziehungswesens, Munich 1971, 120. 39 Godding, Prêtres, 61–2, 123, 124, 481. 40 Illmer, Formen der Erziehung, 121, citing Gregorii I registrum, II, 415 (Book XIII, no. 50). 41 S. Chrodegangi Metensis episcopi (742–766) regula canonicorum aus dem Leidener Codex Vossianus Latinus 94 mit Umschrift der tironischen Noten, ed. Wilhelm Schmitz, Hanover 1889, 14 (c. 21); The Chrodegang Rules, ed. and trans. Jerome Bertram, Aldershot 2005, 40, 68–9. 42 The abbey of Fulda still retained some specific duties for the doorkeeper in the celebration of the mass as late as the mid-ninth century: Picker, Pastor doctus, 155.

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young, trainee cleric was that of acolyte, with references to lectores extremely rare, and to the other two grades non-existent except in ordination liturgies.43 At some point between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries there seems to have been a shift from bestowing the three most junior orders separately from each other to bestowing them in swift succession on the same day. In an ordination list of 1203 surviving from the diocese of Hildesheim44 the grade of acolyte is the lowest mentioned and this suggests that the most junior clergy had perhaps been put through the four most junior orders at once. Similarly, further into the thirteenth century, English episcopal registers, which can provide very full information about ordination, mention no grade lower than acolyte.45 Near the end of the thirteenth century the register of Bishop Richard Swinfield of Hereford specifically says two clerics were put through all four minor orders on the same day.46 Clergy in minor orders could marry (provided that they were not members of cathedral communities) and from the twelfth century many urban clerics took advantage of widening opportunities to make a living by writing charters and did not seek ordination in the higher grades.47 Otherwise, the minor orders were for schoolboys, who had often been handed over (the verb used is tradere) at a young age by their parents to become canons of cathedral or collegiate churches, in a parallel system to monastic oblation. Child entry into cathedrals died out in France and England from about 1100, but remained strong in the Empire until much later.48 43 Junior canons in the grade of lector occur in the early twelfth century at Arras cathedral: Les Chartes des évêques d’Arras (1093–1203), ed. Benoît-Michel Tock, Collection de documents inédits sur l’histoire de France, Section d’histoire médiévale et de philologie 21, Paris 1991, nos. 15 (1109), 16 (1110), and 20 (1113); a lector occurring ibid. no. 2 (1097) appears from his position in the witness list to have been a senior member of the chapter and the term here may possibly refer to a dignity rather than to the grade of ordination. 44 Urkundenbuch des Hochstifts Hildesheim und seiner Bischöfe, ed. K. Janicke and H. Hoogeweg, 6 vols, Leipzig 1896–1911 [hereafter UB Hild.], I, 557–9, no. 582 of 1203. See also Urkundenbuch der Stadt Goslar, ed. G. Bode and U. Hölscher, 5 vols, Halle 1893–1922, I, nos. 473 of 1226 and 502 of 1226 × 1232: the former is a report by Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim on an ordination ceremony where a canon of Goslar (who was also parish priest of Gandersheim) was made priest and several scolares presented by the scholasticus were ordained subdeacon and acolytes, and the latter is a letter from the collegiate church of Sts Simeon and Jude in Goslar to Bishop Conrad of Hildesheim requesting ordination for a canon as deacon, another canon as subdeacon, a vicar as subdeacon, and three scolares or schoolboy canons in minor orders. 45 e.g. Registrum Thome de Cantilupo, episcopi Herefordensis, AD MCCLXXV–MCCLXXXII, ed. R. G. Griffiths and W. W. Capes, Canterbury and York Society 2, 1907, 299–312; The Register of John Pecham, Archbishop of Canterbury, 1279–1292, ed. F. N. Davies and Decima Douie, 2 vols, Canterbury and York Society 64–5, 1968–9, I, 184–6, 190–2, 194–7, 199–201, 203–4, 208–15, 220–56; II, 1–35; The Register of Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1296–1321, ed. J. B. Hughes, 2 vols, Canterbury and York Society 91 and 97, 2001–7, II, 8–10, 11–12, 26–7, 70, 94–5. The registers of Bishop Oliver Sutton of Lincoln do not name the clerks being ordained in minor orders, though they name the ones ordained in major orders and specify which major order was bestowed: The Rolls and Register of Bishop Oliver Sutton, 1280–1299, ed. Rosalind M. T. Hill, 8 vols, Lincoln Record Society 39, 43, 48, 52, 60, 64, 69, 76, Lincoln 1948–86, VII, 37, 38, 51, 66. 46 Registrum Ricardi de Swinfield, episcopi Herefordensis, A.D. MCCLXXXIII–MCCCXVII, ed. W. W. Capes, Canterbury and York Society 6, 1909, 549, at Reading 27 March 1288; the only ordinations recorded in Swinfield’s register were performed in the diocese of Salisbury under licence, while notifications of ordinations carried out by Swinfield himself have been lost. Ordination to any or all of the minor orders on the same day (though not to a major order as well, nor to more than one major order) was regarded as permissible by John de Burgh in his Pupilla Oculi of the 1380s: see Pastors and the Care of Souls in Medieval England, ed. John Shinners and William J. Dohar, Notre Dame IN 1998, 57. 47 For some late medieval examples, see Margaret Harvey, Lay Religious Life in Late Medieval Durham, Woodbridge 2006, 114–19. 48 There was some attempt to limit it at Minden in 1230, at both the cathedral and the Marienstift, where it was laid down that no one should be elected to a prebend under the age of fourteen (possibly



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The subdiaconate occupied a pivotal position. Down to the earlier eleventh century it was often considered to be a minor order (and remains so in the Eastern church), and, in spite of some conciliar decrees prescribing chastity for sub­deacons, on the whole there was little pressure on them to be celibate.49 In the first half of the ­eleventh century, however, various church councils insisted on celibacy for this grade as for those of deacon and priest,50 and the subdiaconate became a major order.51 It was pivotal in another sense too: since it was common for ordination to the subdiaconate to take place at the age of twenty-one it formed a sort of coming-of-age ceremony, and several cathedrals insisted that a canon had to have attained the subdiaconate before he could have his own stall and a voice in chapter.52 In the Empire, where child entry into cathedral communities remained normal, the shift from being a schoolboy canon under the control of the scholasticus to being an ‘emancipated’ canon with a voice in chapter came with ordination to the ­subdiac­onate.53 The very early twenties was the normal age for ordination to the subdiaconate in the period down to the eleventh century and beyond in northern Europe.54 at ordination to acolyte): Westf. UB, VI, nos. 207, 211. Likewise in the same year at Paderborn prebends previously set aside for boys (pueriles prebende) were earmarked for priests acting as chaplains, below the status of cathedral canons: Westf. UB, IV: Die Urkunden des Bistums Paderborn 1201–1300, ed. Roger Wilmans, no. 185. 49 Roger E. Reynolds, ‘The Subdiaconate as a Sacred and Superior Order’, in idem, Clerics in the Early Middle Ages: Hierarchy and Image, Aldershot 1999, 1–39 (chapter IV); on the Eastern church see Papadakis, ‘Clergy’, 471. 50 Council of Pavia 1012 × 1024, c. 1 (Mansi, XIX, 353); Council of Bourges 1031, cc. 5–6: c. 6 stipulated that a cleric wishing to be ordained as subdeacon had to promise that he would not take a wife or a concubine (Mansi, XIX, 503); these were followed by a steady stream of prescriptions from the Gregorians, see Reynolds, ‘Subdiaconate’, 10–23. See also Charles Hilken, ‘Necrological Evidence of the Place and Permanence of the Subdiaconate’, in Ritual, Text and Law: Studies in Medieval Canon Law and Liturgy Presented to Roger E. Reynolds, ed. K. G. Cushing and R. F. Gyug, Aldershot 2004, 51–66. 51 Urban II is said to have commented that the subdiaconate had become one of the ‘sacred orders’ (quoted in Decretalium Gregorii IX compilatio, I, xiv, c. 9: Corpus iuris canonici, II, col. 243); the text is discussed by Reynolds, ‘Subdiaconate’, 2, and see also C. R. Cheney, ‘Three Decretal Collections before Compilatio IV: Pragensis, Palatina I, and Abrincensis I’, Traditio, 15, 1959, 464–83 at 480–3. 52 Bremisches Urkundenbuch, ed. D. R. Ehmck and W. von Bippen, 5 vols, Bremen 1873–1902, I, no. 133 (1224) and cf. also ibid. no. 151 of 1229, where a canon of St Anschar, Bremen, is ordained subdeacon and given a stall and hebdomadal duties; Alois Weissthanner, ‘Regesten des Freisinger Bischofs Otto I. (1138–1158)’, Analecta Sacri Ordinis Cisterciensis, 14, 1958, 151–222, no. 172; Cartulaire de l’église St-Lambert de Liège, ed. S. Bormans and E. Schoolmeesters, 6 vols, Brussels 1893–1933, I, no. 84 (1203): ‘Nullus acolitus vocem habet in capitulo’ at Liège cathedral; AD Aisne G1850 [1], fols 187v.–188v. (Laon, 1159: no canon to have a ‘whole prebend’ before ordination as subdeacon); Chartularium insignis ecclesiae Cenomannensis quod dicitur Liber Albus Capituli, ed. A. Cauvin, Le Mans 1869 [hereafter Liber Albus], no. 221 (Le Mans, 1225/6: canons can be admitted over twenty-one after swearing an oath of loyalty to the chapter and if not already subdeacon must sit in lower stalls). Cf. also Oorkondenboek van het Sticht Utrecht tot 1301, ed. S. Muller and A. C. Bouman, 5 vols in 7, Utrecht 1920, I, no. 299 (1121), stipulating that provosts of collegiate churches in the city and diocese of Utrecht had to be cathedral canons in subdeacon’s or deacon’s orders, and Westf. UB, III: Die Urkunden des Bisthums Münster 1201–1300, ed. Roger Wilmans, no. 67 (1212), which said that canons still in scholis could not hold obediences. 53 Julia Barrow, ‘Education and the Recruitment of Cathedral Canons in England and Germany 1100– 1225’, Viator, 20, 1989, 117–138 at 121–2; see also Mainzer Urkundenbuch, ed. M. Stimming and P. Acht, 2 vols in 3, Darmstadt 1932–71, II part ii, nos. 517, 532, and, as a source for twelfth-century rather than tenth-century behaviour, the Aschaffenburger Schulprivileg, supposedly of 976: Urkundenbuch des Stifts St. Peter und Alexander zu Aschaffenburg, I: 861–1325, ed. Matthias Thiel, Aschaffenburg 1986, no. 8. 54 At Le Mans, cf. the case of the ninth-century cleric Rigrannus, ordained to all the grades up to subdeacon soon after the age of twenty-three: Giles Constable, ‘Monks and Canons in Carolingian Gaul: The Case of Rigrannus of Le Mans’, in After Rome’s Fall: Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval

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The diaconate had traditionally been a grade to which a high degree of respons­ ibility was attached.55 In the period before the ninth century the leading deacon, or ‘archdeacon’, in the community of clergy attached to the bishop had the duty of training junior clergy in their ecclesiastical duties; the archdeacon was one of the senior figures in the Rule of Chrodegang in the mid-eighth century.56 Over the course of the ninth and tenth centuries in eastern France, Lotharingia, and western Germany the title ‘archdeacon’ was taken over for the cleric who acted as the ­bishop’s deputy in jurisdictional matters; there were usually several in each diocese. Bit by bit, the new system spread more widely. The office of archdeacon remained linked to the diaconate, certainly in theory but very often, when it is possible to check this, in practice too.57 In Germany it was normal for archdeaconries to be attached to the provostships of cathedral and collegiate churches, and provosts often occur as deacons.58 In 1078 the Council of Poitiers, headed by Bishop Hugh of Die, insisted that all clerks holding archdeaconries should be deacons.59 For high-flying clerics in the twelfth century, those whose birth or whose education put them in the running for the episcopate, the diaconate was the best place to be, provided that a suitable position could be found: this ideally was a prebend in a cathedral, though being rector of a parish church was possible if a vicar could be employed to say services. Although there were many more archdeaconries (or, in Germany, provostships) than bishoprics, becoming an archdeacon or a provost did improve the chances of promotion to the episcopate in the twelfth century and later. Thus, thirteen or fourteen out of twenty bishops of Würzburg between the 1080s and the middle of the thirteenth century had been provosts.60 In Normandy between 911 and 1204 at least twenty out of ninety-one or ninety-two bishops had been archdeacons before their elevaHistory. Essays Presented to Walter Goffart, ed. A. C. Murray, Toronto 1998, 320–36 at 335, and much later, in 1225/6, statutes stipulating twenty-one as the minimum age for cathedral canons to be made subdeacon: Liber Albus, no. 221. 55 Cf. Amalarius, Liber officialis, in Amalarii episcopi opera liturgica, 3 vols, Vatican City 1948–50, ed. J. M. Hanssens, II, 213. 56 In the Epistula ad Leudefredum, probably of the late seventh century, the archdeacon trained the subdeacons and deacons while the primicerius trained clerics in the lower grades: Reynolds, ‘The “Isidor­ian” Epistula ad Leudefredum’, 261; for the dating, see idem, ‘The “Isidorian” Epistula ad Leudefredum: Its Origins, Early Manuscript Tradition and Editions’, in Visigothic Spain: New Approaches, ed. Edward James, Oxford 1980, 251–72; for Chrodegang, see S. Chrodegangi regula, ed. Schmitz, 16–17 (c. 25) and The Chrodegang Rules, ed. Bertram, 42–3, 71–2. 57 e.g. Vita Sancti Thomae, archiepiscopi et martyris, auctore Herberto de Boseham, in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. J. C. Robertson, 7 vols, RS 67, London 1875–85, III, 155–534 at 168; however, see also Hildebert of Lavardin, Epistolae, Book II, ep. 29 (PL 171, 248–53), concerning a subdeacon being made archdeacon in the diocese of Clermont between 1111 and 1125. 58 Julia Barrow, ‘Cathedrals, Provosts and Prebends: A Comparison of Twelfth-Century German and English Practice’, JEH 37, 1986, 536–64 at 545 (on provostships being linked to archdeaconries); at Münster, most of the dignitaries in the eleventh and twelfth centuries for whom the information is available were either deacon or priest: Wilhelm Kohl, Das Domstift St. Paulus zu Münster, Germania Sacra, NF 17.2, Berlin 1982, 3–8, 81–93, 162–6, 207–11, 247–50, 281–3, 324–7. 59 Mansi, XX, 498 (quoted in Decretalium Gregorii IX compilatio, I, xiv, c. 1: Corpus iuris canonici, II, col. 125). At Minden in 1230 it was laid down that archdeaconries were not to be held by boys but by ‘prudent and faithful men’, and that no one should be elected to a dignity under the age of twenty-five, the traditional minimum age for ordination to the diaconate: Westf. UB, VI, nos. 207 (cathedral), 211 (Marienstift). At Le Mans in 1230 it was laid down that the maior archidiaconatus was to be held by a deacon and all the other archdeaconries by priests: Liber Albus, no. 232, in an inspeximus of 1232 × 1234. 60 Das Bistum Würzburg, Teil 1, ed. Alfred Wendehorst, Germania Sacra, NF 1, Die Bistümer der Kirchenprovinz Mainz, Berlin 1962, 117–226. At Bremen archbishops Libentius (988–1013), Hermann (1032–5), and Adalbert (1043–72) had all been cathedral provosts: Magistri Adam Bremensis Gesta



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tion; in England and Wales at least seventy-seven out of 321 bishops between 1066 and 1300 had been archdeacons.61 Even if, for the majority of archdeacons, further promotion was unlikely, at least the grade of deacon allowed freedom of movement for members of those cathedral communities that did not enforce residence strictly. Deacons and subdeacons in cathedral and collegiate churches were usually at liberty to appoint substitutes to stand in for them at mass, as at Le Mans in the early thirteenth century;62 they were not attached to the service of a particular altar in the way that a priest was. It is likely that there was usually no serious shortage of candidates for the diaconate in cathedral chapters, but at Liège in 1203 a visiting papal legate requested the dean to persuade reluctant canons to be ordained deacon.63 The priesthood was the top grade and only priests were able to celebrate mass. However, this responsibility often worked to their disadvantage in terms of social status and political influence. They were supposed to celebrate mass daily and were attached to particular altars to do so. In a cathedral, the normal practice was for the priest canons to take it in turns to serve for a week or weeks at a time.64 It was possible for them to arrange substitutes but harder than for clergy in other grades, and some major churches prevented this altogether.65 Admittedly, becoming dean, a dignity usually only granted to priests,66 had become quite a good jumping-off point for becoming a bishop in France and England by the late twelfth century,67 but markedly fewer deans than archdeacons became bishops.

Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, ed. Bernhard Schmeidler, MGH SRG, Hanover and Leipzig 1917, 123, 128, 144 (Book II, 63, 68; Book III, 2). 61 Figures calculated from (for Normandy) David Spear, The Personnel of the Norman Cathedrals during the Ducal Period, 911–1204, London 2006, and (for England and Wales) vols 1–10 of Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300, ed. D. E. Greenway (vols 1–7 and 10), J. S. Barrow (vol. 8), and M. Pearson (vol. 9), London 1968– (in progress). No Fasti volume is yet available for Coventry and Lichfield; bishops of that see have been included in the total, based on Handbook of Brit. Chron., and some information about their previous careers (at least five former archdeacons) has been supplied from ODNB. Even where bishops cannot be shown to have been archdeacons, they were sometimes appointed or elected to the episcopate from the diaconate, being priested shortly before their consecration, as in the case of Bishop Bernard of St David’s: St Davids Episcopal Acta 1085–1280, ed. Julia Barrow, South Wales Record Society 13, Cardiff 1998, 3. 62 Cartulaire de l’évêché du Mans 965–1786, ed. A. Bertrand de Broussillon, Société des Archives Historiques du Mans 9, 1908, nos. 1010 (c. 1200), 1033 (1220). 63 Cartulaire St-Lambert, no. 84 (1203). 64 Cartulaire de l’évêché du Mans, no. 1010 of c. 1200 and esp. no. 1033 of 1220, where the dean and priest canons were ordered to serve their hebdomadal weeks; Cartulaire du chapitre de la cathédrale d’Amiens, ed. J. Roux, 2 vols, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de Picardie: Documents Inédits concernant la Province 14 and 18, Amiens and Paris 1912, I, no. 160, dated 1219; at Troyes cathedral in 1183 Lucius III limited the people who served at high altar to cut out the ‘unknown and less suitable persons’ (innote persone atque minus idonee): Collection des principaux cartulaires du diocèse de Troyes, ed. Charles Lalore, 7 vols, Paris and Troyes 1875–90, V: Cartulaire de Saint-Pierre de Troyes, no. 38; Statutes of Lincoln Cathedral, ed. H. Bradshaw and C. Wordsworth, 2 vols in 3, Cambridge 1892–7, II, 45–6, for the role of the hebdomadary canon in the earliest Hereford cathedral statutes, compiled between 1246 and 1256. 65 Cartulaire du chapitre de la cathédrale d’Amiens, I, no. 160. 66 Stephen of Tournai asked Archbishop William of Rheims 1192/3 for special permission for Arnulf, dean of Tournai, to have more time before being ordained priest (Lettres d’Etienne de Tournai, ed. J. Desilve, Valenciennes and Paris 1893, no. 249; the archbishop agreed, ibid. no. 251). Of the seventeen deans of Tournai cathedral 1080–1300, nine were definitely or probably priests, three occur as deacons (one of these died in deacon’s orders), one was a subdeacon up to a year before becoming dean, and the grades of another four are uncertain: Répertoire biographique des chanoines de Notre-Dame de Tournai, 1080–1300, ed. Jacques Pycke, Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels 1988, 3–32. 67 Only four or five out of ninety-one or ninety-two Norman bishops 911–1204 had previously been deans (Spear, Personnel), but the number was on the increase in the late twelfth century; thirty-four

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There is an observable preoccupation with the number of priest canons in many eastern French and German cathedrals in the later twelfth century and the early thirteenth century; it is noticeable first in eastern France and in Lotharingia, then later on further east in Germany also.68 This was the area where observance of the Rule of Aachen lasted longest in cathedrals. There are frequent complaints that too few canons were seeking ordination as priests, and to supply the lack several churches stipulated that a particular prebend should be held by a priest, sometimes dividing it in two to form two ‘priest-prebends’, to be held by permanently resident priests, who would be of lower social status than the canons.69 The cathedrals of Osnabrück and Paderborn made use of prebends previously used by schoolboy canons for the same purposes.70 Where there is information on the grades of clergy at these churches it does not appear that the proportion of priests was noticeably lower in the later twelfth century than it had been; what probably caused the strain was an increasing demand for private masses focused on particular altars (many positions for priests to serve altars were being founded at this time).71 In France apart from the north-east, and in England, cathedral chapters or individual canons simply appointed chaplains and vicars choral to enlarge the number of services.72

Individual careers: examples Some impression of the impact of ordination on career structure may be gained by looking at the lives of a few individuals of the tenth and eleventh centuries for whom we have some biographical, or occasionally autobiographical, information. The information in biographies or hagiographies is, of course, shaped to fit the expectations of the audiences for whom they were written, but this does at least bishops of English and Welsh sees (omitting the see of Coventry and Lichfield) had been deans at some point in their careers over the period 1066–1300, mostly in the thirteenth century. 68 Julia Barrow, ‘The Origins of Vicars Choral to c. 1300’, in Vicars Choral at English Cathedrals: Cantate Domino: History, Architecture and Archaeology, ed. Richard Hall and David Stocker, Oxford 2005, 11–16 at 15. 69 Le Cartulaire de Saint-Barthélemy de Béthune, ed. A. de Loisne, Société des Antiquaires de la Morinie, St-Omer 1895, nos. 3 (1170 × 1181), 6 (1183); AD Aisne G1850 [1], fol. 123r.–v. (1185); Cartulaire du chapitre de la cathédrale d’Amiens, I, no. 77 (1190); Cartulaire de l’église d’Autun (677–1299), ed. A. de Charmasse, Paris and Autun 1865, part 2, no. 29 (1195: St-Lazare); Actes des princes-évêques de Liège: Hugues de Pierrepont, 1200–1229, ed. E. Poncelet, Brussels 1941, no. 20; Cartulaire St-Lambert, I, no. 84; cf. also Urkundenbuch der Bischöfe und des Domkapitels von Verden, I, ed. Arend Mindermann, Stade 2001, no. 191 (1197); Cartulaire du chapitre cathédrale de Langres, ed. Hubert Flammarion, Atelier des Recherches sur les Textes Médiévaux 7, Turnhout 2004, no. 326 (1215); Car­tulaires de l’église de Térouane, ed. T. Duchet and A. Giry, Société des Antiquaires de la Morinie, St-Omer 1881, nos. 70, 85 (1184, 1192); J. Barbier, ‘Documents extraits du cartulaire du chapitre de Saint-Aubain, à Namur’, Analectes pour servir à l’histoire ecclésiastique de la Belgique, 5, 1868, 198–204, 480–91; 6, 1869, 182–203; 7, 1870, 465–6; 9, 1872, 495–501; 11, 1874, 99–128, at vol. 5, 480–2 (1207) and vol. 11, 102–3 (1212); Cartulaire de Saint-Pierre de Troyes, no. 36 (1182). 70 Osnabrücker Urkundenbuch, ed. F. Philippi and M. Bär, 4 vols, Osnabrück 1892–1902, II, no. 266 (1230); Westf. UB, IV, no. 185 (1230). 71 Urkundenbuch zur Geschichte der jetzt die preussischen Regierungsbezirke Coblenz und Trier bildenden mittelrheinischen Territorien, ed. H. Beyer, L. Eltester, and A. Goerz, 3 vols, Koblenz 1860– 74, III, no. 2 (1212); Westf. UB, II, no. 417 (1181); Monumenta Boica, 60 vols, Munich 1763–1956, XXXVII, no. 141 (1188, Würzburg cathedral); AD Aisne G1850 [1], fol. 113v. (Laon, 1131), 192v.–194 (several charters establishing chaplaincies at Laon). 72 Barrow, ‘Origins of Vicars Choral’, 12–15. Cf. also Antiquus cartularius ecclesiae Baiocensis (Livre Noir), ed. V. Bourrienne, 2 vols, Rouen and Paris 1902–3, I, nos. 248 (1205 × 1213: vicars), 270 (1207: priest-prebends); II, no. 327 (1198); Liber Albus, no. 7 (1161).



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provide us with an idea of what was regarded as normal or acceptable. The individuals picked out below are exclusively clerics who became bishops, or clerics who became monks (and sometimes bishops as well later on). They are therefore not typical of the wider whole, but are the only cases for which detailed information survives. Biographers were usually careful, when describing the early stages of their subjects’ careers, to state which period of life the latter were passing through when they entered the church: infantia (down to seven), pueritia or boyhood (seven to fourteen), which was the normal age at which parents would hand over boys intended for a clerical career to a bishop or other ecclesiastical figure, and adolescentia, which in classical Latin covers the age from puberty (say fourteen or fifteen) to twenty-eight. The sequence of career sketches given below starts in the late ninth century, but this should not be taken to imply that the end of the ninth century saw innovations in clerical career structure: the careers of ninth-century figures such as Bishop Aldric of Le Mans and Hincmar of Rheims’s nephew Hincmar of Laon show similar patterns.73 Clerics in the tenth century, in other words, were following in an established tradition that had been reinforced by Carolingian educational reforms. Abbot Odo of Cluny Odo, abbot of Cluny (927–42), recounted to his biographer John of Salerno that he had been devoted by his father to the service of St Martin in babyhood. After being weaned (ablactatum) he was handed over by his father to a priest in his service to be brought up and taught to read. On his return to his parents, he grew up into a fine youth and his father little by little removed him from the ecclesiastical ordo and applied him to military exercises. To further this he handed over Odo to the service of Duke William of Aquitaine (d. 918). Odo gave up literary study and took up hunting, but suffered from nightmares and fatigue and could only obtain a cure when his father admitted that he had long ago promised him to St Martin. Odo accordingly became a cleric and a canon at the basilica of St Martin of Tours at the age of nineteen.74 According to John of Salerno, Odo became a monk in his thirtieth year, at Baume, and was subsequently ordained priest by the bishop of Limoges.75 Bishop Æthelwold of Winchester Æthelwold of Winchester76 had a wet-nurse when he was an infant (infantem)77 and studied sacred letters in his boyhood (pueritia).78 When he reached adolescence (‘cumque florentis adolescentiae contingeret aetatem’), therefore presumably at about fifteen, King Athelstan (924–39) sent for him and he spent time at the royal court as the king’s companion: possibly Athelstan intended him for a lay career at 73

Geschichte des Bistums Le Mans von der Spätantike bis zur Karolingerzeit: Actus pontificum cenomannis in urbe degentium und Gesta Aldrici, ed. Margarete Weidemann, 3 vols, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Monographien 56.1–3, Mainz and Bonn 2002, I, 118–20; Die Streitschriften Hinkmars von Reims und Hinkmars von Laon 869–871, ed. Rudolf Schieffer, MGH Concilia 4, supplementum 2, Hanover 2003, 195, 303. 74 PL 133, 47–8; for a translation, see St Odo of Cluny, Being the Life of St Odo of Cluny by John of Salerno and the Life of St Gerald of Aurillac by St Odo, trans. Gerard Sitwell, London 1958, 7–14. 75 PL 133, 45, 60; St Odo of Cluny, trans. Sitwell, 7, 39. 76 Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom suggest that he was born 904/5 × 909, to allow for him to have become a priest at the age of thirty while Athelstan was still king, but it is not clear that Æthelwold was made priest in Athelstan’s lifetime or that he had reached thirty when he was priested: Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Oxford 1991 [hereafter Vita Æthelwoldi], p. xl. 77 Ibid. 8, c. 5. 78 Ibid. 8, c. 6, presumably between seven and fifteen.

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this point.79 At length (demum) Athelstan commanded that he be ‘tonsured to clerical office’ by Ælfheah, bishop of Winchester (934–51), and a few years after this he was consecrated priest, again by Ælfheah.80 Æthelwold’s consecration as priest occurred on the same day as the priesting of Dunstan and a certain Athelstan.81 Æthelwold then studied with Ælfheah and it was only after this that he went to Glastonbury to take the monastic habit under Dunstan.82 Archbishop Hugh of Rheims Archbishop Hugh of Rheims was elected archbishop in 925 on the insistence of his father Count Heribert while Hugh was still parvulum and not yet five years old. He spent the next fifteen years at Auxerre ‘occupied with the study of letters’ (‘litterarum studiis occupatus’), in the charge of Guy, bishop of Auxerre (933–61); however, he received ordination in the inferior grades, including the subdiaconate, still an inferior grade before the eleventh century, from Abbo, bishop of Soissons (909–37), who had been given the duty of performing archiepiscopal duties during Hugh’s minority, though for much of this time the diocese of Rheims was held by the usurping archbishop Artold. Bishop Guy of Auxerre ordained Hugh deacon in or by 940, at which point he would probably have been in his twentieth year. In 940 Hugh was restored to Rheims and three months after his return Bishop Guy of ­Soissons (937–72) ordained him priest; in 941 he was consecrated archbishop.83 Dunstan If Dunstan’s earliest biographer, B., is correct in his statement that Dunstan was born in the reign of Athelstan and thus between 924 and 939,84 we should probably view Dunstan as a high-flier who was fast-tracked through the system. His father, Heorstan, is perhaps identifiable with the Heorstan who occurs, almost certainly as a cleric of one of either Old or New Minster in Winchester, in S 1417 (924 × 933).85 Since B. says that Dunstan visited Glastonbury with his father in his boyhood, the family presumably did not live there; Dunstan may have received his earliest

79

Ibid. 10, c. 7; Barbara Yorke, ‘Æthelwold and the Politics of the Tenth Century’, in Bishop Æthelwold, ed. Barbara Yorke, Woodbridge 1988, 65–88 at 68. 80 Vita Æthelwoldi, 10, c. 7: ‘ac deinde, paucis labentibus annorum curriculis, in gradum sacerdotalem consecratus est’. Michael Lapidge, ‘Dunstan’, ODNB, argues that Æthelwold’s priesting happened during Athelstan’s reign, but this does not have to have been the case. It was Æthelwold’s original tonsure that happened at Athelstan’s request. 81 Vita Æthelwoldi, 12, c. 8. 82 Ibid. 14, c. 9. 83 Flodoard, Historia Remensis Ecclesiae, ed. J. Heller and G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores 13, Hanover 1881, 578, 581–2 (Book IV, cc. 20, 28–9). 84 Memorials of St Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, RS 63, London 1874, 6 (c. 3); B.’s full name may have been Byrhthelm: Michael Lapidge, ‘B. and the Vita Sancti Dunstani’, in St Dunstan: His Life, Times and Cult, ed. Nigel Ramsay, Margaret Sparks, and Tim Tatton-Brown, Woodbridge 1992, 247–59 at 257. The verb used by ‘B.’ is oritur (‘he arises’), which, as Michael Lapidge (‘Dunstan’, ODNB) argues, could mean ‘emerged’ rather than ‘is born’, but since oriri is used fairly frequently in German episcopal vitae of the tenth and eleventh century to refer to birth, and since B. was living in Liège and would thus have good knowledge of contemporary texts from elsewhere in the Empire, B. probably means that Dunstan was born in Athelstan’s reign. How well informed B. was, however, is another question (and Lapidge is right to raise it). 85 Memorials of St Dunstan, 6 (c. 3) for the names of Dunstan’s parents; N. P. Brooks, ‘The Career of St Dunstan’, in St Dunstan, ed. Ramsay, Sparks, and Tatton-Brown, 1–23 at 6, on the possible identity of the two Heorstans; Julia Barrow, ‘The Aristocracy and the Clergy in Later Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Anglo-Saxon Aristocracy, ed. Alex Burghart, forthcoming, on the likelihood that the Heorstan in S 1417 was a cleric.



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education in Winchester, perhaps in the church up whose roof he climbed while suffering from a fever.86 When he reached puberty his parents sent him to Glastonbury to be tonsured as a cleric and to further his education.87 B. gives no further information about Dunstan’s clerical career, but places him as a cleric and then as a monk (this may merely mean that, at this stage, Dunstan had renounced marriage) in the en­tourage of Bishop Ælfheah of Winchester (934–51). From Wulfstan of Win­chester’s Life of Æthelwold we learn that Bishop Ælfheah ordained Æthelwold and Dunstan as priests,88 presumably before 946, since it was King Edmund (939– 46) who installed Dunstan in the ‘priestly throne’ at Glastonbury.89 Bishop Gerard of Toul According to his biographer Widric (Wéry), Gerard’s parents handed him over (tradiderunt) to Cologne cathedral to be taught the liberal arts and to serve Christ ‘under the clerical order’, which presumably means that he was tonsured on entry. Widric remarks that he entered Cologne cathedral at the outset of boyhood (therefore at about seven), and that he went through each of the grades of the sacred office in due order.90 Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg Our information about Thietmar is autobiographical, and derives from his Chronicon. He was born in the summer of 975 and was taught his letters by his great-aunt Ennilda or Emnilde at Quedlinburg until he was twelve. His father then commended him to Abbot Ricdag of Kloster Berge at Magdeburg,91 but after three years at Berge Thietmar could not become a monk,92 because his father – perhaps for financial reasons, though Thietmar is not explicit – could not offer him at the altar (fifteen was the last possible age for oblation).93 Instead, Thietmar joined the cathedral community at Magdeburg on 30 November 990.94 In 994, when he would have been nineteen, he was still under the authority of the master of the cathedral school: we know this because Thietmar says his family sought the permission of the master of the school to release him from the cathedral so that he could be a hostage to obtain the release of his uncle from pagan captivity.95 This suggests that Thietmar was not yet subdeacon, since evidence for twelfth-century German cathedral schools shows that ‘emancipation’ from the school into the chapter occurred with ordination as subdeacon, and before this point canons were under the authority of the

86 87 88

Memorials of St Dunstan, 7–8 (cc. 3–4). Ibid. 10 (c. 5). Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Oxford 1991, 12 (c. 8). 89 Memorials of St Dunstan, 23–5 (c. 14). 90 Widrici vita S. Gerardi episcopi Tullensis, ed. G. Waitz, MGH Scriptores 4, Hanover 1841, 485–505 at 492: ‘Ab ipsis ergo pueritiae exordiis in iam dicto commoratus clericorum coenobio, per singulos sacri offitii gradus more ascendit ecclesiastico’. Gerard was bishop of Toul 963–94. 91 Die Chronik des Bischofs Thietmar von Merseburg, ed. Robert Holtzmann, MGH SRG nova series 9, Berlin 1935, 150–1 (Book IV, c. 16); for a translation see Ottonian Germany: The Chronicon of Thietmar of Merseburg, trans. David Warner, Manchester 2001, 162. Nuns and canonesses were forbidden to teach boys, but canon law rulings on this point were often ignored. 92 Thietmar, Chronik, 150–1 (Book IV, c. 16); Ottonian Germany, trans. Warner, 162. 93 La Règle de Saint Benoît, ed. and trans. Adalbert de Vogüé and Jean Neufville, 7 vols, Sources chrétiennes, Paris 1972–7, II, 666 (‘infantes usque quindecim annorum aetates’); see de Jong, In Samuel’s Image, 61–4, for comment. 94 Thietmar, Chronik, 150–1 (Book IV, c. 16); Ottonian Germany, trans. Warner, 162. 95 Thietmar, Chronik, 158–61 (Book IV, cc. 24–5); Ottonian Germany, trans. Warner, 168–9.

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scholasticus.96 As it happened, Thietmar did not have to become a hostage. On 21 December 1004, when he would have been twenty-nine and a half, he was ordained priest by Archbishop Tagino of Magdeburg.97 In 1009 he became bishop of Merseburg, by which point he was suitably older than the minimum age of thirty.98 Leo IX (Bishop Bruno of Toul) Bruno of Toul, the future Pope Leo IX, was born 21 June 1002; he was, according to the longest of his Lives,99 weaned ‘at the appropriate time’ and was then entrusted by his mother at the age of five to Bishop Berthold of Toul.100 Berthold ‘received the little child and caused him to be instructed in literature with all the honour appropriate to noble boys’.101 The Life does not specifically state that Bruno entered the cathedral school of Toul, but we can assume this from the context; likewise it is fairly safe to assume that Bruno was tonsured and became a cathedral canon on entry into the school. Berthold, Bruno’s nutritor,102 died in 1019, at which point Bruno would have been seventeen. He then obeyed Berthold’s successor, Hermann. Under Hermann Bruno looked after the prebenda of the canons of Toul, which suggests that he was provost of the cathedral.103 While he was still adolescens he became a chaplain at the court of the emperor Conrad II.104 In 1025, in his twentythird year and now having entered the second stage of his adolescence, Bruno, by now deacon, was put in charge of leading Bishop Hermann’s military contingent to Italy.105 During Lent 1026 Hermann died and the clergy and people of the diocese of Toul wrote to Conrad asking that Bruno could become bishop: among the other points they raised in his favour was the fact that he had proceeded regulariter through all the clerical grades to that of deacon.106 Bishop Wulfstan of Worcester (the saint) Wulfstan was born in about 1008;107 his father was probably a cleric.108 He was educated at the abbeys of first Evesham and then Peterborough, but without entering 96 97

See note 53 above. Thietmar, Chronik, 330–1 (Book VI, c. 46); Warner (Ottonian Germany, 269) wrongly says 2 December. 98 Thietmar, Chronik, 322–7 (Book VI, cc. 39–40, 42); Ottonian Germany, trans. Warner, 264–5, 267. 99 Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur, ed. Johannes Bollandus and Godefridus Henschenius, 61 vols, repr. Brussels 1965–70 from Antwerp 1746–62 edition [hereafter AASS], X (Aprilis II), 648–65 (Life of Leo IX: Vita auctore Wiberto eius archidiacono). See also The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century: Lives of Pope Leo IX and Pope Gregory VII, trans. I. S. Robinson, Manchester 2004, 17. 100 AASS, X, 649: ‘Quem congruo tempore ablactatum, Bertholdo sanctae Tullensis ecclesiae antistiti tradidit iam quinquennem’; for translation, see Papal Reform, 101. 101 AASS, X, 649: ‘Tam idoneus itaque vir infantulum praefatum gratanter susceptum, et litteris fecit erudiri et omni honestate ingenuis pueris competenti’; translation from Papal Reform, 101, with adaptations. 102 AASS, X, 651; for translation, see Papal Reform, 105. 103 AASS, X, 651; for translation, see Papal Reform, 106. 104 AASS, X, 651: ‘ut eximius adolescens’; for translation, see Papal Reform, 106. 105 AASS, X, 651: ‘Anno igitur aetatis suae vigesimo tertio, cum iam alteram adolescentiae hebdomadam fuisset ingressus’; for translation, see Papal Reform, 107–8. 106 AASS, X, 651–2: ‘per singulos gradus ecclesiae regulariter ad leviticum ordinem provectum’; for translation, see Papal Reform, 109–10. 107 Emma Mason, St Wulfstan of Worcester, c. 1008–1085, Oxford 1990, 28. 108 I. Atkins, ‘The Church of Worcester from the Eighth to the Twelfth Century’, Antiquaries Journal, 20, 1940, 1–38 and 203–28 at 30; see also Mason, St Wulfstan, 30–1; Nicholas Brooks, ‘Introduction: How Do We Know About St Wulfstan?’, in St Wulfstan and his World, ed. Julia S. Barrow and N. P. Brooks, Aldershot 2005, 1–21 at 18; Barrow, ‘Aristocracy and Clergy’, forthcoming.



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either of them as a monk; he had entered adolescentia before he left Peterborough.109 He then returned home to his parents. When they decided to enter religious life, Wulfstan gave himself (‘sese … dedit’) to the curia of Bishop Brihtheah of Worcester (1033–8), by which time he would have been in his mid-twenties.110 William of Malmesbury says twice that Brihtheah ‘promoted’ Wulfstan to be priest; on the second occasion he says Brihtheah ‘had promoted’ Wulfstan ‘from the first grades of ordination into the priesthood’, and gave him a church.111 It was only after this that Wulfstan decided to become a monk.112 Bishop Lietbert of Cambrai Bishop Lietbert of Cambrai (1051–76), after being weaned, was taught ‘in the elements of letters’ (presumably how to read).113 His kinsman Bishop Gerard of Cambrai heard that he was a promising pupil, and had him transferred into the episcopal hall. Lietbert was still a boy (puer) at this stage.114 Gerard handed him over to teachers in the school so that Lietbert could serve with pastoral care the ‘flocks of the shorn, which go up from the well’.115 The choice of this quotation from the Song of Songs, with the participle tonsarum, may have been made deliberately to encourage the reader to infer that Lietbert was himself tonsured at this point and that he was going to be trained to teach boys who had been tonsured, but there is no specific mention of his tonsure or ordination. As an adolescent, he shone at his studies; he was put in charge of the schools and later he became archdeacon and also provost of Cambrai.116 From the later eleventh century onwards it seems to have become much less common to note the ordination process in Lives of bishops (William of Malmesbury in mentioning Wulfstan’s ordination was translating the Old English Life of Wulfstan by Coleman, who was a stickler for old traditions).117 In the Lives of Bishop Benno II of Osnabrück (1067–88)118 and Archbishop Adalbert II of Mainz (1138–41)119 and in the narrative about Bishop Bartholomew of Laon (1113–51) in Hermann of Tournai’s Miracles of Notre-Dame of Laon,120 the career structure is described principally in terms of education, and in Bartholomew’s and Adalbert’s 109

William of Malmesbury, Saints’ Lives, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, Oxford 2002, 14–17. 110 Ibid. 20–1. 111 Ibid. 22–3, 108–9: ‘Brihtegus, ut premissum est, episcopus eum a primis ordinibus in presbiteratum promouerat’. 112 Ibid. 22–5. 113 Vita Lietberti Episcopi Cameracensis auctore Rodulfo monacho S. Sepvlcri Cameracensis, ed. A. Hofmeister, MGH Scriptores 30, part 2, Hanover 1934, 838–68 at 844; the Life was written 1092 × 1133. 114 Ibid. 844. 115 Ibid. 844; the quote is from Song of Songs, 4: 2. 116 Vita Lietberti, 844–5; see also Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium, ed. Ludwig Bethmann, MGH Scriptores 7, Hanover 1846, 393–525 at 489. 117 On William’s translation of Coleman’s work, see Andy Orchard, ‘Parallel Lives: Wulfstan, William, Coleman and Christ’, in St Wulfstan, ed. Barrow and Brooks, 39–58: William made some innovations but much of Coleman’s approach remains. 118 Vita Bennonis II episcopi Osnabrugensis, auctore Nortberto abbate Iburgensi, ed. Harry Bresslau, MGH SRG, Hanover and Leipzig 1902, 3–6; the Life was written 1090 × 1100 (ibid. p. v). 119 Anselmi Havelbergensis vita Adelberti II Moguntini, in Monumenta Moguntina, ed. Philipp Jaffé, Bibliotheca Rerum Germanicarum 3, repr. Darmstadt 1964 from Berlin 1866 edn, 565–603. 120 Hermanni monachi, De miraculis S. Mariae Laudunensis, PL 156, 962–1020 at 965–7 (Book I, c. 2).

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cases also in terms of entering cathedral churches as canons. Adalbert is referred to as a cleric ‘in a definite grade’, but this is not further specified, perhaps to disguise the fact that he had been made provost of a collegiate church extremely young.121 Similarly, Peter Abelard describes his decision to renounce his right as first-born to train as a knight in favour of becoming a cleric in terms of Mars and Minerva:122 for him, it was education that defined clergy, and he nowhere mentions clerical grades. There are, however, some exceptions. One is the obscure figure of Guy of Merton, an Italian cleric who went to England to teach at Merton priory’s school, and, with the encouragement of Prior Robert of Merton (1114–50), was promoted up the clerical ladder and became deacon, and, later, priest.123 Another is Thomas Becket in Herbert of Bosham’s Life. According to Herbert, Theobald ordained Thomas to all the orders up to subdeacon, and then, later, as deacon at the point at which he made Thomas archdeacon of Canterbury. Thomas remained in deacon’s orders until after his election as archbishop in 1162; then, on the Saturday after Whit Sunday he was priested and on the following day, Trinity Sunday, he was made archbishop. William fitz Stephen, by contrast, takes no interest in Thomas’s progression through the clerical grades.124 In other words, boys and men were continuing to be tonsured and ordained, but biographers were much less interested in reporting this and concentrated on where they had been taught instead. However, detailed information about when individual clerics were ordained to particular grades can sometimes emerge from other types of source in the twelfth century, for example letter collections125 or charters.

Proportions of clergy in various grades in communities and progression In what follows a sketch will be offered of some further lines of enquiry to be undertaken on cathedral clergy, to find out which how many were in each grade at any one point and also how quickly they tended to move from one grade to another. Witness statements in inquests can be very helpful here, but they survive only rarely.126 Information about the clerical grades of cathedral clergy is preserved most fully in two types of source, necrologies (obit books) and charter witness lists. Of the two 121

Anselmi Havelbergensis vita Adelberti II Moguntini, 570; the collegiate church was St Mary’s, Erfurt, where Adalbert became provost in 1128. 122 Peter Abelard, Historia calamitatum, PL 178, 115: ‘Martis curiae penitus abdicarem ut Minervae gremio educarer’. For discussion, see M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life, Oxford 1997, 47–50. 123 M. L. Colker, ‘The Life of Guy of Merton by Rainald of Merton’, Medieval Studies, 31, 1969, 250–61 at 256: ‘ad sacros illum ordines festinavit provehere, et de clerico usque ad diaconatus officium se indignum reclamantem promoveri fecit’. Guy was so pious that he never celebrated mass twice in a single day without crying (ibid. 257). 124 For Herbert of Bosham’s account of Thomas’s progression as far as the diaconate, see his Vita Sancti Thomae, in Materials, ed. Robertson, III, 155–534 at 168; for his account of Thomas’s ordination as priest, see ibid. 188; for comment, see Gibaut, Cursus Honorum, 300–1; for William fitz Stephen, see Vita Sancti Thomae, Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris, auctore Willelmo filio Stephani, in Materials, ed. Robertson, III, 1–154. 125 e.g. The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, ed. Frank Barlow, Camden 3rd series 61, London 1939, no. 83. 126 Witness statements in legal inquests can also be helpful in showing how long canons might stay in grades: in Bayeux in 1164 several canons gave evidence about events decades previously; at least one of them was still only a subdeacon in 1164: Antiquus cartularius, ed. Bourrienne, I, no. 49. A similar document survives from Chartres 1194/5, in which several canons still in subdeacons’ orders give evidence about events dating back to the 1160s: Cartulaire de Notre-Dame de Chartres, ed. E. de Lépinois and L. Merlet, 3 vols, Chartres 1862–5, I, no. 121.



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types of source, necrologies are the less useful. The canons named in them often lack bynames or surnames and can be hard to identify, since such compilations were often built up over a century or more.127 They record a canon’s clerical grade only at the end of his life if they do so at all,128 and they provide no information about his age, except for boy canons in Germany,129 so it is hard to guess, for example, how long the canon had stayed in that grade. Charter witness lists, where a sequence of charters witnessed by a community survives over several decades, are much more helpful. The period best represented is from the later eleventh century to the later twelfth century, occasionally later; the geographical areas best represented are France and the Empire, though cathedrals in western areas of France had given up mentioning the grades of canons by the early twelfth century; Angers ceased to do so in the mid-eleventh century.130 By contrast, Burgundy, Champagne, Picardy, Flanders, and northern Germany were keen to class canons by grade down to the later twelfth century; this probably represents a longer survival of use of the Rule of Aachen, which opens with quotes from Isidore’s De officiis ecclesiasticis on the clerical grades.131 In Anglo-Saxon England, clerks were quite often given their grade of ordination, but sufficient numbers of charters for analysis survive only for Worcester cathedral and, to a lesser extent, Canterbury and Winchester, and all of these communities became monastic during the century before the Norman Conquest. Post-Conquest English and also Norman cathedral canons are hardly ever identified by their grade of ordination in witness lists. Turning first to proportions in each grade, we can start with the charters for tenth-century Worcester. For much of the tenth century at Worcester it is normal to find only one or two priests and one or two deacons and then about eleven or twelve clerici.132 The term ‘clerk’ presumably here covers all those in minor orders, which at this point still included the subdiaconate. The large number of clergy not in major orders suggests that private masses were unusual and that private devotion would have centred on the psalter; it might also be safe to infer that many of the clerks did not want to advance to major orders because they were married. The proportion

127

For some examples of this material see Necrologien, Anniversarien- und Obödienzverzeichnisse des Mindener Domkapitels aus dem 13. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Rasche, MGH Libri Memoriales et Necrologia, nova series 5, Hanover 1998, 35–52 (for how to approach the material); Corpus regulae seu kalendarium domus S. Kiliani Wirceburgensis, ed. F. X. Wegele, Abhandlungen der königlichen bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, III Klasse, 13 part 2, Munich 1877; Die Stiftskirche des hl. Viktor zu Xanten: Das älteste Totenbuch des Stifts Xanten, ed. F. W. Oediger, Kevelaer 1958; Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1066–1300, VIII: Hereford, ed. J. S. Barrow, London 2002, 99–158. 128 Only thirty-nine out of 158 canons in Hereford obit book (ibid.; this total omits bishops and canons mentioned in entries for their relatives) are provided with their grade of ordination; the proportion is much higher at Minden, but here the number of canons listed is much smaller, about fifty. 129 e.g. Die Stiftskirche des hl. Viktor, ed. Oediger, 10 (scolaris), 17 (puer frater noster), 27 (puerulus frater noster), 36 (puer frater noster), 47 (scolaris et puer), 51 (puer et canonicus et frater noster), 60 (puer scolaris bone memorie natus (de) Dacia), 66 (puerulus frater noster), 67 (puerulus frater noster); quite a few Xanten canons are listed ibid. as acolytes and were probably also fairly young when they died. 130 Cartulaire noir de la cathédrale d’Angers, ed. C. Urseau, Paris and Angers 1908, nos. 45 (1049), 46 (1047 × 1055), 49 (1077), 77 (1109): the cathedral canons in the witness lists of nos. 45–6 are defined by their grades of ordination, while those in nos. 49 and 77 are not. 131 The Institutio canonicorum selected carefully from Isidore to make sure that the seven grades of doorkeeper, lector, exorcist, acolyte, subdeacon, deacon, and priest were included: see Concilia aevi Karolini, II, 319–22. 132 Thus, for example, in the charters issued by Bishop Oswald (961–92) in the years 962–3, there are never more than three priests (usually two) or two deacons (often one), and there are between ten and twelve clerici and occasionally a ‘churchward’ or sacrist (S 1297, 1299–1307).

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of priests and deacons rose from 966,133 after Oswald had set up a monastic church in the cathedral precinct,134 and this may possibly reflect the growing proportion of members of the community who had decided to adopt a monastic life. Witness lists naming French and German cathedral canons in the eleventh and twelfth centuries usually give all the dignitaries first (but not always: sometimes they are classed with other members of their particular clerical grade), and then identify the other canons as priests, deacons, subdeacons, and, sometimes, acolytes. At Arras a few early twelfth-century witness lists also mention a reader (lector).135 Most witness lists lack acolytes; this is probably because they were not full members of the community rather than because they did not exist. Sometimes the junior members of the community are referred to as boys (pueri) instead. Numbers of canons in each grade fluctuate: sometimes there are specifically two or three of each, in a deliberate effort to be representative, but more often they are uneven. However, at most cath­edrals the overall picture suggests roughly equal proportions of the three major orders if we reckon that the dignitaries are more likely to have been priests or deacons than subdeacons.136 Evidence for progression is harder to estimate, since the same canons did not always witness. Jacques Pycke in his prosopographical study of the canons of Tournai estimated that movement from grade to grade was very limited.137 The episcopal charters of Arras, however, show a mixture of stagnation and movement in the cathedral chapter in the twelfth century.138 Rather more movement is visible at twelfth-century Hildesheim, where (to take two out of many examples) Esico moved from subdeacon (1143, 1149) to deacon (1151)139 and Werno moved from subdeacon (1146) to deacon (by 1147, and until at least 1152) and then to priest in 1155;140 he spent at least five years in the diaconate, thus meeting the requirements of canon law. But more striking than the moves from grade to grade at Hildesheim are the promotions to dignities. By the twelfth century, these were what counted much more. In conclusion we may note that during the late eleventh and the twelfth centuries individual clerics became less interested in commenting on orders and ordination when describing their careers, and more interested in their education. This shift in attitudes occurred earliest in western France and soon afterwards in England; it was appreciably slower in eastern France and especially in the Empire. On the other hand, bishops were keen to regulate ordination, and, when episcopal registers 133

In the leases issued by Oswald in 966 the number of priests varies between three and seven and there are no deacons (S 1309–11); thereafter the number of priests can be as high as eight (though more often about six) and the number of deacons can be as high as five: e.g. S 1327 (of 969), 1332 (of 977), 1335 (of 977 ?for 974), and 1372 (of 975 × 978). 134 Julia Barrow, ‘The Community of Worcester, 961–c. 1100’, in St Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence, ed. Nicholas Brooks and Catherine Cubitt, Leicester 1996, 84–99 at 89–91. 135 Les Chartes des évêques d’Arras, ed. Tock, nos. 15–16, 20. Hubard, the lector in nos. 15–16, had become an acolyte by no. 24. 136 Lists examined here are for the cathedrals of Amiens, Arras, Chartres, Hildesheim, Langres, and Troyes and the collegiate churches of Goslar and Lille (for the last-named, see Cartulaire de l’église collégiale de Saint-Pierre de Lille, 2 vols, Lille 1894, nos. 1, 13, 73–4). 137 Jacques Pycke, Le Chapitre cathédral Notre-Dame de Tournai de la fin du XIe à la fin du XIIIe siècle: son organisation, sa vie, ses membres, Université de Louvain, Recueil de Travaux d’Histoire et de Philologie, 6e série 30, Louvain-la-Neuve and Brussels 1986, 243–7. 138 One cleric who did not move was Saswalo, acolyte 1106–17: Les Chartes des évêques d’Arras, ed. Tock, nos. 10, 16–18, 25; for cases of movement see Frumald, subdeacon in no. 57 (1133) and then deacon in no. 71 (1141), and Guy, Saswalo (a younger namesake), and Matthew, subdeacons in no. 128 (1161) and then deacons in no. 160 (1171). 139 UB Hild., I, nos. 231, 253, 272–3. 140 Ibid. nos. 239, 243, 253, 280, 296.



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began to be kept in the thirteenth century, lists of clerks ordained to particular orders became a prominent feature. As far as the significance of individual orders is concerned, the Carolingian church inherited and preserved a set of orders of which the lowest three were already, effectively, fossils. The other four orders, however, all retained their usefulness not only within the celebration of the mass but also in the social fabric: acolytes could be boys already launched on a clerical education, or adults who wanted to remain clerks in minor orders and marry; subdeacons could play a full role in clerical communities; for high-flying clerics the diaconate provided seniority and good prospects for promotion to the episcopate, and, by the end of our period, the priesthood offered access to a large number of secure positions, including the many chaplaincies and chantries responding to a strong public demand for private masses.

EVESHAM J AND EVESHAM L: TWO EARLY TWELFTH-CENTURY MANORIAL SURVEYS Howard B. Clarke Traditionally the history of Evesham abbey begins in the year 701 when Æthelræd, king of the Mercians (674–704), granted to Ecgwine, third bishop of the Hwicce (693–704), the place æt Hamme (Hethomme). Out of a mass of pious legend, uncertain tradition, fraudulent invention, and ill-recorded fact, this is probably all that will ever be known beyond reasonable doubt. This hamm was a piece of land within the great loop of the river Avon that was later to contain the church, conventual buildings, and medieval town. According to the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury, there may have been a small British church on this site, a possibility unrecorded elsewhere. The historical core of the jungle of fact and fiction, legend and tradition that makes up the purported early Evesham documentation is likely to have been of the utmost simplicity. Desirous of founding a monastery, Ecgwine, bishop of the Hwicce, secured a site and adequate endowment between 701 and 709, when the new buildings were consecrated. For the remainder of his life Ecgwine may have spent much of his time at Evesham in semi-retirement, until his death on 30 December 717. Over the centuries, and especially during the eleventh century, the character of the founder was magnified and sanctified, the size of the initial endowment was grossly exaggerated, and papal privileges were added for good measure. The Evesham known to Ecgwine was no doubt a humble establishment, with a compact block of territory on both banks of the Avon and an outlier, Ombers­ley, in the Severn valley north of Worcester. At a much later date, probably during the reign of King Edgar (957–75), these estates came to form the contrived and quasi-privatized hundred of Fissesberg. The name Fissesberg is unrecorded before the Norman Conquest, but it is derived from



The early history of the abbey is dealt with in some detail in my doctoral thesis, ‘The Early Surveys of Evesham Abbey: An Investigation into the Problem of Continuity in Anglo-Norman England’, University of Birmingham, 1977, 75–84 and maps 5, 6. I hope in due course to make this and other Evesham abbey material more accessible elsewhere. See also D. C. Cox, ‘The Vale Estates of the Church of Evesham, c. 700–1086’, Research Papers, Vale of Evesham Historical Society, 5, 1975, 25–50 at 40–5.  Malmesbury, De Gestis Pontificum, 296; William of Malmesbury, Gesta Pontificum Anglorum, The History of the English Bishops, ed. and trans. M. Winterbottom with R. M. Thomson, I, Text and Translation, Oxford 2007, 452–3; R. M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, revised edn, Woodbridge 2003, 208.  The Life of St Ecgwine has been attributed to Byrhtferth of Ramsey (M. Lapidge, ‘The Medieval Hagiography of St Ecgwine’, Research Papers, 6, 1977, 77–93; idem, ‘The Digby-Gotha Recension of the Life of St Ecgwine’, Research Papers, 7, 1979, 39–55; idem, ‘Byrhtferth and the Vita Ecgwini’, Mediaeval Studies, 41, 1979, 331–53).  Cox, ‘Vale Estates’, 26–32, 34–40. For a map depicting the privatized hundreds of Worcestershire in 1086, see S. Bassett, ‘The Administrative Landscape of the Diocese of Worcester in the Tenth Century’, in St Oswald of Worcester: Life and Influence, ed. N. Brooks and C. Cubitt, London and New York 1996, 147–73 at 159. See also D. Hooke, Anglo-Saxon Landscapes of the West Midlands: The Charter Evidence, BAR British series 95, 1981, 205, 345.



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the Old English personal name Fisc compounded with beorg meaning ‘barrow’ or ‘hill’. Fisc’s burial mound may have been a prominent contemporary landmark and a Fish Hill still exists in South Littleton parish, not far from the only pagan place-name in the middle Avon valley, Harrow Hill. The two meanings of beorg were easily confused, while modern historians have resorted to a corruption of this word, hence Fishborough hundred. This was the starting-point for the astonishing odyssey conducted by the last Anglo-Saxon abbot of Evesham, Æthelwig (1058–78). Æthelwig’s pre-Conquest acquisitions lay scattered around the shires of Gloucester, Warwick, and Worcester. His policies show a fair grasp of economic and strategic realities, not to mention the political skill at local level required to wrest so many manors from their owners. Two categories of landholder attracted Æthelwig’s attention: independent thegns, and lessees of the bishop of Worcester. Both categories were vulnerable, because of the political uncertainties of King Edward’s declining years and because of the (alleged) unworldliness of the new bishop after 1062, Wulfstan II.10 With cunning and persistence, Æthelwig seized his chance as the various opportunities presented themselves. By the time of his death in 1078, a highly complex situation had evolved.11 Never before or afterwards were the possessions of Evesham abbey so extensive. The most spectacular aspect of the period 1066–78 was the addition of a further thirty-one manors to the existing estates. Again, if we inquire from whom so much property was obtained, it is abundantly clear from Domesday Book’s information on the Edwardian landholders (antecessores) that the great majority were free men or thegns, who must have either died in the battles of 1066, forfeited their land, or sought the abbot’s protection. Altogether Abbot Æthelwig acquired by legal purchase or otherwise as many as fifty-one manors, twenty before the Conquest and thirty-one afterwards, valued in 1066 at £130 3s. To these should be added two subtenancies held of the bishop of Worcester and worth £6.12 It is hardly surprising that Æthelwig receives from his biographer so much praise for his policy of land acquisition.13 While many churches after 1066 were losing property to the invading Normans, the last Anglo-Saxon abbot of Evesham was performing the extraordinary feat of increasing the potential income of his house by about two thirds. We can well believe the story of refugees from the devastated north of England in 1069–70 flocking to Evesham; the abbot obviously had cash to spare. Even ­strangers from as  O. S. Anderson, The English Hundred-Names, Lunds Universitets Årsskrift 30, no. 1, 1934, pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, 140.  W. J. Ford, ‘The Pattern of Settlement in the Central Region of the Warwickshire Avon’, University of Leicester MA thesis, 1973, 64.  O. S. Anderson, The English Hundred-Names: The South-Eastern Counties, Lunds Universitets Årsskrift 37, no. 1, 1939, 163.  Clarke, ‘Early Surveys’, 97–111 and maps 9, 10.  On Æthelwig’s relations with Bishop Wulfstan, see E. Mason, ‘Change and Continuity in EleventhCentury Mercia: The Experience of St Wulfstan of Worcester’, ANS 8, 1985, 154–76 at 157–9, 164, 167, 174. 10 E. Mason, St Wulfstan of Worcester, c. 1008–1095, Oxford 1990, 86, 127, 139. 11 The date of Æthelwig’s death is usually given as 1077 (e.g. The Heads of Religious Houses: England and Wales, 940–1216, ed. D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke, and V. C. M. London, Cambridge 1972, 47). There is, however, a strong argument in favour of the following year (Clarke, ‘Early Surveys’, 32–3; cf. Heads, 2nd edn, Cambridge, 2001, 248). 12 For background on Worcester, see A. Williams, ‘The Spoliation of Worcester’, ANS 19, 1996, 383–408. 13 Thomas of Marlborough, History of the Abbey of Evesham, ed. and trans. J. Sayers and L. Watkiss, Oxford 2003, 162–3, 172–5.

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far away as Aquitaine and Ireland found a welcome at the monastery.14 Much of the circumstantial detail of the biography, and all the ‘necessary generosity’ attributed to the abbot and monks, were underpinned by Æthelwig’s monastic imperial­ism.15 The thirteen paupers fed daily at the abbot’s table are reminiscent of those accom­panying King Robert the Pious earlier in the century.16 Money ­ permeates the bio­graphy and its postscript refers to five chests full of silver intended for the rebuilding of the church.17 Thus the abbacy of Æthelwig marks a high point in the history of Evesham abbey. It represents both the culmination of a long if undistinguished Anglo-Saxon past and the prelude to half a century of tenurial upheaval. In short, the rule of Æthelwig created the circumstances that led directly to the composition and recording of the early surveys themselves.

Survey nomenclature Of the Evesham collection of surveys the two first were named Evesham A and Evesham B as long ago as 1927 in a volume on place-names.18 They are there described as ‘miscellaneous records among which . . . are included two lists of villages, giving the details of their assessment to the danegeld’.19 The convention of denoting each survey by a capital letter was upheld many years later in an analytical edition of Evesham A and in a passing reference to Evesham J.20 In my doctoral thesis I pursued this useful convention to its logical conclusion by naming all the Evesham surveys in accordance with the established principle.21 Which documents are to be included in this corpus of ‘surveys’? Neither Evesham A nor Evesham B was intended primarily to assess villages for the collection of danegeld; nevertheless it was argued that all the surveys share one characteristic in common: a prominent and often dominant feature is their provision of tax assessments expressed in hides and/or virgates. The sixteen documents in the two cartularies to which this characteristic applies are varied in nature and purpose but, almost without exception, a hidage figure is given in each of the 1,187 individual items that make up the entire collection.22 The surveys were named in precisely the order in which they occur in the manuscripts, taking the Cottonian cartulary first. The sequence runs from A to H and from J to Q: the letter ‘I’ was omitted lest it be confused with Roman numeral one 14 15

Ibid. 168–9. On the importance of necessary generosity in the early Middle Ages, see G. Duby, The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the Seventh to the Twelfth Century, trans. H. B. Clarke, London 1974, 50–1, 56–7, 201, 234. For the broader English context, see J. Kerr, ‘Monastic Hospitality: The Benedictines in England, c. 1070–c. 1245’, ANS 23, 2000, 97–114. 16 Thomas of Marlborough, History of Evesham, 168–9; Duby, Early Growth, 233. 17 Thomas of Marlborough, History of Evesham, 174–5. 18 A. Mawer, F. M. Stenton, and F. T. S. Houghton, The Place-Names of Worcestershire, EPNS 4, 1927, pp. xxvi, 4. 19 Ibid. pp. xxv–xxvi. 20 ‘Evesham A, a Domesday Text’, ed. P. H. Sawyer, in Miscellany I, Worcestershire Historical Society 1960, 3–36; H. B. Clarke, review in Midland History, 1, no. 1, 1971, 58–9 at 59. 21 This gave rise to translations of and notes on many of these documents in Domesday Book: Worcestershire, ed. F. and C. Thorn, Chichester 1982, appendix IV; Domesday Book: Gloucestershire, ed. J. S. Moore, Chichester 1982, appendix. The lack of pagination makes precise referencing impossible. 22 Clarke, ‘Early Surveys’, 177–8. It should be noted that, in a comparatively small number of instances, textual breaks in the cartulary copies are unclear and that Domesday Book’s subdivisions and rubrication were sometimes used as a guide.



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when cited alone. Fifteen of the sixteen surveys date from the period 1086–1136. The first half-century after the Domesday inquest witnessed a crucial stage in the formation of medieval England, for this was when the new aristocracy consolidated its hold over the rest of the population, when subinfeudation rendered the social and tenurial fabric of the landholding classes vastly more complex and volatile, and when the central government made strenuous efforts to extend its management and share of the wealth of the country.23 The early surveys of Evesham abbey are reflections of all these important developments, one aspect of which was the evolution of a very specialized type of document – the manorial extent. One of the most remarkable features of the Domesday texts (i.e. documents that represent primarily a stage in the production of Domesday Book, including Great Domesday itself) is the astonishing wealth of manorial detail gathered and digested so systematically and so speedily in 1086. This is most apparent in the two surviving regional drafts, Exon Domesday and Little Domesday. How the manorial statistics were tendered to the Domesday commissioners is largely a matter of speculation, though one of the Bath abbey surveys may represent a written return by an ecclesiastical tenant-in-chief.24 Possibly the details were submitted both orally and in written form, depending on the degree to which the use of writing had penetrated the manorial administration of any particular estate.25 But whatever the method, men were sufficiently conscious of farming practices and resources, and of social grades and distinctions in the English countryside, to have had the facts at their fingertips. This had already been made clear by the manorial tract, Rectitudines Singularum Personarum, based on a great estate in the west Midlands.26 Traditionally this text was assigned to the very late Anglo-Saxon period, but a mid tenth-century context for it has been proposed.27 It is equally clear from the so-called ‘terms of reference’ for the Domesday inquest, which are preserved in the prologue to the Inquisitio Eliensis, that the Normans expected such information to be readily available.28 Of course, to anyone familiar with the Carolingian evidence for manorial administration, all of this comes as no surprise.29 The monks of Evesham chose to preserve two early twelfth-century surveys with a manorial content. These have been named Evesham J and Evesham L, and I propose next to examine each of them by turn in some detail before returning to the question of the ancestry of the manorial extent.

23

For a judicious summary, see M. Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1166, Oxford 1986, 105–34. 24 Two Chartularies of the Priory of St Peter at Bath, ed. W. Hunt, Somerset Record Society 7, 1893, 67–8; R. Lennard, ‘A Neglected Domesday Satellite’, EHR 58, 1943, 32–41; Domesday Book: Somerset, ed. C. and F. Thorn, Chichester 1980, 381–5, where it is named Bath A. It will be apparent that I am adopting a neo-Galbraithian view of matters relating to the making of Domesday Book. 25 On the importance of oral legal culture, see R. Fleming, ‘Oral Testimony and the Domesday Inquest’, ANS 17, 1994, 101–22. 26 Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 444–53; EHD II, 875–9. 27 P. D. A. Harvey, ‘Rectitudines Singularum Personarum and Gerefa’, EHR 108, 1993, 1–22 at 17–19. 28 IE, 97. The validity of this concept is rejected, along with much else, in D. Roffe, Domesday: The Inquest and the Book, Oxford 2000, 114–17. Irrespective of when Great Domesday Book was written up in its present form, what matters for present purposes is that the modo of this and related texts is the year 1086. Valuations presumably related back, at least in part, to the harvest of the previous year. 29 J. Campbell, ‘Observations on English Government from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century’, in Essays on Anglo-Saxon History, London and Ronceverte WV 1986, 155–70 at 163–7.

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Evesham J Evesham J is one of the two early surveys that contain manorial as well as fiscal and tenurial information (Appendix A). It also possesses some mysterious features that challenge the interpretative imagination. Evesham J was printed by Tindal in the late eighteenth century and was known to J. H. Round, who was under the misimpression that its scope was restricted to Fissesberg hundred.30 This survey was among those printed and discussed by that very fine scholar, R. R. Darlington, in 1933, after which it lapsed once more into obscurity.31 This is surprising, to say the least, for Darlington dated the document convincingly to c. 1104 and any sort of manorial survey from so early a period is rare indeed. Moreover Evesham J is quite independent of Domesday Book, with the result that for eleven manors comparable details are available eighteen years later. One comparative aspect, the replacement of slaves by oxherds, has received attention from a number of writers, but this important subject has never been treated exhaustively.32 A tabular analysis will suggest other interesting developments between 1086 and c. 1104. Evesham J describes most of the monastery’s manors in Worcestershire together with Badby (including Newnham) in Northamptonshire. The cartulary copy is in two parts, Lenchwick and Badby occurring on a later folio. This section of the first cartulary contains a number of manorial extents of c. 1190. Thus the first part of Evesham J is encompassed by the extents of Wickhamford and Badsey, the second by those of Lenchwick and Norton.33 Though more ancient in origin, the two parts of Evesham J were entered in the manuscript later than the extents. There are signs that the scribe endeavoured to insert these addenda in appropriate positions, for both Wickhamford and Badsey are surveyed in the first part of Evesham J, Lenchwick (including Evesham and Norton) in the second. There are no fundamental differences between these two parts, hence they have been treated here as one text. This early survey is distinguished in the manuscript by the use of brown rather than the more usual greenish-black ink, which may have been the late twelfth-century writer’s concession to the antiquity of his exemplar, for brown ink is usually older. No trace of Evesham J exists in the second cartulary, despite the fact that it has a full and orderly version of the extents.34 With respect to Worcestershire, Evesham J accounts for all the manors assigned to the church by Domesday Book, with the exception of Oldberrow and Ombersley (the two detached portions of Fissesberg hundred), Abbots Morton, and Bevington Waste (in Ash hundred) (Fig. 1). There is one other difference of immediate relev­ ance between the surveys of 1086 and c. 1104. In Domesday Book the abbot’s

30

W. Tindal, The History and Antiquities of the Abbey and Borough of Evesham, Evesham 1794, 71 n. † at 71–3; VCH Worcs. I, 247 n. 6. 31 R. R. Darlington, ‘Æthelwig, Abbot of Evesham’, EHR 48, 1933, 1–22, 177–98 at 192–5, 197–8. For a brief and derivative note, see Domesday Book: Worcestershire, ed. Thorn and Thorn, appendix IV. The material relating to Evesham abbey in The Agrarian History of England and Wales, ed. J. Thirsk and H. P. R. Finberg, 8 vols in 11, Cambridge 1967–2000, II, 530, 551, 570–1, 573 is riddled with inaccuracies and misrepresentations, and should be disregarded in its entirety. 32 VCH Worcs. I, 274–5; VCH Salop. I, 302–4; M. M. Postan, The Famulus: The Estate Labourer in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Economic History Review Supplements 2, 1954, 6; H. B. Clarke, ‘Domesday Slavery (adjusted for Slaves)’, Midland History, 1, no. 4, 1972, 37–46 at 41–2; S. Harvey, ‘Domesday England’, in Agrarian History, ed. Thirsk and Finberg, II, 45–136 at 67; D. A. E. Pelteret, Slavery in Early Mediaeval England from the Reign of Alfred until the Twelfth Century, Woodbridge 1995, 194–9. 33 BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fols 49r.–v., 50r.–v.; 52v.–53, 53v.–54. 34 BL Harley MS 3763, fols 72–81v.



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Figure 1  The composition of Blackenhurst hundred c. 1104 fief is arranged in hundredal blocks, following the order Fissesberg, Oswaldslow, and Ash.35 Evesham J, on the other hand, while grouping Bengeworth with Little Hampton, and Atch Lench with Church Lench, places these pairs of manors haphazardly among the rest, with the result that the Worcestershire section begins and ends with manors that had formed part of Fissesberg hundred in 1086. A reason for this apparent confusion can be found in one of the rare royal charters to Evesham abbey in the Anglo-Norman period, datable to August 1107.36 This document deals with a number of matters, such as the abbot’s military quota and the establishment of a market at Stow-on-the-Wold, but its prime purpose is to describe and authorize the monks’ rights and privileges in the seigneurial hundred of Blackenhurst. The existence and composition of this hundred are taken for granted by the charter, suggesting that Blackenhurst had already been created. There is no doubt that Evesham abbey’s seigneurial hundred was expanded some time between 1086 and 1107, and that time could have been 1104 when the monastery escheated to the Crown after Abbot Walter’s death in January. The order of manors in Evesham J is not therefore random: those in Worcestershire may well have been in the same 35

GDB 175b1–2 (Worcs. 10/1–16). Worcestershire is one of the (many) counties with a regular hundredal order (P. H. Sawyer, ‘The “Original Returns” and Domesday Book’, EHR 70, 1955, 177–97 at 181; H. B. Clarke, ‘The Domesday Satellites’, in Domesday Book: A Reassessment, ed. P. Sawyer, London 1985, 50–70 at 52; Roffe, Inquest and the Book, 145 n. 175). 36 Regesta II, no. 831. This was a period when Evesham abbey benefited more frequently from seigneur­ial patronage (E. Cownie, Religious Patronage in Anglo-Norman England, 1066–1135, Woodbridge 1998, 145–6).

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hundred. Indeed the creation of Blackenhurst hundred affords a simple explanation for the compilation of Evesham J: a survey of the new hundred and its manorial resources, made possibly by royal officials during the vacancy. This hypothesis needs to be viewed in the context of three related factors. First, the survey of the lands of the church of Worcester, which dates from c. 1115, still attributes the 4 hides in Bengeworth and 5 in Little Hampton held by Evesham abbey to Oswaldslow hundred.37 The anomalous position of these disputed manors went back to the pre-Conquest period, when the bishop collected geld in respect of the 5 hides in Little Hampton, but all other hundredal rights belonged to the abbot.38 The compromise reached before the Domesday commissioners laid down that the disputed portions of Bengeworth and Little Hampton belonged tenurially to Evesham but fiscally and juridically to Worcester.39 The second factor is the inclusion of Badby in Evesham J. This disputed Northamptonshire manor was recovered by Evesham abbey during the interval between the making of Domesday Book and this local survey.40 Coincidentally the Domesday manor of Litchborough was lost or otherwise relinquished, with the result that the monks’ fiscal assessment in Northamptonshire still amounted to 4 hides.41 Again, therefore, Evesham J is concerned with what was new or very recent in the development of the monastery’s estates. The third factor is the insertion of marginal rubrications in Evesham J: tempore regis Edwardi against every manor except Badby, which has tempore regis Kanuti. These inscriptions caused both Round and Darlington difficulty, the former associating them with the tax assessments, the latter with the time when these manors were secured or recovered.42 Neither explanation is convincing. If such inscriptions were derived from the exemplar of this copy of a survey of post-Conquest holdings in Northamptonshire and Worcestershire, their purpose may simply have been to indicate Evesham abbey’s pre-Conquest tenure of these manors. As it happened, all but one had been held in the Edwardian period, Badby being claimed as a gift of Cnut. This feature of Evesham J is more likely to have been a mark of Norman royal officials than of native English monks. In common with all the other early surveys, Evesham J supplies for each item a tax assessment. A comparison of these figures with those in Domesday Book is set out in Table 1 where, in order to clarify the transition from Fissesberg to Blackenhurst hundred, the manors have been arranged in their Domesday sequence. One important point to emerge from this comparison is seen most clearly in the section dealing with Fissesberg hundred. Given the not unreasonable assumption that the assessments of the two isolated manors in this hundred, Oldberrow and Ombersley, were unchanged, the total number of hides remained precisely the same despite many differences of detail. Apparently the abbot and his officials had been free to readjust the assessments of individual manors, in other words to re­allocate

37

Hemming, Hemingi Chartularium Ecclesiae Wigorniensis, ed. T. Hearne, 2 vols, Oxford 1723, I, 315. This survey is named Worcester C in Domesday Book: Worcestershire, ed. Thorn and Thorn, appendix V; cf. Domesday Book: Gloucestershire, ed. Moore, appendix. 38 GDB 174a1 (Worcs. 2/74); Clarke, ‘Early Surveys’, 404–10, 427–32. 39 English Lawsuits from William I to Richard I, ed. R. C. van Caenegem, 2 vols, Selden Society 106–7, 1990–1, I, no. 15; P. Wormald, ‘Oswaldslow: An “Immunity”?’, in St Oswald of Worcester, ed. Brooks and Cubitt, 117–28 at 124–6. 40 S. Raban, The Estates of Thorney and Crowland: A Study in Medieval Monastic Land Tenure, Cambridge 1977, 28–9; Clarke, ‘Early Surveys’, 505–6. 41 Cf. BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fol. 12v., being a hidage summary of an individual fief, that of Evesham abbey, known as Evesham H. 42 VCH Worcs. I, 247 n. 6; Darlington, ‘Æthelwig’, 193.



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the tax burden among them, provided that the number of geldable hides in Fisses­ berg hundred was constant.43 Domesday Book reveals that 12 of the 65.1 hides were non-geldable, leaving 53.1 tax-paying hides. Presumably this was still the case eighteen years later. As already indicated, the inhabitants of Bengeworth and Little Hampton continued to pay their geld contributions to the bishop’s triple hundred of Oswaldslow. The effect of the removal of four Evesham manors from Ash hundred is unknown: possibly the hundred was reduced permanently to 85½ hides; alternatively the remaining tax assessments were raised in such a way that the total was restored to 100 hides. Table 1 suggests also that Evesham and Norton are represented fiscally in the 10-hide assessment of Lenchwick. But a comparison of the manorial details argues against the inclusion in this manor of the rural part of Evesham. Of the twelve manors in the extant portion of Evesham J one, Church Lench, yields no manorial information. It had been granted by Abbot Walter for life to Urse d’Abetot, the sheriff of Worcester who died in 1108, and was no longer part of the monks’ feudal demesne.44 Thus eleven manors are comparable in 1086 and c. 1104. Table 2 is restricted to those categories of information for which there are parallel figures in the two documents. This means that valuations, watermills, and woodland have been omitted on the one hand and subtenancies on the other. From a strictly manorial point of view, Evesham J is more limited than Domesday Book, enumerating only the demesne ploughs and the principal grades of the village population. There are two semantic differences: for the Domesday villanus Evesham J uses rusticus, and for the Domesday servus Evesham J uses bovarius. No valuations were provided by the local surveyors, but for each of the two manors in the second part of the text, Lenchwick and Badby, a farm of £10 is stated. The fact that Lenchwick and Badby were leased out may account for the division of Evesham J into two parts; in 1086 they were valued at £7 and £8 respectively.45 Occasionally Evesham J mentions amounts of land measured in virgates or acres held by unnamed members of the peasantry. In fact the characteristics of this document seem to represent an early stage in the evolution from the Domesday descriptiones of 1086 to the man­orial extenta of c. 1190. The general impression to be derived from Table 2 is one of demographic and economic stability.46 For the eleven comparable manors the total recorded population in the three principal grades was 252 in 1086 and 244 c. 1104.47 These are minimal figures, for neither text is complete. The clearest indicator of stability is the fact that, during this eighteen-year period, only two more demesne ploughs had been brought into operation. Economic growth on these manors was still only hesitant at best. Abbot Walter enriched his relations from the Evesham estates, but there must have been other, non-consanguineous dependants to be provided for, both native and foreign. This is precisely what is suggested by the subtenancies detailed in Evesham J. Furthermore Evesham E and Evesham O – lists of subtenants that date from c. 1130 – can be utilized to investigate subtenurial developments over the 43

This phenomenon is relevant to the ongoing debate about the rationality or otherwise of the taxation system, now best reviewed and developed in A. Wareham and X. Wei, ‘Taxation and the Economy in Late Eleventh-Century England: Reviving the Domesday Regression Debate’, ANS 29, 2006, 214–27. 44 BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fol. 11 (Evesham D 5). 45 GDB 175b1 (Worcs. 10/3), 222b1 (Northants. 11/6). 46 Cf. R. V. Lennard, Rural England, 1086–1135: A Study of Social and Agrarian Conditions, Oxford 1959, 357. 47 The greater number of customary tenants as compared with cottagers is characteristic of ecclesiastical manors in this period (C. Dyer, ‘St Oswald and 10,000 West Midland Peasants’, in St Oswald of Worcester, ed. Brooks and Cubitt, 174–93 at 181).

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Table 1  Tax Assessments of Manors Comprising Blackenhurst Hundred Evesham J Fissesberg hundred 11 – 6 3 1 2 7 8 – Total

Manor Evesham Lenchwick Norton Oldberrow Offenham South Littleton Bretforton Lower End Aldington Wickhamford Bretforton Upper End Badsey Middle Littleton Church Honeybourne Ombersley

Hides 1086 3 1 7 12 acres 1 6 6 1 3 6 6½ TRE 7 TRE 2½ TRE 15 TRE 65.1

Hides c. 1104 10 TRE <12 acres>1 8 TRE 8 TRE 1½ TRE 8 TRE 5½ TRE 6 TRE 3 TRE <15 TRE>1 65.1

Oswaldslow hundred 5 4

Little Hampton Bengeworth2

5 TRE 4

5 TRE 4 TRE

Ash hundred – 9 – 10

Abbots Morton Atch Lench Bevington Waste Church Lench

5 TRE 4½ 1 4 TRE

— 3½ TRE — 4 TRE

Notes: 1 Tax assessments enclosed in angle brackets have been derived from Domesday Book. 2 Excluding the fifth hide claimed successfully by Abbot Walter.

next generation.48 In Table 3 not many names are common to the surveys of c. 1104 and c. 1130, while it remains uncertain whether Abbot Walter’s brothers were still living at the later date. Their sister, Albretha, may have died, with the result that her subtenancy lapsed. The succession of Hugh Travers at South Littleton and of William I de Beauchamp at Church Lench seems convincing enough. Another uncertainty is how complete the surveys of c. 1130 are: on their evidence the smaller subtenancies held mainly by Anglo-Scandinavians c. 1104 had lapsed a generation later. These men may be representative of the many unrecorded native subtenants in 1086. Finally most of the subtenancies in Evesham J are described as being ‘of the demesne’ (de dominio) or a stated amount ‘of free land’ (terre libere). At Badby, Morkar held ¾ hide and ½ hide in these categories respectively.49 This obscure problem is made difficult to resolve by the ambiguous nature of both ‘demesne’ and ‘free’. Twelve hides in Fissesberg hundred and in effect 6 at Badby (after the 60 per cent reduction) were free of geld payments. In the new Blackenhurst hundred, with

48

Evesham E: BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fol. 11r.–v.; Harley MS 3763, fol. 71r.–v. (two copies); Evesham O: BL Harley MS 3763, fol. 61r.–v. For extracts in translation and brief notes, see Domesday Book: Gloucestershire, ed. Moore, appendix. 49 Evesham J 12.



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Evesham J and Evesham L

Table 2  Fiscal and Manorial Data in Domesday Book and Evesham J

Slaves / Oxherds

Demesne Ploughs

0 4 4 6 8 0 3 4 2 10

4 2 2 2 3 6 2 4 1 5

8 5½ 1½ 4 5 16 6 3 3½ 10

20 9 0 0 13 14 12 10 5 0

15 5 2 5 6 14 5 2 0 0

8 6 6 4 8 8 6 6 2 10

4 3 3 2 4 4 3 3 1 5

4

12

8

13

4

4

22

11

10

5

65½

128

70

54

35

66½

105

65

74

37

Cottagers

7 0 5 2 9 20 0 4 4 11

Demesne Ploughs

16 12 0 5 15 25 17 10 3 13

Slaves / Oxherds

9 6½ 1 5 5 13 7 2½ 4½ 8

Cottagers

Customary Tenants

Total

Tax Assessments

Northamptonshire Badby6

    Evesham J, c. 1104

Customary Tenants

Worcestershire Wickhamford1 Badsey2 Aldington3 Bengeworth4 Little Hampton Offenham5 Middle Littleton Church Honeybourne Atch Lench Lenchwick

   Domesday Book, 1086 Tax Assessments

Manor

Notes: 1 Including Bretforton Upper End. 2 A widow mentioned in Domesday Book may have been the wife of a customary tenant who had recently died. 3 In 1086 Aldington was a berewick or subsidiary manor of Offenham. 4 One Domesday hide was held by Sheriff Urse. In c. 1104 a smith with 5 acres of land may have belonged to the cottager grade (Evesham J 4). 5 Including Bretforton Lower End and South Littleton. In Evesham J 6 the customary tenants are called rustici plenarii. 6 Including Newnham. This manor was held by Crowland abbey in 1086, when five of the slaves were female. In c. 1104 one customary tenant was rendering 14s. in lieu of labour services (Evesham J 12).

its redistributed fiscal liabilities, the permanently free hides may also have been redistributed. Some subtenants, such as Abbot Walter’s brother and sister-in-law, were fortunate in holding land in this category, for they would have been free to appropriate geld collected from their own peasant producers (the probable implication of fiscal demesne or ‘inland’).50 The remaining subtenants held land that had been carved out of the abbot’s feudal demesne, in which case all geld would have been handed over to the royal collectors, unless like Urse d’Abetot they happened

50

Evesham J 6, 12.

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Table 3  Subtenurial Developments, c. 1104 to c. 1130 Evesham J, c. 1104 No. Manor and subtenant(s)   5 Little Hampton (5 hides) Albretha, sister of Abbot Walter Ælfweard  6

⅜

3¼ 2½

Ralph Travers Ealdbold2 Osbern Withelard Ansger

1¼ 1 1 ¾ ¼

Church Lench (4 hides) Urse d’Abetot

11

Lenchwick (10 hides)3 Hugh, nephew of Abbot Walter Thorkil Thorsten Godwine of Hook Norton Hurtebrand Badby (4 hides)4 Wife of Geoffrey, brother   of Abbot Walter5 William, son of Geoffrey Morkar Ealhhere Mærgeat Leofric

Total

Evesham E and Evesham O, c. 1130 Hides Manor and subtenant(s) sublet

3¼

Offenham (16 hides)1 Ralph, brother of Abbot Walter Hugh the marshal

10

12

Hides sublet

4 3½ 1 1 ½

Bretforton Lower End Ralph, brother of Abbot Walter Hugh of Bretforton South Littleton Hugh Travers

Church Lench William de Beauchamp Lenchwick Hugh, nephew of Abbot Walter

3¼ 2½ 1¼

4 3½

⅗

2½ 1 1¼ 1 ¾ ½ 31.225

Badby Geoffrey, brother of Abbot   Walter William, son of Geoffrey

2½ 1

18

Notes: 1 2

Including Bretforton Lower End and South Littleton. Since Evesham J allocates 8 hides each to Bretforton Lower End and South Littleton for fiscal purposes, the four last subtenancies may have been located in South Littleton. An Ealdbold was granted ½ hide of land in Evesham by Abbot Maurice (Evesham E 9; Evesham O 16). Without giving any reason, Darlington treated these as different individuals. 3 Including Norton. 4 Including Newnham. After the 60 per cent reduction in the tax assessment of this part of Northamptonshire, Badby answered for 4 geldable hides. But the old assessment of 10 hides is reflected in the same number of ploughlands in Domesday Book and the £10 farm in Evesham J 12. The subtenancies of c. 1104 are expressed in terms of the old hidage, which explains the apparent inconsistency between the fiscal and the subtenurial assessments. 5 If Evesham J 12 and Evesham O 11 are stating true facts, it can only be assumed that Geoffrey was abroad in 1104, possibly participating in the First Crusade and its aftermath. Darlington’s interpretation seems unnecessarily contorted.



Evesham J and Evesham L

73

to hold by knight service.51 In that case, in accordance with the terms of Henry I’s coronation charter, the subtenant’s manorial demesne would have been exempt by the time Evesham J came to be compiled.52

Evesham L Of all the early surveys Evesham L is one of the least known and at the same time one of the most rewarding (Appendix B).53 Compressed into the lower margin of one of the folios of Evesham K (a Domesday text relating to Gloucestershire) is a detailed description of Beckford and Ashton-under-Hill. These villages occur among escheated lands in the royal demesne in Gloucestershire Domesday and accordingly they make an appearance in Evesham K, on the verso opposite.54 Evesham L stands in distinct contrast to the terseness of Evesham K, while its source cannot have been any stage of the Domesday inquest. Many of the figures are different; the Evesham document contains particulars not found in Exchequer Domesday; most decisively mention is made, in the past tense, of Sheriff Walter of Gloucester, who inherited the shrievalty from his father Durand some time between 1086 and 1098. The small, cramped hand of this cartulary copy is different from, but contemporary with, that of the much longer text of Evesham K. Beckford and Ashton-under-Hill are now two small villages situated about 3 kilometres apart on the south-eastern side of Bredon Hill (Fig. 2). They lie immediately north of the Gloucestershire border, having been transferred to Worcestershire in 1931. In the nineteenth century Tibblestone hundred was minuscule, consisting of just them and one other parish, Hinton-on-the-Green, but originally the hundred (part of the ‘lost’ county of Winchcombeshire) embraced many more settlements.55 Although only a short distance from the monastery, Beckford and Ashton-underHill are mentioned in no other early Evesham source. Consequently the existence of this detailed survey in a cartulary of that house is something of a mystery. These villages were associated with the church of Worcester in Anglo-Saxon times.56 By 803 there was a minster church at Beckford – possibly of the lesser sort – and both places feature among Bishop Oswald’s leases in the second half of the tenth century.57 Ashton is also alluded to in the bounds of a lease dated 1042 relating to 51 52

Evesham J 10. By his coronation charter of 1100 Henry I, in a bid for political support, extended the exemption of manorial demesne to subtenants by knight service (R. S. Hoyt, The Royal Demesne in English Constitutional History, 1066–1272, New York 1950, 52–3; S. P. J. Harvey, ‘The Knight and the Knight’s Fee in England’, Past and Present, 49, Nov. 1970, 3–43 at 26; J. A. Green, The Government of England under Henry I, Cambridge 1986, 72; eadem, ‘ “A Lasting Memorial”: The Charter of Liberties of Henry I’, in Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland, ed. M. T. Flanagan and J. A. Green, Basingstoke 2005, 53–69). 53 For a brief discussion, see H. B. Clarke, ‘The Norman Conquest of the West Midlands’, Research Papers, 1, 1967, 17–26 at 18; for a translation and notes, see Domesday Book: Gloucestershire, ed. Moore, appendix. 54 GDB 164a1–2 (Glos. 1/59–60); BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fol. 58 (Evesham K 35–6). This may have been the intended position for Evesham L. 55 A. H. Smith, The Place-Names of Gloucestershire, 4 vols, EPNS 38–41, 1964–5, II, 41, 48, 86; J. Whybra, A Lost English County: Winchcombeshire in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, Woodbridge 1990, 68–9, 81, 101. 56 For Beckford, see A. Wareham, ‘St Oswald’s Family and Kin’, in St Oswald of Worcester, ed. Brooks and Cubitt, 46–63 at 58–9. 57 S 1314, 1365, 1431; Bassett, ‘Administrative Landscape’, 166; J. Blair, The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society, Oxford 2005, 159.

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Figure 2  The manor of Beckford

land at Elmley Castle.58 By 1066 the church had lost control, for Domesday Book attributes Beckford to a housecarl named Rotlesc and Ashton to Turbert, a thegn of ‘Earl’ Harold.59 Domesday Book further records that Earl William fitz Osbern had made one manor out of these villages, though the shire court had never seen any proof that they had been granted to the earl. Possibly after the forfeiture of the latter’s son Roger in 1075, the manor was put to farm at £30 per annum by Roger d’Ivry, the royal butler.60 It was still part of the royal demesne in 1086. The next certain date, unfortunately much later, is 1129 when Henry I confirmed the grant of the manor of Beckford and Ashton-under-Hill to the Norman monastery of SainteBarbe-en-Auge.61 In order to clarify what little dating evidence there is for Evesham L, the background to this grant requires a brief explanation. In the reign of William the Conqueror Eudes Stigand, the lord of Mézidon in Calvados, founded a church for the relics of St Barbara brought back from the East and established a college of secular canons. In 1127 Ravel de Tancarville, Eudes’s grandson, replaced the seculars by regulars and in the following year William, the treasurer of Henry I, became their prior.62 Meanwhile the king had granted the manor of Beckford (including Ashton-under-Hill) to his chamberlain, William de 58 59

S 1396. GDB 164a1–2 (Glos. 1/59–60). For a separate 4-hide manor at Ashton belonging to an unnamed thegn, see GDB 163b2 (Glos. 1/40). 60 GDB 164a2 (Glos. 1/60). Roger d’Ivry’s successor, Ascelin of Tetbury, appears in Evesham K 1 as a householder in Gloucester itself (BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fol. 57). 61 Calendared at Regesta II, no. 1587 and printed at no. 216. This places the villages in the Vale of Gloucester. 62 La Chronique de Sainte-Barbe-en-Auge, ed. R. N. Sauvage, Caen 1905, 6.



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75

Tancarville, whose son Ravel claimed to hold it not at farm but freely during his father’s lifetime.63 Probably in 1128 Ravel granted Beckford to the canons of SainteBarbe, hence the royal confirmation a year later.64 Beckford must have remained part of the royal demesne until the grant to William de Tancarville. Then, from 1128, the manor was in the hands of an alien monastery. Some time before the death of Henry I a small dependent priory for Augustinian canons was founded at Beckford, of which the twelfth-century undercroft still survives.65 This fledgling institution soon ran into trouble with William de Beauchamp, who twice evicted the canons on the grounds that he held Beckford by hereditary right.66 Thus Evesham abbey and Beckford priory shared a common enemy during the reign of Stephen. The northern boundary of Beckford manor reached within 1 kilometre of Elmley castle, the great Beauchamp stronghold overlooking the Avon valley. To the south-east the manor originally extended farther than the present parish-cum-county boundary so as to take in Didcot, now part of the Gloucestershire parish of Dum­bleton.67 Didcot constituted the 3-hide holding detached by William fitz Osbern and granted to Ansfrid de Cormeilles, along with twelve customary tenants and five ploughs.68 The post-Conquest manor stretched from Bredon Hill towards Dumbleton Hill with the broad valley of the Carrant Brook between them. The valley floor is gravelly, long settled, and includes in its archaeological record a sixth-century cemetery.69 A pattern of ridge-and-furrow is clearly visible here and there,70 and the agricultural history of these settlements is one of mixed farming. Half-way between Ashton and Beckford lies the hamlet of Grafton, which by the twelfth century was a well defined settlement with its own chapel.71 These topographical features complete this preliminary sketch of the manor of Beckford. Domesday Book describes the two villages separately, as if they had not been amalgamated by Earl William; the Evesham survey treats them as one manorial unit. Evesham L supplies two sets of manorial details, distinguished in each category by the adverbs tunc and modo. The only internal dating evidence comes at the end of the document. As in the Conqueror’s reign, the farm of the manor was £30, besides which Beckford rendered £1 7s. 8d. as a customary due (de consuetudine). Sheriff Walter himself received £2 and, enigmatically and ungrammatically, it is stated that the building (edificium), the king’s demesne, and the office (ministerium) had been ‘improved’ (meliorata, ‘increased in value’) by £10. Whatever the precise implications of this statement,72 the indications are that Beckford was still in the king’s 63 64 65 66

CDF, no. 568; Complete Peerage, X, 52 note c. William died in 1129 (ibid. 53). CDF, nos. 568–9; La Chronique de Sainte-Barbe-en-Auge, 25. VCH Glos. VIII, 255. La Chronique de Sainte-Barbe-en-Auge, 29, 33, 40, 41, 45. At the height of the civil war, in July 1141, the Empress Matilda granted the manor of Beckford to William de Beauchamp (The Beauchamp Cartulary: Charters 1100–1268, ed. E. Mason, Pipe Roll Society new series 43, 1980, no. 9). An undated charter of William de Beauchamp quitclaims the same manor (CDF, no. 572). For the historical context, see H. A. Cronne, The Reign of Stephen, 1135–54: Anarchy in England, London 1970, 172–4. 67 Didcot rather than Beckford as a whole is the subject of one of the pre-Conquest leases already mentioned (S 1314). 68 GDB 164a2 (Glos. 1/59). By its use of the past tense Domesday Book seems to imply that these tenants and ploughs should be deducted from the figures given for the entire manor. 69 D. M. Wilson and J. G. Hurst, ‘Medieval Britain in 1958’, Medieval Archaeology, 3, 1959, 295–326 at 296. 70 W. J. Britnell, ‘An Interim Report upon Excavations at Beckford, 1972–4’, Research Papers, 5, 1975, 1–11 at 10–11. 71 VCH Glos. VIII, 252, 261. 72 The Latin term meliorare, signifying a desire to increase the profits of seigneurial exploitation, occurs frequently from the late eleventh century onwards (Duby, Early Growth, 178–9).

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Table 4  The Manor of Beckford, 1086–c. 1126 Manorial details Tax assessments Beckford Ashton-under-Hill Total

1086

Tunc

8 8 16

Modo

16

Ploughs Demesne ploughs Tenant ploughs1 Total

7 31 38

10 32 42

10 35 45

Population Customary tenants2 Cottagers Male slaves Female slaves Messengers Bird catchers Forester Beadle Gate-keeper Smith Total

30 21 20 7 – – – – – – 78

32 9 5 – 3 2 1 1 1 1 55

46 15 – – 1 2 1 1 1 1 68

Livestock Rounceys Cows Swine Sheep Beehives3 Horses

– – – – – –

9 6 4 500 20 25

9 (10 +) (100 +) (200 +) 20 26

£30

£30

£30

Farm

Notes: 1 The 1086 figure is exclusive of the five ploughs attached to the holding of Ansfrid de Cormeilles. 2 The 1086 figure is exclusive of the twelve tenants attached to the holding of Ansfrid de Cormeilles, and the two tenants attached to that of the abbey of Cormeilles. 3 Whether these hives existed at both dates is uncertain.

hands modo and that Evesham L pre-dates Henry I’s grant to William de Tancarville, the royal chamberlain. Conceivably this document was drawn up by royal agents at the time of the grant c. 1126. Sheriff Walter, who is referred to in the past tense, was certainly dead by 1130.73 It is possible that the death of Walter, the sole individual to be named, was the occasion of both the survey and the grant to William de Tancarville. In the sentence dealing with demesne ploughs, tunc seems to be equated with in predicto tempore, though no date is specified: Evesham L may have been appended to another document or may have formed part of a more extensive 73

PR 31 Henry I, 77. The first extant pipe roll contains much out-of-date information and a reference to a dead person does not necessarily mean that he or she had died only recently (C. W. Hollister, ‘The Misfortunes of the Mandevilles’, History, 58, 1973, 18–28 at 21–3). The name of Walter’s son, Miles of Gloucester, occurs frequently as a witness from 1126 or 1127 (G. H. White, ‘Constables under the Norman Kings’, The Genealogist, new series 38, 1921–2, 113–27 at 123).



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77

survey, of which this is a fragmentary survival. What was intended by tunc is quite obscure, but the close approximation between the two sets of figures suggests that tunc and modo were not very far apart. Evesham L thus invites comparison with the Burton abbey surveys belonging to the years 1114 and c. 1126.74 Over the span of approximately forty years between the Domesday inquest and Evesham L, the combined tax assessment was unchanged at 16 hides, while the two churches increased their estate by ½ virgate. Domesday Book records that Earl William had given these churches, together with their tithes and two customary tenants, to the Norman abbey of Cormeilles.75 For other classes of information the Evesham text provides two sets of figures (Table 4). The number of demesne and tenant ploughs was large and grew slowly during this period, reflecting the fact that, by 1086, Beckford and Ashton were situated in an intensively cultivated area by medieval standards.76 On the other hand there appears to have been a decline in the manorial population, caused partly by the elimination of male and female slaves. The slave population sequence of twenty-seven in 1086, five tunc, and nil modo seems again to indicate that the two dates of Evesham L are nearer to one another than the first is to Domesday Book. The elimination of slavery conforms with a widely recognized trend in early Norman England, as indicated already by Evesham J, but on this manor the number of customary tenants rose only hesitantly, while that of cottagers was less c. 1126 than it had been in 1086. If the figures are correct, peasant heads of household barely outnumbered ploughs, particularly at the intermediate date. Possibly the slaves and their descendants had joined the ranks of hirelings (famuli) who laboured on many twelfth-century manors.77 Certainly Evesham L creates an impression of completeness by its inclusion of manorial officials and specialized workers. Such men may be concealed in the generalized terminology of Domesday Book; alternatively they may normally have been omitted, even from the regional drafts. Exchequer Domesday mentions them occasionally: for example, the beadle, cowherd, dairymaid, forester, and reeve who are included among the inhabitants of Bushley in Worcestershire.78 The messengers (‘riding knights’) may equally have been passed over in 1086. The main conclusion to be drawn from these figures, however, is that population movements were not invariably upwards, even in this age of tentative economic growth.79 The livestock figures have no parallel in the first volume of Exchequer Domesday, with the result that a threefold comparison is no longer possible. Evesham L implies that the number of cows, swine, and sheep was the same tunc as modo, but that more animals could have been accommodated.80 In particular there was a serious deficiency of swine and no woodland is mentioned in either source. The actual and potential stock of sheep indicates how important these animals were, even in rich arable areas. Their omission from Exchequer Domesday has been used to explain the

74

C. G. O. Bridgeman, ‘The Burton Abbey Twelfth-Century Surveys’, Collections for a History of Staffordshire, William Salt Archaeological Society, 3rd series, 1918, 212–47. For an edition and commentary, see J. F. R. Walmsley, ‘The Estate of Burton Abbey from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Centuries’, University of Birmingham PhD thesis, 1972, 297–305. 75 GDB 164a2 (Glos. 1/60). 76 The Domesday Geography of Midland England, ed. H. C. Darby and I. B. Terrett, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1971, 240. 77 Postan, Famulus; Pelteret, Slavery, 227, 254. 78 GDB 180b2 (Herefs. 1/44). 79 On a macro-economic scale c. 1075 has been posited as the point at which the seeds of economic growth can be detected (Duby, Early Growth, 177–80). 80 Five hundred sheep could be maintained in the thirteenth century (VCH Glos. VIII, 257).

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wealth of otherwise poorly endowed manors and regions.81 For horses and rounceys the figures are virtually identical. Rounceys are recorded systematically in Little Domesday, while Exon Domesday refers frequently to them, especially in Somerset.82 Other types of horse, such as wild mares, are also mentioned in appreciable numbers and, in his remarks on the Domesday inquest, Bishop Robert of Hereford singled out horses from other livestock.83 These details illustrate the striking similarities between this isolated survey and numerous entries in Exon Domesday and Little Domesday. A further similarity is the inclusion of beehives, of which 1,370 are recorded for East Anglia and Essex in 1086.84 Evesham L helps to demonstrate the way in which Domesday Book lived on as a model for later administrators. The form of the survey is close to that of the regional drafts that lie behind Exchequer Domesday, yet this Evesham text was compiled perhaps forty years afterwards. As a manorial description it stands nearer to Domesday Book than to the late twelfth-century extents, with their details of peasant services and tenancies. No clear-cut explanation can be offered for the preservation and subsequent entry of Evesham L into the first cartulary. The gift of two neighbouring villages to the royal chamberlain was possibly a matter of local concern to the monks, while the subsequent enrichment of a Norman monastery may have been of passing interest to Abbot Robert (c. 1121–1129), formerly a monk at Jumièges.85 Indeed Cormeilles, Mézidon, Sainte-Barbe-en-Auge, and Tancarville are all situated in the area west of Jumièges. Surveys made by royal agents may well have played a part in the evolution of more sophisticated techniques of manorial administration in twelfth-century England. Of this we have an indication in the Leges Henrici Primi, in a chapter concerning the holding of a manor at farm that specifies that enquiries should be made as to livestock capacity and other resources.86 It could be said, therefore, that Evesham L reflects what may have been regarded as official policy.

81

P. H. Sawyer, ‘The Wealth of England in the Eleventh Century’, TRHS 5th series 15, 1965, 145–64 at 162–3. 82 The Domesday Geography of South-West England, ed. H. C. Darby and R. W. Finn, Cambridge 1967, 206; H. C. Darby, The Domesday Geography of Eastern England, 3rd edn, Cambridge 1971, 142, 199, 255. 83 Darby, Domesday Geography of Eastern England, passim; H. R. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, London 1962, 153–4; W. Stubbs, Select Charters and Other Illustrations of English Constitutional History, 9th edn by H. W. C. Davis, Oxford 1921, 95; EHD II, 912. 84 Darby, Domesday Geography of Eastern England, 146, 203, 258. But only fourteen beekeepers are recorded for the south-western counties (Domesday Geography of South-West England, 28, 247). The beekeeper features in the Rectitudines Singularum Personarum (Gesetze, ed. Liebermann, I, 448; EHD II, 877). 85 Robert’s date of accession to the abbacy is uncertain, as is his place in the sequence of early twelfthcentury abbots. The house chronicle’s order of Walter, Robert, Maurice, and Reginald has usually been followed (e.g. Heads of Religious Houses, ed. Knowles, Brooke, and London, 47), but there is a per­suasive though complicated argument that Robert came between Maurice and Reginald (Clarke, ‘Early Surveys’, 33–7). The suggested date for Evesham L is in conformity with this argument. The recent editors of the house chronicle favour a two Roberts theory (Thomas of Marlborough, History of Evesham, 180 n. 2). 86 Leges Henrici Primi, ed. L. J. Downer, Oxford 1972, 175, c. 56,3. In its present form the text of the Leges was drawn up about ten years before the proposed date of Evesham L (ibid. 34–7).



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From Domesday descriptiones to manorial extenta To summarize, both surveys may have been produced by royal agents; more certainly does this apply to Evesham L. As we have seen, this survey of the manor of Beckford c. 1126 shares many similarities with manorial descriptions in the circuit returns to the Domesday inquest, Exon Domesday, and Little Domesday. Besides the basic figures for ploughs and peasants, Evesham L records the numbers of livestock. It implies that, forty years after the great survey of 1086, royal officials employed more or less the same approach when called upon to make a manorial descriptio. Evesham J (c. 1104) is less comprehensive, even to the extent of omitting the numbers of peasant ploughs usually given in Great Domesday. It does, however, include details of subtenants. The prime purpose of Evesham J was not strictly manorial if, as we have surmised, it was intended to record the main facts about the new seigneurial hundred of Blackenhurst. Thus, while it would be unwise to draw hard and fast conclusions from such relatively slender evidence, Evesham J and Evesham L do not suggest that methods of manorial administration were elaborated during the early Norman period. Before drawing a conclusion on this point, I propose now to review briefly the evidence for manorial surveys, pre-Conquest and post-Conquest, down to the mid twelfth century. Prior to 1086 the amount of extant manorial material in England as a whole is small indeed. The series may begin with a custumal for Hurstbourne, in Hampshire, which is attached to a charter of the year 900 but is generally assumed to be of later date.87 Dating from 963 × 984 is a list of gifts by Bishop Æthelwold to Peterborough abbey that includes an inventory of stock on the manor of Farcet, in Huntingdonshire.88 This inventory relates to livestock, corn, and tools, together with able-bodied men and women, who must have been slaves or at least attached to the manor by bonds of servility. The earliest English manorial survey comes from Tidenham, in Gloucestershire: it cannot be dated closely, but falls within the period 956–1065.89 This document records rents and services, and regulations about fish-weirs on the rivers Severn and Wye. The earliest survey of a collection of manors seems to be part of a description, in Old English, of the lands of the abbey of Bury St Edmunds in the time of Abbot Leofstan (1045–65).90 This gives details of food and money rents, and of geld-paying peasant holdings (manslot). The abbey’s manors were divided into twelve groups, each responsible for one month’s farm. Some further notes in Latin and in English date from the abbacy of Baldwin (1065–1097/8).91

87 BL Add. MS 15350, fol. 72, printed and translated in Robertson, AS Charters, no. 110; translated in H. P. R. Finberg, ‘Anglo-Saxon England to 1042’, in Agrarian History, ed. Thirsk and Finberg, I, part 2, 453; EHD II, 879. 88 London, Society of Antiquaries MS 60, fol. 39v., printed and translated in Robertson, AS Charters, no. 39. For the identity of this manor, see ibid. 329–30. In appendix II a small fragment of a similar inventory from Bury St Edmunds is printed as no. 3, while no. 9 consists of three fragments that together constitute one leaf. Unfortunately the text cannot be reconstructed fully, but many details are given of Fenland manors associated with Ely and Thorney abbeys. 89 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 111, fol. 73, printed and translated in Robertson, AS Charters, no. 109; translated in EHD II, 879–80. 90 Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS cxcvii, fols 106v.–108, printed in D. C. Douglas, ‘Fragments of an Anglo-Saxon Survey from Bury St Edmunds’, EHR 43, 1928, 376–83 at 381–2; printed and translated in Robertson, AS Charters, no. 104; translated in EHD II, 880–3. 91 Oxford, Corpus Christi College MS cxcvii, fols 108v.–109, printed in Douglas, ‘Fragments’, 382–3; printed and translated in Robertson, AS Charters, no. 104; translated in EHD II, 883–4.

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To judge from the extant documentation, there was an upsurge of interest in manorial surveys during the reign of Henry I, perhaps stimulated by the Domesday inquest.92 The monks of Bury St Edmunds produced a compilation very similar in form and scope to the corresponding sections of Little Domesday (Bury A).93 It may even have been based on the first draft of this provincial Domesday.94 The earliest of the surveys of the English manors of the abbey of La Trinité, at Caen in Normandy, belongs to the reign of Henry I.95 This deals with seven manors scattered about south-western and eastern England: three in Gloucestershire and one each in Dorset, Essex, Norfolk, and Wiltshire. The material is completely independent of the Domesday inquest, though the description of each manor begins similarly with a statement of the number of hides. Details of the various grades of manorial personnel are then given. The appearance of cottagers (bordarii) on most of these manors, and of male and female slaves (servi and ancillae) on some, is suggestive of a date early in the twelfth century. The most conspicuous feature of these Caen surveys is the full inventories of livestock, recording the age and sex of horses, cattle, sheep, and swine. An isolated memorandum concerning manorial customs and services of purportedly comparable date is that of Portswood, in Hampshire, which was granted by Henry I to the church of St Denys at Southampton.96 Thus the independent survey, Evesham J, should be associated with these other indications of a post-Domesday rise in administrative activity in the new Anglo-Norman state. Like the first Caen survey, it could be described as ‘a product of the normal process of efficient estate administration in the reign of Henry I’.97 Among the best known of early twelfth-century manorial surveys are those of Burton abbey, which date from 1114 (Burton B) and c. 1126 (Burton A).98 Both begin with the words ‘Extenta terrarum monasterii de Burton’ super Trent’, but here ‘extent’ as the term for a detailed manorial survey was supplied only in the fifteenth century. These documents are independent productions. Manors are divided into ‘inland’ (manorial demesne) and ‘warland’ (peasant holdings), the latter being liable to pay geld. The information relates to ploughs and peasants, and the most distinctive feature of these surveys is the inclusion of rent-payers (censarii), who may have

92

Cf. M. Bailey, The English Manor, c. 1200–c. 1500, Manchester and New York 2002, 22: ‘the Domesday project helped to encourage and standardise the use of the local survey’. 93 CUL MS Mm.iv.19, fols 124–131v., printed in Feudal Documents from the Abbey of Bury St Edmunds, ed. D. C. Douglas, British Academy Records of the Social and Economic History of England and Wales 8, 1932, 3–15; translated in part in EHD II, 955–9. An abbreviated version occurs in CUL MS Ee.iii.60, fols 178a2–181b2, printed in The Pinchbeck Register, ed. F. Hervey, 2 vols, London 1925, I, 410–18. 94 V. H. Galbraith, ‘The Making of Domesday Book’, EHR 57, 1942, 161–77 at 168. Douglas associated this survey with Abbot Baldwin and dated it 1087 × 1098 (Feudal Book, p. xlix). Other writers have denied the association (Galbraith, ‘Making of Domesday Book’, 168 n. 1; idem, The Making of Domesday Book, Oxford 1961, 77; Lennard, Rural England, 359 n. 1). 95 BN MS lat. 5650, fols 26–29v., printed in Charters and Custumals of the Abbey of Holy Trinity Caen, ed. M. Chibnall, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History new series 5, 1982, 33–8. 96 BL Add. MS 15314, fols 99v., 100, printed in C. H. Haskins, ‘The Manor of Portswood under Henry I’, in Mélanges d’histoire offerts à M. Charles Bémont par ses amis et ses élèves, Paris 1913, 77–83 at 79–81; The Cartulary of the Priory of St Denys near Southampton, ed. E. O. Blake, 2 vols, Southampton Records Series 24–5, 1981, II, 211–12. This late medieval copy appears to have been brought up to date by annotations and additions.. 97 Charters and Custumals, ed. Chibnall, p. xxix. 98 BL Loan MS no. 30, fols 28a1–36b1, printed in Bridgeman, ‘Burton Abbey Surveys’, 212–47; survey B translated in EHD II, 884–92. The latter, earlier survey was made probably soon after Abbot Nigel’s death. A fragment of a draft version of survey B survives in Burton-upon-Trent, Town Hall, Anglesey MS 1925 (a portion of a former roll).



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gone unrecorded in 1086.99 A rather different survey was compiled at about the same time (1107 × 1124) by the monks of Battle abbey.100 As its preface explains, since the Domesday inquest the abbot’s rape had been subdivided into wistae, the equivalent of virgates in other parts of England. The text then proceeds to give the number of wistae in each settlement and details of resources and services, but says nothing of the holders of the land. From Peterborough comes a survey of the monastery’s lands in four counties, entitled ‘Haec est descriptio maneriorum abbatiae de Burhe’.101 Dating from the vacancy of 1125–8, this ambitious survey is contem­porary with Evesham L. Each entry begins by stating the number of hides or carucates ‘to the king’s geld’ (ad geldum regis), followed by information about the various grades of peasant, their obligations and dues, and about certain named tenants. Most entries close with a statement of the number of demesne ploughs and livestock. This Peterborough survey is the most comprehensive of those so far encountered and is comparable with the first of the Shaftesbury abbey surveys (1127 × 1130).102 Here each manor is described according to its subtenants, whether knights or peasants, whose obligations are recorded in some detail. The holdings are designated in terms of hides and virgates, and occur in roughly descending order of size. Nothing is said about the demesne or its resources: this document is more in the nature of a custumal. A link with a later age is provided by the first Ramsey abbey custumals and extents.103 These were made c. 1161 and contemporary tenurial conditions are contrasted with those in the time of Henry I. Though less detailed than their thirteenth-century counterparts, these surveys contain a range of information that makes them almost recognizable as extents: demesne stock, freeholds, money rents, villein services, and tenements.104 Much the same period is covered by the Glastonbury abbey survey brought to light in the middle of the last century.105 This document, whose interpretation has proved to be highly contentious, was drawn up c. 1171 by Hilbert the precentor and, like that of Ramsey, includes information from the reign of Henry I. This aspect of both surveys presupposes the preservation of written

99 J. F. R. Walmsley, ‘The “Censarii” of Burton Abbey and the Domesday Population’, North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies, 8, 1968, 73–80. 100 BL Cotton MS Domitian A.ii, fols 18v.–21v., printed in Chron. Battle, 60–7. The last part of the survey is concerned with guildhalls inside and outside the town. 101 London, Society of Antiquaries MS 60, fols 6–17, printed in Chronicon Petroburgense, ed. T. ­Stapleton, Camden Society 1st series 47, 1849, 157–66; translated in part in EHD II, 892–3. For tabulated material and expert analysis, see E. King, Peterborough Abbey, 1086–1310: A Study in the Land Market, Cambridge 1973, 140–4. 102 BL Harley MS 61, fols 37–52v., 54v.–55v., printed in Charters and Custumals of Shaftesbury Abbey, 1089–1216, ed. N. E. Stacy, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History new series 39, 2006, 75–120. 103 BL Cotton MS Galba E.x, fols 23b2–57b1, printed in Cartularium Monasterii de Rameseia, ed. W. H. Hart and P. A. Lyons, 3 vols, RS 79, 1884–93, III, 241–314; translated in part in EHD II, 894–7. 104 J. A. Raftis, The Estates of Ramsey Abbey: A Study in Economic Growth and Organization, Toronto 1957, 305–6. 105 Cambridge, Trinity College MS R.5.33, fols 115–116A, printed in Surveys of the Estates of Glastonbury Abbey, c. 1135–1201, ed. N. E. Stacy, British Academy Records of Social and Economic History new series 33, 2001, 70–6. For discussion pre-dating the recent edition and its introduction, see R. Lennard, ‘The Demesnes of Glastonbury Abbey in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, EcHR 2nd series 8, 1955–6, 355–63; M. M. Postan, ‘Glastonbury Estates in the Twelfth Century’, in Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy, Cambridge 1973, 249–77; R. V. Lennard, ‘The Glastonbury Estates: A Rejoinder’, EcHR 2nd series 28, 1975, 517–23; M. M. Postan, ‘The Glastonbury Estates: A Restatement’, ibid. 524–7.

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records during the reign of Stephen.106 The scope of the Glastonbury survey is remin­ iscent of Exon Domesday, with the addition of rents of assize, many of which had been created since 1086. The first half of the reign of Henry II saw the production of a second survey of the English lands of the nuns of Caen.107 By this time (c. 1170 or a little earlier) Simon of Felsted (one of the abbey’s manors) had probably received at farm this and all the other manors, causing severe losses to the nuns.108 With one exception these manorial descriptions begin with the names of jurors who swore to the accuracy of the facts; otherwise their content varies in quality and quantity. The second Shaftesbury abbey survey is similar to the first.109 The account of each manor again opens with a list of jurors. Then follow the names of the tenants, ranging from knights down to peasant smallholders, with their dues and obligations. Sometimes the dues and obligations of particular categories of farm-worker, such as cottagers and ploughmen, are specified. One characteristic shared by this group of surveys is their retrospective quality: parts of the country had been badly disrupted by the civil war and it was now both necessary and opportune to take stock of the new situation in Angevin England. One might conclude, therefore, that the manorial extent, as classically defined by R. V. Lennard,110 was not invented in a particular place at a particular moment in time. Rather it evolved out of pre-existing practices that went back to the Domesday inquest and even beyond. The terms of reference for the conduct of the great survey of 1086 preserved in the Inquisitio Eliensis imply that the priest, the reeve, and six peasants in a typical vill of that time were capable of constituting an informed jury and of verifying under oath the required information. Evesham J and Evesham L are documents that belong to a similar mind-set, as reflected in the former’s usage of the formula tempore regis Edwardi and the latter’s usage of tunc and modo. In the Norman period the country was indeed advancing ‘from memory to written record’ in the context of manorial administration, but it was only when more and more landlords were persuaded that it would be in their best interests to resume direct management of their estates, in response to favourable economic conditions, that extents detailing the services, rents, and customs pertaining to individual holdings were made on a wide scale, with a view to the extraction of more wealth from their peasant producers.111 The manorial extent in its classical form represents a change of economic mentality rather than of administrative competence. Norman administrators were competent; Angevin ones had to be inventive as well and, as a result, ‘life on the English manor’ starts to come more clearly into focus in the middle of the twelfth century.112

106

Cf. the argument in G. J. White, ‘The Myth of the Anarchy’, ANS 22, 1999, 323–37. BN MS lat. 5650, fols 41–7, 50–56v., printed in Charters and Custumals, ed. Chibnall, 40–62. For the three Gloucestershire manors there is a third twelfth-century survey of about the same date at fols 47v.–50 (Avening), 56v.–60 (Minchinhampton), 60v. (Pinbury), printed in Charters and Custumals, ed. Chibnall, 63–74. 108 For Simon and his depredations, see Charters and Custumals, ed. Chibnall, pp. xxxii, xl–xlii, 39–40; Chibnall, Anglo-Norman England, 146–7. 109 BL Harley MS 61, fols 55v.–82, printed in Charters and Custumals, ed. Stacy, 121–91. 110 R. Lennard, ‘What is a Manorial Extent?’, EHR 44, 1929, 256–63; cf. Bailey, English Manor, 21. 111 The 1180s appear to have been the decisive point of lift-off (M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, London 1979, 73). For an excellent general evaluation, see C. Dyer, Making a Living in the Middle Ages: The People of Britain, 850–1520, London 2003, 119–37. Again on the macro-economic scale, see Duby, Early Growth, 257–70. 112 H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor: A Study of Peasant Conditions, 1150–1400, Cambridge 1937. 107



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APPENDIX A

A numbered edition of Evesham J BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fols 49v., 53 Date c. 1104 fol. 49v.] 1] (Tempore regis Edwardi.)113 In Wicwonia [Wickhamford] viii hide, iiij caruce, viij bouarii. Viginti rustici sunt in Bretfertona [Bretforton Upper End], qui pertinent ad Wicwon’, et xv bordarij. 2] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Badeseia [Badsey] v hide et dimidia, iii caruce, vj bouarii, ix rusticj, v bordarii. 3] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Aldinton’ [Aldington] j hida et dimidia, jjj caruce, vj bouarij, ij bordarij. 4] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Benigwrth’ [Bengeworth] iiij hide, ij caruce, iiij bouarii, j faber habet v acras, v bordarii. 5] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Hamton’ [Little Hampton] v hide, iiij caruce, viij bouarij, xiij rustici, vi bordarij. De hac uilla tenet Ailwardus j uirgatam et [sic] terre et dimidiam libere. Albretha soror abbatis iij hidas et j virgatam. 6] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Offenham [Offenham] xvi hide. viij ex his iacent in Bretferton’ [Bretforton Lower End] et viij in Litleton’ [South Littleton]. iiijor caruce, viij bouarii, xiiij rustici plenarii, xiiij bordarii. Ex his xvj hidis Rannulfus frater abbatis habet iij hidas et j uirgatam terre libere, Rannulfus Trauers j hidam et j uirgatam de dominio, Withelard iij virgatas de dominio, Ansgerus j uirgatam de dominio, Osbernus j hidam liberam, Alboldus j hidam liberam, Hugo marescaldus ij hidas et dimidiam de dominio. 7] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Litleton’ [Middle Littleton] vj hide, iij caruce, vj bouarii. Monasterium dimidiam hidam. xij rustici. Vnus ex his tenet dimidiam hidam et xi totidem uirgatas. v bordarij. 8] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Huniburnia [Church Honeybourne] iij hide, iij caruce, vi bouarii. Monasterium j hidam. x rustici, ij bordarii. 9] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Hecheslench [Atch Lench] iij hide et dimidia, j caruca, ij bouarii, v rustici. Duo ex his tenent ij virgatas et tres alii unusquisque dimidiam virgatam. 10] (Tempore regis Edwardi.) In Chireclench [Church Lench] iiij hide, quas Walterus abbas de dominio dedit Vrsoni de Abetot sine capitulo. fol. 53] 11] (Tempore regis Edwardi.)114 In Lenchwic’ [Lenchwick] x hide, v caruce, x bouarii. De his x hidis Walterus abbas dedit hominibus suis vj hidas et j virgatam. Set due hide antea erant libere et iiij hide et j virgata de dominio. In eadem uilla Hugo nepos abbatis tenet iij hidas et dimidiam, Turstanus j hidam de dominio, Thurkil j hidam de dominio, Hurtebrand in eadem uilla dimidiam hidam et xii acras terre libere, Godwinus de Hokenarton’ [Hook Norton] dimidiam hidam de dominio. (Firma x libre.)115

113 114 115

Tempore … Edwardi a rubric in the left margin against Evesham J 1–10. Tempore … Edwardi a rubric in the right margin. Firma … libre in the right margin.

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12] (Tempore regis Kanuti.)116 In Baddebi [Badby] iiij hide, v caruce, x bouarii, viginti et j rustici, xi bordarii. Monasterium dimidiam hidam. Rusticus est in eadem uilla qui dat xiiij solidos pro opere suo.117 In hac uilla tenet femina Gosfridi fratris abbatis ij hidas terre et dimidiam libere; Willelmus filius Gosfridi j hidam de dominio; Morcarus j hidam et j virgatam et j bordellum de dominio, sed dimidia hida est libera; Algerus j hidam terre libere; Mergetus iij virgatas de dominio; Leuericus dimidiam hidam de dominio et ij bordella terre libere. Firma uille x libre.

APPENDIX B

An edition of Evesham L BL Cotton MS Vespasian B.xxiv, fol. 57v. Date c. 1126 fol. 57v.] [I]n Berchafort [Beckford] sunt xvi hide terre et due ecclesie habentes iii virgatas et dimidiam. Huic adiacet Estona [Ashton-under-Hill]. In predicto tempore erant ibi x carruce et modo; tunc ix runcini et modo; tunc vi uacce, sed x plus possunt; tunc iiiior sues cum porcellis, sed c porci plus possunt; tunc d oues, sed cc plus possunt, et xx uasa apum; tunc serui et ancille v; tunc villaui [sic] xxxii, modo xiiii plus; tunc ix bordarii, modo vi plus; tunc iii radch’, modo i; aucupes ii et forestarius i et bedellus i et portaruus [sic] i et faber i; et omnes hii et simul et habebant xxxii carucas, modo iii plus; tunc xxv equos et modo i plus; tunc reddebat hoc manerium xxx libras de firma et modo, et preter hoc reddidit de consuetudine xxvii solidos et viii denarios. Walterus uicecomes habuit xl solidos. Edificium et dominium regis et ministerium est [sic] meliorata de x libris.

116 117

Tempore … Kanuti a rubric in the right margin. Altered from soo.

ASPECTS OF CHURCH REFORM IN WALES, c. 1093–c. 1223 John Reuben Davies In 1093, not far from Brecon, the ‘French who were inhabiting Brycheiniog’ killed the king of Deheubarth. For Sir John Edward Lloyd, the death of this native ruler, Rhys ap Tewdwr, ‘opened the flood-gates of Norman rapacity in South Wales’. In John of Worcester’s chronicle, this was the day from which ‘kings ceased to bear rule in Wales’; and a Welsh cleric of the time judged that ‘the kingdom of the Britons was overthrown’. On the west coast, near Aberystwyth, in the ancient community of St Padarn at Llanbadarn Fawr, the renowned scholar Rhygyfarch ap Sulien composed a poetic lament on the ravages wrought by the Norman invasion. ‘Nothing is of any use to me now’, he wrote, ‘the people and the priest are despised by the word, the heart, and the work of the Normans … Patriotism and the hope of self-government flee; liberty and self-will perish.’ By this time Rhygyfarch – viewed by the annalists as ‘the most learned of the learned men of the Britons’ – was head of an ecclesiastical dynasty that had dom­inated the Church in south-west Wales for at least two generations. In Planctus – his ‘Lament’ – he set his face against the Normans. Rhygyfarch, best known for his Life of St David, was the eldest son of Bishop Sulien. Twice bishop of St David’s (in 1073 and 1080), and twice resigning the see after an incumbency of five years (first in 1078, and again in 1085, dying in 1091), Sulien was himself also offspring of a clerical family. Having studied in Welsh schools, he continued



‘las Rys uap Tewdwr, brenhin Deheubarth, y gann y Ffreinc a oed ynn presswylaw Brecheinawc’: Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. T. Jones, 2nd edn, Cardiff 1973, s.a. 1090 [=1093]; other versions concur. The kingdom of Deheubarth roughly comprised the territories west of the river Tawe and south of the river Dyfi: Ystrad Tywi, Dyfed, and Ceredigion.  J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols, 3rd edn, London 1939, II, 398. On Rhys ap Tewdwr, see K. L. Maund, Ireland, Wales, and England in the Eleventh Century, Woodbridge 1991, 33–8; Robert S. Badcock, ‘Rhys ap Tewdwr, King of Deheubarth’, ANS 16, 1994, 21–35.  John of Worcester, III, 64–5; ‘Ac yna y dygwydawd teyrnas y Brytanyeit’: Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, s.a. 1090 [=1093]; Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. T. Jones, Cardiff 1952, concurs; Brenhinedd y Saesson, or, The Kings of the Saxons: BM Cotton MS. Cleopatra B.v and The Black Book of Basingwerk, NLW MS. 7006, ed. and trans. T. Jones, Cardiff 1971, s.a. 1091 [=1093] reads, ‘Ac yna y syrthws brenhiniaeth Kymre’, ‘And then the kingdom of Wales fell’.  Planctus, lines 8, 16, 74–5, ed. and trans. M. Lapidge, ‘The Welsh-Latin Poetry of Sulien’s Family’, Studia Celtica, 8/9, 1973–4, 68–106 at 88–90. I have adapted Lapidge’s translation.  ‘y doethaf o doethon y Brytanyeit’: Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, s.a. 1095 [=1099].  ‘Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David’, ed. and trans. R. Sharpe and J. R. Davies, in St David of Wales: Cult, Church and Nation, ed. J. W. Evans and J. M. Wooding, Woodbridge 2007, 107–55.  On the career of Sulien and his family, see Lapidge, ‘Welsh-Latin Poetry’; J. C. Davies, Episcopal Acts and Cognate Documents Relating to Welsh Dioceses, 1066–1272, 2 vols, Cardiff 1946–8, II, 493– 506; Lloyd, History of Wales, II, 459–61.

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his education in Albania (Scotland north of the Forth), and in Ireland, for a period of eighteen years. Sulien, his sons, and his grandsons, represented a lively tradition of Latin learning in the greater Welsh ecclesiastical communities. Here Latin verse and Lives of the saints were composed; St Augustine of Hippo’s De Trinitate and Macrobius’s commentary on Cicero’s Dream of Scipio were copied; Bede’s De natura rerum was glossed and used for teaching; and a substantial classical library was available. These same scholarly traditions of Welsh clerical learning survived elsewhere in Wales too – at Llancarfan in Glamorgan, and at St David’s, to name two other places.10 Lifris, master of the school at Llancarfan – Glamorgan’s counterpart to Ceredigion’s Llanbadarn – wrote an extensive Life of St Cadog in the late eleventh century to match Rhygyfarch’s Life of St David.11 Lifris too, like Rhygyfarch, was the son of a bishop; in this case, his father was Herewald, bishop of Glamorgan.12 At centres like Llanbadarn, Llancarfan, and St David’s, annals were recorded, charters and legal memoranda copied, saints’ Lives written and rewritten, and native learning passed on. Now, however, with the Norman onslaught of 1093, Rhygyfarch ap Sulien, one of the most important scholars and churchmen in Wales, saw the values and traditions that he had inherited and taught trampled on: ‘neither law, nor learning …, not wise teaching, neither deeds nor arts …, none retains its station’.13 So, as the eleventh century turned into a twelfth that Rhygyfarch was not to see, the last days of the native Welsh Church gave themselves up to a new age of reform, and a future that was to lie with Canterbury and the English Church for the next eight hundred years.14

The control and establishment of Welsh bishoprics It has been observed that, for the Normans, the subjugation of the Welsh Church was at once politically essential and ecclesiastically necessary.15 Control of the Church was bound to follow political conquest. Lloyd even entitled a section of his classic History of Wales ‘The Subjugation of the Welsh Church’.16 The Normans regarded themselves as ecclesiastical reformers. They thought it their obligation to impose the standards and practices of the recently reformed Church of northern Europe on what they may have regarded (in the words of Sir Rees Davies) as ‘the isolated and deviant native church in Wales’.17



Poem on the life of Sulien by Ieuan, ed. and trans. Lapidge, in ‘Welsh-Latin Poetry’, 80–8. Lapidge, ‘Welsh-Latin Poetry’, 68–76. On Lifris of Llancarfan, see C. W. Lewis, ‘The Literary Tradition of Morgannwg down to the Middle of the Sixteenth Century’, in Glamorgan County History, Volume 3: The Middle Ages, ed. T. B. Pugh, Cardiff 1971, 449–554; C. N. L. Brooke, ‘The Archbishops of St David’s, Llandaff, and Caerleon-onUsk’, in his Church and the Welsh Border in the Central Middle Ages, Woodbridge 1986, 70–94. 11 Vitae Sanctorum Britanniae et Genealogiae, ed. and trans. A. W. Wade-Evans, Cardiff 1944, 24–141. 12 J. R. Davies, The Book of Llandaf and the Norman Church in Wales, Woodbridge 2003, 15. 13 Planctus, lines 9–14, ed. Lapidge, in ‘Welsh-Latin Poetry’, 90. 14 That is, up to the disestablishment of the Welsh dioceses in 1920, and the creation of a metropolitan archbishop for the new independent province of the Church in Wales. 15 R. R. Davies, Conquest, Co-existence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1987; issued in paperback as The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415, Oxford 1990, 179. 16 Lloyd, History of Wales, II, 447–59. 17 Davies, Age of Conquest, 179. On the Normans as Church reformers, see M. Brett, The English  10



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The principal means of imposing authority over the Welsh Church was through the appointment and control of bishops. The Norman advance had, at first, been most rapid in north Wales, and it was at Bangor that they imposed their first nominee in 1092. This bishop was Hervé, a Breton, possibly a chaplain of William Rufus. But Hervé’s career in Bangor was cut short when the Welsh of Gwynedd revolted in 1095, and he was driven from his see. Pope Paschal II was scathing in his letter to Archbishop Anselm on the subject; this predicament had come about ‘owing to the savagery of barbarians’.18 Hervé was eventually translated to the newly created see of Ely in Cambridgeshire in 1109. From there we have an account of Hervé’s tribulations: When Hervé was exercising his episcopacy in Bangor, he began to treat a rebellious people with extreme rigour, observing in their behaviour wickedness so great that no one could readily tolerate it. The upshot was that, because they did not maintain any reverence for fear of their bishop, he twice wielded a sharp sword with the aim of subduing them: curbing them now with a frequently repeated anathema, now by means of a large force of his kinsfolk and other men. The rebellion of the people was on no smaller a scale: they began to attack him with such recklessness that they murdered his brother, intending to punish Hervé in a similar fashion, if they could lay hands on him … he saw that the people were seeking to take his own life and that he did not have adequate defenders, so he fled to the protection of the king of England, achieving the exile expedient for him.19

Elsewhere in Wales, Canterbury simply imposed its authority on the native episcopate; Herewald of Glamorgan and Wilfrid of St David’s were both suspended by Archbishop Anselm as soon as he ascended the throne of St Augustine.20 The names of both these prelates, we should observe, attest the anglicizing influences already present in the southern Welsh territories in the eleventh century. John of Worcester noted that as far as Wilfrid, ‘all the bishops had been Welsh’.21 Gerald of Wales’s statement that Wilfrid’s successor was ‘primus Francorum’ of the bishops of St David’s seems to support the idea of his Welsh origins.22 Herewald is said to have been ordained priest by Joseph, his predecessor as bishop of Glamorgan, but had lived among the English for some time.23 There was to be no doubt that these two bishops, and their sees, now fell within the sphere of Canterbury’s disciplinary powers. Wilfrid of St David’s came to terms with Anselm on the road between Windsor and Canterbury at the end of May 1095, and Anselm requested Robert de Bellême, earl of Shrewsbury, his brother Arnulf, earl of Pembroke, Ralph Mortimer, Philip de Briouze, Bernard de Neufmarché, and others to regard Wilfrid as their bishop.24 These men were the conquerors and lords of a large part of Dyfed, Ceredigion, and Brycheiniog.25 Whether Herewald’s suspension from episcopal authority Church under Henry I, Oxford 1975; F. Barlow, The English Church, 1066–1154: A History of the AngloNorman Church, London 1979. 18 Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh Century to the Twelfth, trans. J. Fairweather, Woodbridge 2005, 300. 19 Ibid. 297. 20 S. Anselmi Cantuariensis archiepiscopi opera omnia, ed. F. S. Schmitt, 6 vols, Edinburgh 1946–61, IV, 6, no. 175; Eadmer, HN, 72. 21 John of Worcester, III, 136–7. 22 Itinerarium Kambriae, II.i, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, VI, 105. 23 The Text of the Book of Llan Dâv, ed. J. G. Evans, Oxford 1893, 265–6; Davies, Book of Llandaf, 26–9. 24 S. Anselmi opera omnia, ed. Schmitt, IV, 185, no. 270. 25 Robert de Bellême (c. 1057–c. 1130) was earl of Shrewsbury and held lands in Powys. Ralph Mortimer (fl. c. 1080–1104) was a tenant in Shropshire of Robert de Bellême’s father, Roger de Mont-

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in Glamorgan was lifted is not recorded. But when he died in 1104, there was an interregnum of three years before the appointment of his successor.26 That successor, a Welshman called Urban, educated and ordained in Worcester, and currently archdeacon of Llandaf, was appointed to the bishopric of Glamorgan in August 1107.27 On his consecration, he submitted to Canterbury, and is the first bishop of a Welsh diocese certainly to have done so. Under Urban, the diocese of Glamorgan was transformed into the reformed see of Llandaf; it became fully part of the province of Canterbury, and secured papal protection.28 We shall return to Urban and Llandaf in due course. Moving westward again, back to St David’s, Bishop Wilfrid had died in June 1115, having held the see since 1085.29 With him, as we have seen, the monopoly of the British race in that bishopric ended, for a Norman was imposed without delay, doubtless on account of the need to forestall the election of a Welsh candidate. The new bishop, Bernard, was plucked straight out of the Anglo-Norman court, where he was already very well connected. His writ of appointment is the sole act of Henry I in favour of St David’s that survives.30 As early as 1101 Bernard attested an act of Queen Matilda as her clerk.31 He continued to attest as the queen’s chaplain until at least 1104; he also attested a number of charters of King Henry as chaplain, with Queen Matilda and without.32 Before 1108 he had the title of chancellor in the queen’s acts.33 At the time of his becoming bishop of St David’s, he was variously described as the queen’s chancellor and as her chaplain. It seems that it was the interest and favour of his patron Queen Matilda that impelled him towards this office. On 18 September 1115, his election took place at Southwark, where the bishop-elect was also ordained priest.34 On the following day, the feast of Theodore of Tarsus, a figure charged with significance in this context, Bernard was consecrated at Westminster in the presence of the queen. Theodore of Tarsus, it should be remembered, was an archbishop of Canterbury (668–90) who reformed the ecclesiastical organization of England, including, most famously, the Northumbrian bishopric of a prelate by the name of Wilfrid; Theodore was also notable for his work in the unification of disparate constituencies in the Church, fusing the elements from Rome, Gaul, and Ireland into a cohesive whole.35 Bernard gradually brought the episcopal church of St David’s into loose conformity with the pattern of cathedral chapters seen in England and in France, though perhaps only in the later 1120s when he had already been bishop for a decade or more; certainly, by the 1130s the clerical establishment was termed a capitulum, in accordance with norms seen elsewhere; likewise, Bernard defined gomery, earl of Shrewsbury. Bernard de Neufmarché (d. 1121 × 1125) was responsible for the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr in 1093, when he annexed the whole Welsh kingdom of Brycheiniog; his main castle was at Aberhonddu, where he established the borough of Brecon. 26 Davies, Book of Llandaf, 26–30. 27 D. Crouch, ‘Urban: First Bishop of Llandaff, 1107–34’, Journal of Welsh Ecclesiastical History, 6, 1989, 1–15; Davies, Book of Llandaf, esp. 9–53. 28 Davies, Book of Llandaf, 32–59. 29 St Davids Episcopal Acta, 1085–1280, ed. J. Barrow, Cardiff 1998, 2. 30 Regesta II, no. 1091. I am grateful to Richard Sharpe and Hugh Doherty of the Anglo-Norman Royal Acta Project for confirming this. 31 Regesta II, no. 565. 32 Ibid. nos. 675, 698, 720, 743, 808, 988, 1041. 33 Ibid. nos. 624, 906, 971. 34 John of Worcester, III, 136–9. 35 See Archbishop Theodore: Commemorative Studies on His Life and Influence, ed. Michael Lapidge, Cambridge 1995.



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and defended the bounds of his diocese against the pretensions of Urban, bishop of Llandaf.36 Alongside the remodelling of the cathedral church itself, Bernard also supervised the creation of local offices for ecclesiastical government by founding rural deaneries and archdeaconries. Back in Bangor, after the expulsion of Hervé, there had been a standoff for two decades. The Welsh of Gwynedd were not able to present the king with a candidate acceptable to him, and they had made their feelings quite clear already on the imposition of foreign prelates and foreign rule. At length, the matter of a bishop for the north-western Welsh see was resolved in 1120. Gruffudd ap Cynan, ruler of Gwynedd, secured the election of ‘a respected clerk named David’.37 According to William of Malmesbury, David was none other than the Irish clerk of that name who had accompanied the Emperor Henry V on his famous journey to Italy in 1110, and had written an account of the expedition, ‘decorated more in favour of the king than in the honour of history’.38 If this were indeed the case, it is not hard to see why the king of England should have so readily agreed to the election of his Salic son-in-law’s court chaplain. David’s Celtic origin, almost certainly Irish (perhaps, given his name, with a Welsh connexion), might also have mollified the men of Gwynedd.39 He was consecrated at Westminster on 4 April 1120, and made full and explicit profession of canonical subjection and obedience to Canterbury.40 So far, I have made no mention of the fourth Welsh bishopric, which occupies the north-eastern quarter of Wales. The reason for its absence until this point is precisely that it was, indeed, absent until its foundation (or, at best, refoundation) in 1141.41 This new see was established at the ancient ecclesiastical site of Llanelwy, on the eastern bank of the river Elwy, a tributary of the Clwyd. The place was soon to be known as St Asaph. The position of the cathedral, in the border territory between the Welsh and the English, had been, until now, unfavourable for the growth of the see. Llanelwy was within the English sphere of influence, being included in the domains of the earl of Chester, while the greater portion of the diocese was in the possession of the Welsh. When in 1125 attempts were afoot to settle the eternal feud between the archbishops of Canterbury and York, it was proposed to transfer from Canterbury to York the bishoprics of Chester, Bangor, and ‘a third which lies between these two, but is now vacant, owing to the desolation of the country and the rudeness of the inhabitants’.42 In the early 1140s, Owain ap Gruffudd ap Cynan, ruler of Gwynedd (and more commonly known as Owain Gwynedd), had defeated the armies of the earl of Chester east of the river Conwy.43 Owain’s intention may have been to annex the whole of the north-east to the bishopric of Bangor; in the end, he retained the enclaves of the deaneries of Arwystli and Dyffryn Clwyd as detached portions of the diocese of Bangor. Owain’s military campaign may have 36

John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1066–1300, IX: The Welsh Cathedrals, comp. M. J. Pearson, London 2003, p. xxi; St Davids Episcopal Acta, ed. Barrow, 3; Davies, Episcopal Acts, I, 141– 90; Davies, Book of Llandaf, chapter II. 37 John of Worcester, III, 146–7. 38 Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, I, 764–5, 770–1. 39 Martin Brett has clarified the matter of Bishop David’s Irish birth in ‘David (d. 1137 × 1139)’, in ODNB. 40 Canterbury Professions, ed. M. Richter, Canterbury and York Society 67, 1973, no. 67. 41 M. J. Pearson, ‘The Creation and Development of the St Asaph Cathedral Chapter, 1141–1293’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 40, 2000, 35–56. 42 Hugh the Chanter: The History of the Church of York, 1066–1127, ed. C. Johnson, Edinburgh 1961, 122–3. 43 Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1145 [=1146], 1148 [=1149], 1149 [=1150]; Lloyd, History, II, 487–95; Davies, Age of Conquest, 46.

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been what finally impelled the earl of Chester and the archbishop of Canterbury, Theobald of Bec, to provide north-east Wales with a Norman bishop dependent on the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of Canterbury, and located near the military and political base of Rhuddlan. So, like Llandaf in the south-east, the cathedral was established on the banks of a river, a couple of miles upstream of a Norman castle. The first bishop of Llanelwy, a shadowy figure by the name of Richard and – given his name – presumably of Anglo-Norman extraction, was consecrated in 1141.44

Welsh churchmen and reform By 1141, then, Anglo-Norman domination of the Welsh Church had been brought to consummation. But was this the ‘subjugation’ described in such pejorative terms by Lloyd? Was the Church in the Welsh March oppressed by Anglo-Norman intruders; and was reform of its native structures and practices a burden unwillingly borne? On the contrary, I think we may discern that there was rather more co-operation and integration on both sides than has formerly been supposed. At Rheims, in 1119, Urban, bishop of Llandaf, had complained to Pope Calixtus II that his see had been impoverished by the invasion of the Norman barons and their grants of ecclesiastical property to their monastic foundations.45 But by 1126 the bishop had come to terms with his Anglo-Norman overlord, and his relationship with Robert, earl of Gloucester, lord of Glamorgan, was regularized in a treaty signed at Woodstock.46 He was granted a compact episcopal lordship around his cathedral, and the means for settling disputes between the ecclesiastical and lay powers were set out. During the course of his twenty-seven-year episcopate, Urban had to fund the building of a new and impressive cathedral as well as a fifteen-year legal suit at the papal curia, among other enterprises. Bishop Urban’s project of reform was accompanied and supported by the Book of Llandaf, a history of the bishops of Llandaf through seven centuries, which might be described as one of the most ingenious, well researched, but misleading works of historiography produced in early twelfth-century Britain – second only, perhaps, to the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Such activity could surely only have been financed with the support of local Anglo-Norman magnates. In 1119 Urban was arguing the poverty of his see. A year later he was building a cathedral in the Romanesque style. Here was the most rapidly reformed diocese in Wales being run by a stalwart of the ancien régime of the Church in Glamorgan. Whereas the Welshman, Urban, protested and advertised his loyalty and obedience to Canterbury, Bernard, his Norman neighbour in St David’s, was busy preparing a campaign for St David’s to be made the metropolitan see of Wales.47 We cannot be certain when this claim was first put forward, but it is unlikely that Bernard, the loyal courtier, would have raised the matter during the lifetime of Henry I. A more probable context would have been the general upheaval in Wales after the death of Henry. Bernard’s resolve in pursuing this campaign for an independent Welsh ecclesiastical province was such that Owain Gwynedd and his brother Cadwaladr were persuaded to entreat his support in their opposition to the elevation of Meurig to

44 45 46 47

See Pearson, ‘Creation’, 8–9. Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans, 87–8. Ibid. 27–9; Davies, Book of Llandaf, 51–9 (including text and translation of the agreement, 56–9). St Davids Episcopal Acta, ed. Barrow, 4; Davies, Episcopal Acts, I, 190–232.



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the bishopric of Bangor.48 In the south-western diocese, the gamekeeper was turning poacher. Meurig of Bangor, to whom I have just referred, and who held the north-western see from 1139 to 1161, is another interesting case.49 This Welshman was elected to the see, and early in December 1139 was presented to King Stephen at Worcester by the bishops of Hereford and Chichester as the choice of the clergy and people of the diocese. But it was at this stage that a certain difficulty arose; Meurig informed his sponsors that he was not prepared to swear fealty to the king, having been forbidden to do so by a man for whom he had the profoundest veneration, his predecessor’s archdeacon, one Simeon of Clynnog. At length, Meurig was prevailed upon by the other bishops to see reason and conform, which he did, swearing fealty to the king and making full submission to Canterbury. Meurig’s appointment was then opposed by the native princes of Gwynedd, whose opposition was overcome; but he was later forced into exile as a result of his attempts to reform the Church and because of Owain Gwynedd’s hostility. A letter from Archbishop Theobald to Pope Alexander III sheds some light on the matter. The people were said to be ‘rude and untamed; they live like beasts and despise the word of life, and though they nominally profess Christ, they deny him in their life and ways’; still more miserable were the priests, who, ‘steeped in the same errors … foster the plague, and by their pernicious example corrupt those whom they ought to bring back to the way of virtue and of truth’.50 Then comes the ‘crowning horror’: Owain was ‘abusing’ his first cousin, the daughter of his uncle, and had been admonished by the bishop. The proscription of marriages, let alone fornication, within prohibited degrees of kinship was one of the touchstones of reform. Archbishop Theobald went so far as to say that ‘the country is already a fertile seed-ground for heresy and schism’.51 Here, then, is a bishop of Welsh descent – probably a native of Gwynedd – who had qualms about doing homage to the English king, yet had poor relations with the native princes of Wales, probably because he was a fervent reformer in his own right.

Clerical marriage The picture of ecclesiastical reorganization that I have outlined so far allows us to observe a largely Welsh episcopate in Wales aligning itself operationally and structurally with Canterbury and Rome. To what extent, though, are we also able to observe the reception in Wales of the chief elements of the moral and disciplinary reform which was being promoted through Church councils from the second half of the eleventh century onwards? One way or another, the abolition of clerical marriage – a widespread practice – was at the heart of the popes’ reforming agenda. In the West, the celibacy of the higher clergy had been a requirement since the fourth century.52 The council of 48

Gerald of Wales, Libellus inuectionum, ed. W. S. Davies, Y Cymmrodor, 30, 1920, 77–237 at 140, 142–3, 146–7. 49 For what follows, John of Worcester, III, 278–9. 50 The Letters of John of Salisbury, ed. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler, rev. C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols, Oxford 1955–79, I, 135–6, no. 87. 51 Ibid. I, 136. 52 The standard work in English on clerical celibacy is still H. C. Lea, History of Sacerdotal Celibacy in the Christian Church, 4th edn, London 1932; see also C. N. L. Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform in Action: Clerical Marriage in England, 1050–1200’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 12, 1956, 1–21 (reprinted in Change in Medieval Society, ed. S. Thrupp, New York 1964, 49–71, and in C. N. L. Brooke, Medieval

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Elvira (c. 306) had legislated that bishops, presbyters, deacons, and others with a position in the ministry were to abstain completely from sexual intercourse with their wives and from the procreation of children.53 In 386 a decretal of Pope Siricius ordered celibacy for ‘priests and Levites’, and this was reiterated by Pope Innocent I (402–17).54 In Africa, those in the orders of subdeacon and above were altogether prohibited from marrying.55 At one level, therefore, the reformers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were seeking to reinstate an ancient discipline. The renewed emphasis on celibacy may also be seen as a product of developments in sacramental theology. Here the focus was converging increasingly sharply on the objective nature of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharistic species. This in turn brought on a realization that the priesthood and all ministers of the altar should be set apart from the laity. In a specifically Welsh context, such theology was articulated in the writings of Gerald of Wales (1146–1223). In Gemma ecclesiastica, ‘The Jewel of the Church’ (in essence a handbook of Church reform), Gerald took up the issue of sexual laxity among those in holy orders: ‘Just as Pilate washed his hands in the presence of the Jews, but did not purify his soul, so does the priest about to say Mass, who is a fornicator, wash his hands and his mouth but remain unwashed and impure on the inside.’56 The real starting point for the reformers, however, had been Pope Leo IX’s concern with the heresy of simony.57 With simony as the main target, clerical marriage eventually came into the same field of vision; for at the heart of the problem of simony was the difficulty of separating the spiritual from the temporal. Clerical marriage made such a separation troublesome, for it inevitably led to clerical offspring, and offspring produced a natural desire for hereditary succession, so that ‘a benefice became more and more like a lay fee, passing from father to son’.58 The situation is illustrated rather nicely in the Book of Llandaf. Here, a striking text provides us with an unusually clear snapshot of Church life on the Anglo-Welsh borderlands in the second half of the eleventh century. An account of the land of Ergyng, copied into the book around 1130, candidly describes the inheritance of ecclesiastical benefices by clerical offspring operating in the diocese of Glamorgan during the episcopate of Bishop Herewald (1056–1104). A detailed picture is drawn of the succession from father to son of churches in the district of Ergyng (Archenfield, Herefordshire) during the reigns of Edward the Confessor, King Harold, and William the Conqueror. The Land of Ergyng: … In the time of Edward, king of England, and Gruffudd, king of Wales, Bishop Herewald consecrated Henllan Ddyfrig and Llandeilo in one churchyard, and ordained Einion ap Cyngen into the priesthood, with the remaining heirs of Church and Society: Collected Essays, London 1971, 69–99); C. N. L. Brooke, The Medieval Idea of Marriage, Oxford 1989. 53 Canon 33, ed. J. D. Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio, 70 vols, Florence etc. 1759–1870, II, 5; also ed. and trans. in S. Laeuchli, Sexuality and Power: The Emergence of Canon Law at the Synod of Elvira, Philadelphia PA 1972, 126–35. 54 Epistolae Romanorum Pontificum, et quae ad eos scriptae sunt, ed. P. Coustant, Paris 1721; repr. Farnborough 1967, 623–38. 55 Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. E. A. Livingstone, 3rd edn, Oxford 2005, under ‘Celibacy of the clergy’. 56 Gemma ecclesiastica, ed. J. F. Dimock, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, II, 169; Gerald of Wales, The Jewel of the Church: A Translation of ‘Gemma ecclesiastica’ by Giraldus Cambrensis, trans. J. J. Hagen, Leiden 1979, 131. On the concept of pollution and clerical marriage, see K. G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change, Manchester 2005, 111–17, 120–8. 57 For an overview, see Cushing, Reform, 95–100. 58 Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform’, 3.



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the demesne of those churches under Bishop Herewald, Morddig ap Cynni, Morfran ab Awddi, and his brother, Cynni, and Marchwyn ab Elgu … and on the death of Einion the priest, he ordained his son, Joseph, into the priesthood … In the time of King Harold he consecrated in a similar way Llansanffraid, and in it he ordained Gwyllwyn into the priesthood, and after him, his son, Ioan. In the time of King Harold, he consecrated Llanbedr under the heir of Cydrych ap Gwngu and Cadien and his sons Gwna and Eudud, and his sons Merchion and Cwstennin, and to the aforesaid Gwyllwyn the priest he commended the cure of the church. In the time of King William, and Earl William, and Walter de Lacy, and Ralph de Bernai, sheriff of Hereford, before Monmouth castle was built, he consecrated Llandydiwg, and he ordained Rhys into the priesthood, and on his death, he ordained his sons, Gwriwl and Dwynerth … In the time of William he consecrated Cil Peddeg [Kilpeck], and ordained Morgeneu into the priesthood, and on his death, he ordained his son, Einion … In the time of William he consecrated Llangwstennin in Garthbenni, and he ordained Arwystil ap Segryd into the priesthood, and after him, his son, Cynon … In the time of King William he consecrated Llanddewi Rhos Ceirion and in it he ordained Cynan ap Gredio under the heirs, Eli Fluch, Glesni ab Ioan ap Gwylyged …59

Here, in plain view, is the full array of practices that the reformers sought to abolish: married clergy with offspring, the ordination of the sons of priests, and the inheritance of benefices by clerical sons from clerical fathers. And so it was that, at the council of Clermont in 1095, under the auspices of Pope Urban II, a canon forbidding the ordination of the sons of priests was promulgated.60 In 1076, at the council of Winchester, Archbishop Lanfranc had already laid down a decree against clerical marriage, yet a measure of compromise had been admitted: It is decreed that no canon regular shall have a wife; but priests who live in castles or in villages, who have wives, shall not be forced to dismiss them; if they have not, let them be forbidden to marry; and henceforth let bishops beware that they presume not to ordain any persons either priests or deacons, till they have first professed that they have no wives.61

We should note, however, with Christopher Brooke, that there was one renowned – indeed saintly – English bishop of native stock, Wulfstan, bishop of Worcester (1062–95), who, in his treatment of the married clergy of his diocese made no use of the escape clause permitted by Lanfranc. He hated the blot of unchastity, and approved of chasteness in all men, especially those in holy orders … Married priests he dealt with in a general edict, laying down that they should renounce either their lust or their living … The bishop … gave up promoting to the priesthood anyone who would not give his oath to stay celibate.62

We should expect that Urban, bishop of Llandaf, not only knew Bishop Wulfstan, having been a ‘priest of Worcester’, but that he had probably been ordained by him: he must certainly have been celibate. Bishop Urban’s name, moreover, looks like

59 60

Book of Llan Dâv, 275–8. The Councils of Urban II: Decreta Claromontensia, ed. Robert Somerville, Amsterdam 1972, 75–6. 61 Canon 1: Councils & Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I, A.D. 871– 1204, ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett, and C. N. L. Brooke, 2 vols, Oxford 1981, II, 619. 62 Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform’, 11; William of Malmesbury, Vita Wulfstani, § 12, in Saints’ Lives: Lives of SS. Wulfstan, Dunstan, Patrick, Benignus, and Indract, ed. M. Winterbottom and R. M. Thomson, Oxford 2002, 124–7; E. Mason, St Wulfstan of Worcester, c. 1008–1095, Oxford 1990, 162–4.

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homage to the reforming pope of the council of Clermont, Urban II, under whose pontificate he was probably ordained to the priesthood.63 So, by the end of the eleventh century it had been re-established in canon law that no one in the orders of subdeacon or above might marry and that everyone entering these higher orders must take an oath of chastity. A married man who was ordained, however, did not have to put away his wife; he was still married, but had to live with her as though she were his sister. Then, as the twelfth century progressed, it came to be thought that a married clergyman was too likely to lapse into fornication with his wife. At the First Lateran Council, held by Pope Calixtus II in 1123, therefore, it was decreed not merely that all clerics in higher orders were debarred from marriage, but that ‘marriages already contracted by [priests, deacons, subdeacons, and monks] must be dissolved, and that the persons be condemned to do penance’.64 This was the definitive canon. Christopher Brooke observed that it is difficult to pin-point the moment when clerical marriage became really exceptional: occasional cases of incontinence in high places may be found in any century. In Brooke’s judgement, however, a large majority of the upper clergy known to have had children between 1050 and 1200 had had their families, at latest, by about 1130; and by the middle of the century there is a noticeable falling off.65 So far as we can tell, this judgement appears to apply to Wales too. The most celebrated ecclesiastical dynasty of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries in Wales was that of Sulien, who was bishop of St David’s for two terms of five years in 1073–8 and 1080–5.66 Sulien died in 1091, leaving four sons – Rhygyfarch (died 1099), Arthien (dates unknown), Daniel (died 1127), and Ieuan (died 1037). Rhygyfarch and Ieuan were both scholars, Rhygyfarch heading the school at Llanbadarn Fawr, Ieuan being a poet and a scribe at the same ecclesiastical centre, ending his life as archpriest of Llanbadarn. Daniel, of whom David Stephenson has written elsewhere in this volume, was an ecclesiastical administrator, arbitrator, and archdeacon of Powys. We have no information on the career of Arthien. Rhygyfarch, Arthien, and Daniel in their turn left sons who carried on the family tradition. Rhygyfarch’s son, Sulien, was a monk at Llanbadarn Fawr, as it seems was Henry, son of Arthien. Cadifor, son of Daniel, became archdeacon of Cardigan. Daniel also had another son, John, who appears to have been a canon of St David’s. But from here on, we hear no more of the progeny of the line of Sulien, and may assume that the discipline of clerical celibacy had been adopted. At Llandaf, before Bishop Urban, Bishop Herewald, apparently styled bishop of Glamorgan, had a son called Lifris, who was, according to the Book of Llandaf, master of Llancarfan and archdeacon of Glamorgan.67 Bishop Urban himself appears to have been part of an ecclesiastical dynasty of Llancarfan, having at least three brothers in clerical orders: Caradog, master of Llancarfan, Gwrgan of Llancarfan,

63

Petition for the election of Urban: Canterbury Professions, ed. Richter, no. 7. If Urban was indeed a priest before his elevation to the episcopate, then his progression through the hierarchy might display a less common route; for, although he is said to have been archdeacon of Glamorgan immediately before his episcopal election, archdeacons tended, at this point, to have been in deacons’ orders. See J. Barrow, ‘Grades of Ordination and Clerical Careers, c. 900–c. 1200’, above, pp. 50–1. 64 Canon 21: Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum, XXI, 278; Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary, ed. H. J. Schroeder, St Louis MO and London 1937, 192. 65 Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform’, 15. 66 For the family of Sulien, see refs in note 7 above. 67 ‘Lifris filius episcopi, archidiaconus et magister sancti Catoci’: Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans, 271.



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and Geoffrey. Of their parentage, it is not possible to speculate, however.68 Uhtred, who became bishop of Llandaf in succession to Urban in 1140 (dying in office in 1148), had been archdeacon of Llandaf from at least 1126. He had a daughter, Angharad (who married Iorwerth ab Owain, brother of Morgan ab Owain, lord of Caerleon), and a son called Robert, a monk of Gloucester.69 In all these cases, the offspring of these higher clergy had been produced, at the latest, in the first decade of the twelfth century.70 If in England, by the middle of the twelfth century, among the higher clergy, marriage had died out, or at least was no longer respectable, such seems to have been the case in Wales too.

The reception of canon law and the adoption of the celibate life in Wales One of the prerequisites for the implementation of Church reform would have been the effective dissemination and reception of the canons of the reforming Church councils. In October 1119 Urban, bishop of Llandaf, had attended a council at Rheims convened by Pope Calixtus II.71 The most important canons of the council of Rheims condemned simony, those who invade ecclesiastical possessions, the inheritance of ecclesiastical offices or benefices, and the marriage of priests, deacons, and subdeacons. Those very canons are to be found recorded in full by ecclesiastics of south-east Wales. The most common authorities for the council of Rheims are Hesso ‘scholasticus’ and Orderic Vitalis; but of the eight British sources for the canons of the council, one is Liber Landauensis, the Book of Llandaf.72 So, in the same book that self-consciously lists the ordination of sons of priests to benefices by hereditary right at the hands of the preceding bishop, we find copied out some of the most fundamental decrees promulgated in the course of the reform of the western Church. Several clergy with an academic knowledge of canon law were active in Wales, Gerald of Wales being the most obvious example at the end of the twelfth century. In general, the growing evidence for clerics holding the title magister from the late twelfth century indicates not only that some Welsh clergy were receiving education in the English and French schools, but that they were then returning to benefices in Wales where they could disseminate the knowledge and outlook which they had acquired.73 If I am right in thinking that Caradog of Llancarfan was responsible

68 69 70

Davies, Book of Llandaf, 105–6. Ibid. 55. Around the last decade of the twelfth century, however, a bishop had a son by the name of Philip, who attested episcopal acta as archdeacon: The Cartulary of Haughmond Abbey, ed. U. Rees, Cardiff 1985, nos. 791, 794; J. C. Davies, ‘A Grant by Llywelyn ap Gruffydd’, National Library of Wales Journal, 3, 1943–4, 158–62 at 158. 71 Davies, Book of Llandaf, 38–9. For commentary on this council, see Mary Stroll, Calixtus II (1119– 1124): A Pope Born to Rule, Leiden and Boston MA 2004, 371–8; R. Somerville, ‘The Councils of Pope Calixtus II: Reims 1119’, Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress of Medieval Canon Law, Salamanca 1976; C. J. Hefele, Histoire des conciles d’après les documents originaux, trans. and ed. H. Leclercq, 11 vols, Paris 1907–52, V, 569–91. 72 Mansi, Sacrorum Conciliorum, XXI, 235–6; Hesso ‘scholasticus’, Relatio de concilio Remensi, ed. W. Wattenbach, in MGH Scriptores 12, Hanover 1856, 426–7, and MGH, Libelli de lite imperatorum et pontificum saeculis XI. et XII. conscripti, ed. E. Dümmler, 3 vols, Hanover 1891–7, III, 27; Orderic, VI, 274–6; Book of Llan Dâv, ed. Evans, 95–6. The manuscript sources for the canons of the council of Rheims copied in Britain are listed in Councils & Synods, ed. Whitelock and others, II, 720. 73 Huw Pryce, Native Law and the Church in Medieval Wales, Oxford 1993, 76.

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for the Book of Llandaf, then here we likely have a magister, possibly trained in a French school, recording the decrees of Church councils.74 Huw Pryce, moreover, has drawn attention to a triad in the Cyfnerth redaction of the Welsh laws, which lists the three types of son not entitled to a share of patrimony with their brothers.75 The second limb of the triad states that if there is a cleric and he takes a woman by gift of kin and begets a son by her, and then the cleric takes orders of priesthood and begets another son by the same woman: the son begotten before him should not share land with the latter son because he was begotten contrary to law.76

This denial of inheritance to a priest’s son is an obvious reflection of the desire of Welsh churchmen to enforce the reforming canons of the eleventh- and twelfthcentury Church councils through the native legal codes. Indeed, the rule appears to refer to canon law when it states that a son born to a priest ‘was begotten contrary to law’.77 Another important indicator of the success of the campaign for clerical celibacy is the success of the new monastic foundations. In England there appear to have been over sixty houses of canons at the time of the Conquest.78 By 1200 nearly half of these communities had been abolished, most of them being translated or absorbed into a regular establishment, becoming houses of canons regular.79 A similar process occurred in Wales. The famous and influential ecclesiastical communities of the early Middle Ages – churches often with close royal ties – were appropriated by the new monasteries: Llancarfan, Llantwit Major, Llandeilo Fawr, Llanbadarn Fawr, Llangors, and others became the property of new foundations – either local ­priories, or the greater Anglo-Norman abbeys, such as Gloucester or Tewkesbury.80 There were in the Welsh dioceses approaching forty new monastic foundations by the beginning of the thirteenth century, with four houses of canons regular: three of Austin canons (Carmarthen, Haverfordwest, and Llanthony Prima), and one Premonstratensian (Talley). Twelve Cistercian abbeys were founded between 1130 and 1201 (Neath, Tintern, Whitland, Margam, Strata Florida, Llantarnam, Cwm-hir, Basingwerk, Strata Marcella, Aberconway, Cymmer, and Valle Crucis), with a thirteenth appearing at Grace Dieu in 1226.81 F. G. Cowley inferred that a large number of the monks of the Cistercian houses were younger sons of the leading Welsh families. The sons of married priests also appear to have provided a generous supply of young men for the new monasteries. If we are to believe Gerald of Wales’s propaganda, Cadwgan of Llandyfái, abbot of Strata Florida, then Whitland, and eventually bishop of Bangor (1215–36), was the son of an Irish priest and a Welsh mother and had a brother who was a monk at Caerleon (Llantarnam) abbey. One of Cadwgan’s predecessors as abbot of Whitland, 74 On Caradog as author of the Book of Llandaf, see Davies, Book of Llandaf, 132–42; on magistri in the twelfth century, see J. Barrow, ‘Education and the Recruitment of Cathedral Canons in England and Germany, 1100–1225’, Viator 20, 1989, 117–38. 75 Pryce, Native Law, 100–1. 76 Ancient Laws and Institutes of Wales, ed. A. Owen, 2 vols, London 1841, I, 760, quoted in Pryce, Native Law, 101. 77 Pryce, Native Law, 102. 78 M. D. Knowles and R. N. Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales, 2nd edn, London 1971, 13, 463–87; Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform’, 8; see also J. Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders in Britain, 1000–1300, Cambridge 1994, 4–5. 79 Burton, Monastic and Religious Orders, 21–42. 80 F. G. Cowley, The Monastic Order in South Wales, 1066–1349, Cardiff 1977. 81 See the respective entries in Knowles and Hadcock, Medieval Religious Houses.



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Peter, was also the son of a priest and had been a canon of St David’s before entering the Cistercian order. But in this respect again, the situation in Wales was not so different from England, where Aelred of Rievaulx, perhaps the most celebrated of the English Cistercians, was himself the son of a hereditary priest of Hexham.82

Gerald of Wales and Church reform James Conway Davies made the point that reform on the ground would depend to a large degree on the archdeacons and others further down the hierarchy whose role it was to monitor ecclesiastical discipline. The lower grades of clergy would likely be influenced only by such of the dignitaries as spoke their own language, knew and appreciated their traditional customs, and had a hold upon the laity, upon whom, in all ecclesiastical organizations, success or failure ultimately depended.83 We should therefore expect that compromises had taken place in the application of the new organizational structures, and of the new discipline which was being implemented, in theory, in the Welsh dioceses. It is with Gerald of Wales that we are able to observe reform at local level being applied in earnest. Gerald became one of the chief proponents and implementers of Church reform in late twelfth-century Wales. He famously never became a bishop, but he spent much of his career in the diocese of St David’s as archdeacon of Brecon – that grade of ecclesiastical dignity which Conway Davies deemed so crucial to the success of reform. Gerald’s influence as a reformer was no doubt enhanced not only by his position as archdeacon – playing sheepdog to the bishop’s shepherd – but also by his truly Cambro-Norman heritage. He was the son of William de Barry, a knightly vassal of the earls of Pembroke, and Angharad, daughter of Gerald of Windsor, constable of Pembroke. Through his mother he was descended from the native Welsh princes, for her mother was Nest, daughter of that Rhys ap Tewdwr of Deheubarth whose death was the starting-point of this essay. In this way, Gerald was related to the leading Anglo-Norman families settled in south-west Wales as well as to Rhys ap Gruffudd, the Lord Rhys, grandson of Rhys ap Tewdwr and chief representative of the Deheubarth line in the later twelfth century. Through his own account of his activities in De rebus a se gestis, we are able to observe the disruptive effects of Gerald’s enthusiasm for Church reform as he set about implementing its traditional goals of a pure clergy, sharp division between clerical and lay, and a strict insistence on the Church’s rights. First, the aged archdeacon of Brecon was deposed for keeping a concubine; this was the archdeaconry that was shortly afterwards conferred upon Gerald himself. Upon his appointment as archdeacon, he continued his campaign by restoring to the parson of Hay the full revenues from his church, which had been shared with the parson’s brother, who was a knight. The appearance on the scene of an archdeacon with Gerald’s reforming agenda would have been a calamity for the settled and comfortable life of the local clergy, and they were prepared to forestall change by violent resistance if necessary. On an archidiaconal visitation to Elfael and Maelienydd shortly after his appointment in 1176, Gerald had to call upon the assistance of his relation, the local chief, Cadwallon ap Madog, to enforce his authority among the rebellious clergy and laity

82 83

For all this, see Cowley, Monastic Order, 47–9. Davies, Episcopal Acts, II, 450–1.

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of the locality.84 This incident illustrates rather nicely the benefits Gerald was able to derive from his family background, as well as the importance of a pro-active archdeacon for the implementation of reform. In the Descriptio Kambriae (1194), Gerald aimed his criticisms at the apparently enduring aspects of Welsh ecclesiastical practice that we have already encountered in the eleventh-century diocese of Glamorgan, namely portionary churches and heritable benefices: A Welsh church has as many incumbents and sharers in the living as there are import­ant families resident in the parish. When fathers die, the sons succeed, not by election, but as if they held these benefices by hereditary right, which is a pollution of God’s sanctuary. If a bishop dared to appoint and induct anyone else, the people would avenge this insult both on him and on the man he chose.85

Gerald considered the passing on of church benefices from father to son to have been an inherent trait of the British race, being very common in Brittany and having been practised there and in Wales from time immemorial. He went so far as to invoke Psalm 14: ‘They are corrupt, and become abominable in their doings; there is none that doeth good, no not one’.86 For Gerald, the Welsh were innately immoral. The canons of St David’s, especially the Welshmen among them, were notorious public fornicators and keepers of concubines. They inherited their benefices and expected to hand them on to their children, and married their sons to daughters of fellow canons. Such clerical succession was prevalent not only in the cathedrals, Gerald complained, but throughout Wales. ‘This, therefore, is the reason why they desire bishops of their own race so much, since such bishops do not condemn these vices, which are innate in them and in their race and which have become second nature by long use’.87 Whereas aspects of the old order undoubtedly persisted in the Welsh dioceses, they none the less did so elsewhere too: clerical marriage and inheritance of benefices were widespread throughout western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in England no less than anywhere else.88 Despite this, Gerald chose to write as if they were particularly characteristic of the Welsh Church; he was attacking not clerical vices so much as specifically Welsh vices. The Welsh bishop who refused to condemn such vices was ‘behaving in the manner of his country’.89 When Gerald condemned hereditary canonries as ‘a barbarous practice’, Robert Bartlett has observed that he was conflating ‘the concept of ‘barbarousness’ with the critical rhetoric of ecclesiastical reform.90 The view we take from Gerald is really a ‘hostile national characterization’.91 And so we have one more reason to take stock before accepting the traditional notion of Welsh churchmen as peculiarly incorrigible flouters of reformed ecclesiastical discipline.

84 85

This story is told in De rebus a se gestis: Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, I, 23–32. Descriptio Kambriae, II, 6; Gerald of Wales, The Journey through Wales and The Description of Wales, trans. L. Thorpe, London 1978, 263. 86 Descriptio Kambriae, II, 6; Gerald of Wales, trans. Thorpe, 264. 87 De iure et statu Meneuensis ecclesiae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, III, 128–31. 88 The evidence is laid out in Davies, Episcopal Acts, II, 465–8; Brooke, ‘Gregorian Reform’, 15–19. 89 De iure et statu Meneuensis ecclesiae, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, III, 361. 90 R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1223, Oxford 1982, 35. 91 Ibid.



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From lamentation to integration This study of some of the aspects of Church reform in Wales has taken us from the crisis of Norman invasion, through the reorganization of the Welsh bishoprics, into the period of (by no means easy) co-existence of conqueror and conquered. In south-eastern Wales, which had come early, rapidly, and securely under Norman power, acceptance of Canterbury and the new ecclesiastical order by the native clergy had been achieved before the first decade of the twelfth century was over. Bishop Urban reformed the diocese of Llandaf in line with Continental norms, and furnished his episcopal see with a fully documented history – the Book of Llandaf – to compete with any from the Anglo-Norman realm. Included in this book was not only testimony of uncanonical practices of the past, but – for reference – the new legislation, expressly prohibiting clerical marriage and hereditary succession to ecclesiastical benefices. By the third decade of the twelfth century, half a century after the appearance of Normans on the eastern fringes of Wales, and only a generation after the major onslaught of the 1090s, the Welsh clergy were not only fully part of the life of the English Church, attending ecclesiastical councils and witnessing royal charters, but the most influential Welsh churchmen had also been educated and trained according to Continental models. The Welsh cathedrals were now serviced by those trained in the use of historical sources, who could write saints’ Lives, who knew how to put together an archive of charters, and had a concern for canon law. Among the senior clergy, we are able to observe the decline of ecclesiastical dynasties and clerical marriage, in line with the trends that are observable in England. And the success of the celibate ideal may be observed in Wales, just as in England, with the proliferation of new monastic foundations. On the other hand, the abuses of clerical marriage, hereditary benefices, and portionary churches persisted among the lower clergy, and some of the higher, to be condemned by Gerald of Wales. Yet, we must lay Gerald’s condemnation and criticism of the Welsh alongside what we know to have been the practice in England and the Continent too. Perhaps there has been a tendency to view the reaction of Welsh churchmen to the apparent ecclesiastical consequences of Norman political supremacy as an antagonistic one, and one conditioned by a perceived Norman desire to control the Welsh Church against its will. But in the space of a generation it seems that those at the head of the Welsh ecclesiastical hierarchy had embraced the new ideals of reform in earnest, even if the implementation of universal conformity – as everywhere – was more of a challenge. The Church in the Welsh territories was no longer part of a shadowy Celtic fringe: before the end of the Anglo-Norman period, it had become fully part of the contemporary ecclesiastical, political, and cultural world of the Latin West. An era in the history of the Church in Wales that had been heralded by lamentation in the highest ranks of the native clergy became one of transformation, reformation, and integration, fuelled by the reforming zeal of its very own sons.

LAY CHARTERS AND THE ACTA OF HENRY II Judith Everard This paper deals with the acts of Henry II as a source for the production and use of charters by laymen in the twelfth century. Its starting point is the British Academy ‘Acta of the Plantagenets’ research project, and the immense value to historical research of this corpus of the acts of the early Plantagenet rulers. The subject index currently in preparation will illuminate, among other things, the seemingly endless variety of customs, always interesting and sometimes picturesque or bizarre, mentioned in the royal acta. Some of these only occur in one single text, whether because they represent customs that were highly localized, or anachronistic and redundant, or because of misspellings of the names of customs that were unknown to the scribes or to later copyists. Others are very common, at least in documents concerning land in England, such as the award of ‘soke and sake, toll and team, and infangenthief’, the award of immunity from geld and danegeld, and the award of immunity from ‘toll, passage, pontage, and all customs’. Such curiosities are few and far between in documents issued actually under the seal of Henry II because of the advanced bureaucratic tendencies of the royal chancery. This paper concentrates not on the curious and extraordinary, but rather on the routine and bureaucratic, thus going with the grain of the development of 

For more information on the project, James C. Holt, ‘The Acta of Henry II and Richard I of England, 1154–1199: The Archive and its Historical Implications’, in Fotografishe Sammlungen mittelalterlicher Urkunden in Europa, ed. Peter Rück, Sigmaringen 1989, 137–40; Nicholas Vincent, ‘The Charters of King Henry II: The Introduction of the Royal Inspeximus Revisited’, in Dating Undated Medieval Charters, ed. M. Gervers, Woodbridge 2000, 97–120 at 97–103. The edition of the acta of Henry II is in preparation for publication by Oxford University Press under the Director and Editor, Professor Nicholas Vincent (University of East Anglia). I am very grateful to Professor Sir James Holt and Professor Nicholas Vincent for their encouragement and support of my work on this project, without which this paper could not have appeared, and in particular for Professor Vincent’s helpful comments on this paper. I am also grateful to Valentine Fallan for her unflagging encouragement and to participants at the Battle conference for their helpful comments. Charters of Henry II are referred to by their number in the forthcoming edition [cited as Acta], and (in parentheses) the catalogue number of each in the project archive. Where a particular charter is discussed, I have also supplied a reference to the original single-sheet manuscript (where applicable) or an alternative source.  A selection, mostly still remaining untranslated and perhaps untranslatable, chosen to include ­examples from Normandy and Anjou, and hence not only the large number of Anglo-Saxon survivals, is: assultus (assault), no. 1338 (231H); dica, no. 760 (1569H); frithbriche, no. 1131 (2585H); frydsocna, no. 663 (2902H); haybotam and husbotam, no. 1285 (3148H); terragium (land tax), no. 80 (1875H); melagiis, no. 1075 (1863H); mundbrice, no. 663 (2902H); neautegeld (nutgeld), no. 33 (543H); rouagio, no. 568 (1630H); sirdwyte/schyredwyte, no. 368 (2952H); solaria, no. 554 (1964H); trauas (thraves), no. 223 (3041H); uthleap, no. 663 (2902H); wergagio/wernagio, no. 1117 (1361H). See especially Henry II’s charter for the nuns of Fontevraud, confirming their rights in the customs of the bridges of Ponts-de-Cé and at Brissac (AN ms J184 no. 1 (AN Musée AE.II.1625); Acta, no. 1055 (378H)), with the editorial note that this amount of detail is ‘unprecedented elsewhere in Henry II’s charters’. See also the customs mentioned in Nicholas Vincent, ‘Regional Variations in the Charters of King Henry II (1154–1189)’, in Charters and Charter Scholarship in Britain and Ireland, ed. M.-T. Flanagan and J. A. Green, London 2005, 70–106 at 81–2.



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chancery practice rather than against it. Its topic is a commonplace phenomenon, the confirmation of charters. Charters, it should be noted, are normally represented by the noun carta (invariably with this spelling in chancery), and much less frequently by scriptum and cyrographum (the latter with variant spellings chiro- and ciro-). In April 2007 the total number of acts collected for Henry II was 3,205. In recent years the largest increase has been in ‘mentions’ of acts, that is, those of which the text is now lost. The decision to include ‘mentions’ was something of a philosophical shift, recognizing that the value of an edition of the royal acts was not limited to palaeography and diplomatic, the development of the royal chancery, and constitutional history. Other branches of historical research could derive enormous benefit from this corpus: economic history, ecclesiastical history, archaeology and architectural history, genealogy and prosopography, cultural history, even – dare I say – social history. For these purposes, a mention of a royal act in an authoritative source, such as in the curia regis rolls, typically that the king gave certain property to N., as attested by the charter that N.’s descendant has, may be of almost as much value as one for which the text survives. As my generic example hints, this is particularly valuable for evidence of royal grants to laymen. Ecclesiastical institutions, as perpetual corporate bodies, had both the motivation and the means to preserve their written evidences of title, with royal awards or confirmations being the most valuable of all. Land and rights held by laymen, and the written evidences for them, were ephemeral in comparison. For example, out of the thirty-two identified acts of Robert de Beaumont (1080–1118) recently published by David Crouch, only one was for an individual layman, Osmund Archer, and that was not necessarily attested by charter, or if it was, the charter did not survive for long. Two other charters of Robert were for the laity in the form of the guild merchant of the borough of Leicester, but that was another perpetual corporation. Moving into the twelfth century, another case study is the charters of the lords of the honour of Mowbray, collected and edited by Diana Greenway. Of 403 charters issued between 1107 and 1191, seventy were for lay beneficiaries. In the late twelfth century, the acts of Constance, duchess of Brittany and countess of Richmond (1181–1201), total seventy-seven, including eleven which could be defined as private charters for the benefit of laymen (one of them for the corporation of the citizens of Nantes). 

e.g. Acta, no. 601 (2054H), a general confirmation of possessions and liberties for Chicksands priory (Beds.), where numerous awards to the priory are listed with the names of the donors and with reference to the donors’ charters, which appear to be interchangeably referred to as cartis or scriptis. However, the authenticity of this text is suspect (Acta, no. 601, editorial note by Nicholas Vincent).  It should also be noted that Sir James Holt recognized a distinction between the royal acta and the mentions of writs in sources such as the pipe rolls, characterizing the latter as ‘largely concerned with the internal workings of government … [writs] which linked king and chancery with treasury and exchequer’: Holt, ‘Acta: Historical Implications’, 140.  David Crouch, ‘Robert of Beaumont, Count of Meulan and Leicester: His Lands, His Acts, and His Self-Image’, in Henry I and the Anglo-Norman World: Studies in Memory of C. Warren Hollister, ed. Donald F. Fleming and Janet M. Pope (HSJ 17, 2007 for 2006), 91–116, appendix, Leicester, nos. 14–15, Osmund Archer, no. 23 (mention of an award by Robert de Beaumont in a confirmation charter of his son Robert II).  Charters of the Honour of Mowbray, 1107–1191, ed. D. E. Greenway, London 1972, nos. 330–400.  The Charters of Duchess Constance of Brittany and Her Family, 1171–1221, ed. J. A. Everard and M. C. E. Jones, Woodbridge 1999, nos. C9 (Ge10), C10 (Ge15), C36, C46 (A17), C48 (A8), C58, C60, C61, C62, C63, C68 (citizens of Nantes). As many again are records of acts involving laymen, but they represent the exercise of ducal authority and/or do not furnish clear evidence of having been issued in writing (ibid. nos. C6 (‘the Assize of Count Geoffrey’), C23, C24, C33–5, C40, C46–9).

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Consequently, if one counted the surviving royal acts for churches – monasteries and cathedrals – and compared them with the numbers for lay beneficiaries, the ecclesiastical documents would overwhelmingly dominate. It would appear that the main business of the royal chancery was issuing documents for the benefit of the Church, and by implication not for laymen, who by further implication must have been content with other forms of evidence for royal favour, such as the king’s word given orally and/or a ceremony of investiture and homage. The incorporation of ‘mentions’ into the corpus therefore helps to redress the balance: the royal chancery was active in issuing documents for laymen too, but they simply failed to be preserved at anything like the same rate. The subject index demonstrates with abundant clarity just how formulaic are the acta of Henry II, to the point where deviation from the conventional formula is an indication of possible forgery, reworking and interpolation, or beneficiary production. For instance, the king is styled uniformly ‘H(enricus) [Dei gratia] rex Angl(orum) et dux Norm(annorum) et Aquit(anorum) et comes Andeg(auorum)’. The practice adopted by the chancery under Richard I of omitting the ‘et’ between ‘Norm(annorum)’ and ‘Aquit(anorum)’ highlights the consistency and precision of drafting under both kings. Virtually the whole royal charter can be reduced to a succession of more or less frequently used formulae, including the words of disposition, with variation only in the subject matter. This in turn reveals how frequently the king’s acts are confirmations of the transactions of others, or at least are portrayed as such. In the charters of Henry II, the words of disposition are indeed formulaic, deriving from three verbs: to give (do, occasionally reddo), to grant or surrender (concedo), and to confirm (confirmo), used in various tenses, singly or in combination. A survey of numbers 1 to 1,000 of the edition of acta of Henry II (not all of which contain dispositive clauses) indicates that these verbs are not evenly represented, with a strong preference for concedo. Forms of do (to give) alone occur in thirteen charters, forms of confirmo alone in nineteen charters. Forms of concedo alone are much more frequent, with 159, though in some of these cases the word does not appear in the primary disposit­ive clause, but later in the text as a reminder or supplement (etiam concedo). Combinations of the three verbs – to give, concede, and confirm – are more common than a single verb. Forms of ‘give and confirm’ occur as a pair in thirty-two charters, with a similar frequency for forms of ‘give and concede’, in thirty-seven charters. Much more common is the pairing of various forms of ‘concede and confirm’, with 321 appearances. Indeed, out of these, one formula is by far the most frequently used: ‘Know me to have conceded and by my present charter to have confirmed’ (‘Sciatis me concessisse et presenti carta mea confirmasse’). This formula, with minor variations, appears in 188 texts out of 1,000, by far the most frequent single formula, and surely a good indicator of chancery production. Forms of concedo et confirmo, to grant or surrender and to confirm, are thus the most frequently used element in these dispositive clauses, vastly outnumbering forms of the simple do, to give. One explanation for this is that, while any king wanted to be seen as a generous patron of individual supporters and of monasteries founded by himself or his family, Henry II carefully husbanded the royal domain and did not alienate it lightly. Hence there was a great advantage in being seen to  

Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 76. e.g. (original charters of Richard I): Almenêches abbey (Alençon, AD Orne H3460), Robert de Ameneville (Gloucester, Gloucestershire Record Office D225/T1), and the cathedral chapter of SaintMaurice, Angers (BL Harley Charter 43.C.31).



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exercise royal authority by issuing charters when the actual royal act involved was confirming a disposition made by someone else. But this is not the only reason why Henry II’s royal acts involve a great deal of ‘confirming’. Often his letters and charters refer to confirming the beneficiary in the rights enjoyed in the reign of Henry I. Seisin is frequently confirmed as on ‘the day my grandfather was alive and dead’. The emphasis on confirmation in general, and on confirmation of Henry I’s charters or the status quo in his time in particular, has received much attention for its great significance for constitutional history.10 Henry II sought legitimacy for his own regime by disseminating at every opportunity writings that represented him as the legitimate successor to the crown of England. It is not my purpose here to reiterate the weighty evidence and debates surrounding Henry II’s confirmations of acts of Henry I. Instead I would like to discuss confirmations of a different kind that have received less attention: Henry II’s confirmation of charters by laymen, and the evidence this provides for the importance of charters in lay society in the twelfth century. The charters of laymen not issued in the exercise of public authority – actes privés as opposed to royal acts – have been surprisingly overlooked for the eleventh and twelfth centuries.11 The proliferation of charters in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is abundantly clear in any medieval cartulary or charter collection,12 but charters from the earlier decades of Anglo-Norman rule are more elusive; in fact, they are scarce in comparison.13 In search of secondary sources, one has to look beyond the Anglo-Norman realm, to France, to Ireland,14 and, interestingly, to recent work on Scottish charters of the twelfth century.15 For England, the most relevant and useful discussion I have found is by Richard Mortimer, in a recent paper on Anglo-Norman lay charters from 1066 to 1100, who was prepared to state that there are ‘quite substantial numbers’ of charters of lay men and women concerning estates in England from before 1100, while warning that any study of them should be wary about authenticity, given the motives and opportunities for forgery in later generations.16 In a recent study of the acts of one individual (admittedly very ­ superior) layman who flourished in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, Robert de Beaumont, count of Meulan and earl of Leicester, David Crouch assembled no fewer 10

Most recently, George Garnett, Conquered England: Kingship, Succession, and Tenure, 1066–1166, Oxford 2007, part IV, ‘The Problem Solved’, esp. 298, 302, 316–26. Also, Graeme J. White, Restoration and Reform, 1153–1165, Cambridge 2000; Emilie Amt, The Accession of Henry II: Royal Government Restored, 1149–1159, Woodbridge 1993. 11 Paul R. Hyams, ‘The Charter as a Source for the Early Common Law’, Journal of Legal History, 12, 1991, 173–89 at 173. Michel Zimmerman, having expressed the same sentiment, supplies a survey of secondary sources, in ‘Affirmation et respect de l’autorité dans les chartes’, in Les Actes comme expression du pouvoir, ed. M.-J. Gasse-Grandjean and B. M. Tock, Turnhout 2003, 215–40 at 216 note 3. For England see, e.g., Bruce O’Brien, ‘Forgery and the Literacy of the Early Common Law’, Albion, 27, 1995, 1–18, for emphasis on documents deriving from pre-Conquest religious houses. 12 M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn, Oxford 1993. 13 On the trend for increasing use of documents during the twelfth century, see Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075–1225, Oxford 2000, 196–9. 14 Charters and Charter Scholarship, ed. Flanagan and Green. 15 Dauvit Broun, ‘The Writing of Charters in Scotland and Ireland in the Twelfth Century’, in Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker, Turnhout 2000, 113–24; John Hudson, ‘Legal Aspects of Scottish Charter Diplomatic in the Twelfth Century: A Comparative Approach’, ANS 25, 2002, 121–38; Cynthia J. Neville, ‘Women, Charters and Land Ownership in Scotland, 1150–1350’, Journal of Legal History, 26, 2005, 21–45. 16 Richard Mortimer, ‘Anglo-Norman Lay Charters, 1066–c. 1100: A Diplomatic Approach’, ANS 25, 2002, 153–75. For recent discussions of forgery in this context, see Jennifer Paxton, ‘Forging Communities: Memory and Identity in Post-Conquest England’, HSJ 10, 2001, 95–109; also O’Brien, ‘Forgery’.

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than thirty-two acts or mentions of acts issued in Robert’s name dating from 1080 to 1118, concerning lands and beneficiaries in both England and Normandy.17 A positive abundance of lay charters for the twelfth century is assumed in David Postle’s 1999 article on the origin of warranty clauses.18 It is worth remembering that the charters of laymen referred to in charters of Henry II must by definition date from before 1189. Indeed, many charters of Henry II, more than a third of the corpus, were issued in the early years of the reign. Thomas Becket as chancellor (hence before 1162) may have attested almost a quarter of the total, with at least forty-five acts of Henry II being issued in the space of a few days at the siege of Bridgnorth (Shropshire) in 1155.19 Reiner fitz Berengar, sheriff of London (1157–9, 1162–9), and his son Richard, sheriff of London (1187–9), provide a good example of the wealth of lost charters that lie behind royal confirmations, and at the same time of the loss of charters in the possession of laymen, even royal confirmations. In the corpus of the acta of Henry II, all that now survives is the mention of a single royal charter. The record of pleadings in the curia regis in 1208 involving Berengar’s surviving son William recites that William produced in evidence a confirmatio of Henry II which confirmed to Reiner fitz Berengar and his son Richard several tenements including the land in dispute (a quarter of a knight’s fee in ‘Niweland’, now St Lawrence, Essex), and that Reiner and Richard and their heirs should hold all the tenements just as attested by the charters they possess (‘sicut carte quas inde habent testantur’). William was also able to produce at least three of these charters concerning the tenement at ‘Niweland’ alone, including a charter of Roger de Fraxineto awarding the land to Reiner fitz Berengar for an annual rent of a pair of greaves or hose of scarlet, and one of Gilbert, earl of Pembroke, the tenant-in-chief.20 If it were not for the survival of the plea roll from 1208, all trace of this comprehensive set of mid-twelfth-century charters concerning a single lay fief would have disappeared. Before proceeding further, it is necessary to define the term carta. A textbook definition proposed by Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke, and Benoît-Michel Tock captures very well its wide scope: a generic term covering a variety of documents, but in essence an act in writing, emanating more often from an authority – whether royal, religious, or seigneurial – which may contain a concession of property, or rights, or a judicial decision.21 This definition, and others in more general works, was criticized by Michel Zimmerman for its over-emphasis on ‘public or institutional authority’.22 Based on a study of the rich body of charters from Catalonia of the tenth and eleventh centuries, Zimmerman found that on the whole these texts, whether issued by the count or, as in many cases, by individuals (in other words actes privés), were ‘transactions organisant un transfert de biens ou de droits et mettant en cause, outre les partenaires de l’opération, les seuls témoins et rédacteurs

17 18

Crouch, ‘Robert of Beaumont’. David Postles, ‘Seeking the Language of Warranty of Land in Twelfth-Century England’, Journal of the Society of Archivists, 20, 1999, 209–22. 19 Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 72; Nicholas Vincent, ‘The Court of Henry II’, in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. C. Harper-Bill and N. Vincent, Woodbridge 2007, 278–334 at 282, 288. 20 Acta, no. 938 (4231H); Curia Regis Rolls, V, 142–3; Pleas Before the King or His Justices, 1198– 1212, III, ed. D. M. Stenton, Selden Society 83, London 1967, pp. xxv–xxvi. For the earls of Pembroke (Gilbert I, 1138–1148/9, or Gilbert II, 1176–1185 × 1189), I. J. Sanders, English Baronies: A Study of their Origin and Descent, 1086–1327, Oxford 1960, 111. 21 Olivier Guyotjeannin, Jacques Pycke, and Benoît-Michel Tock, Diplomatique médiévale, L’Atelier du Médiéviste 2, Turnhout 1993, 25. 22 Zimmerman, ‘Affirmation’, 215–16.



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de l’acte’. They gave the impression of being authoritative in their own right: ‘L’acte se suffit à lui-même; il inclut toutes les modalités de sa justification et toutes les garanties de son application’.23 Zimmerman acknowledged that the charter, for all its self-sufficiency, did not come from nowhere. Implicit and explicit in the charter were the procedures surrounding the transaction it recorded, and invocations of authority.24 Nevertheless, in the Anglo-Norman realm at least, it was deemed worthwhile to have this simple private act confirmed by the king’s authority in writing. One of the formulae encountered so frequently that I abandoned indexing it, and made it a passim at quite an early stage, is ‘sicut … carta testatur’, ‘just as the charter attests’.25 The formula appears rather cryptic, and it will help to illustrate it with an example from a charter of Henry II surviving in the original single-sheet manuscript. In 1174/5 or 1177/8 Henry II issued a confirmation for the benefit of William de Bazenville, confirming to William an award of 50s. worth of land in Bugbrooke (Northamptonshire) given to him by Richard de Lucy, out of the honour of Boulogne lands which the king had given to Richard, for his service in hereditary fee, just as was attested by Richard’s charter, ‘sicut carta eiusdem Ric(ardi) testatur’.26 This reference to a charter is not only formulaic in language, but it also conventionally appears in the same place in the text, at the end of the dispositive clause.27 In some instances, it is repeated at the end of a later clause commencing with the royal mandate (‘Quare volo et firmiter precipio’) that the beneficiary shall enjoy tenure of the property with the customary rights, jurisdictions and dues, and immunities (in general and highly formulaic terms). This is the penultimate clause, appearing immediately before the list of attestations (which, in charters, is conventionally introduced with the formula Testibus, ‘with witnesses’, so frequently used that the chancery scribes often represented it with the abbreviation T.) and place-date (apud X). Again, an example will elucidate. In a charter issued at Valognes between 1172 and 1185, the king confirmed for the abbey of Saint-Etienne in Caen an award of land by Hugh Villanus. The royal charter recites that Hugh gave 20 acres of land in the vill of Loucelles (Calvados) in perpetual alms and his charter confirmed it, with the consents and confirmations of the two lords of the fee, wherefore the king orders that the monks should have and hold the said 20 acres in perpetual alms and in peace, just as Hugh gave it and his charter confirmed it, and just as the charters of the said lords attest. Hugo eis in perpetuam elemosinam dedit et concessit et carta sua confirmauit concedentibus et confirmantibus easdem Arn(ulfo) Lexou’ episcopo et Waleran(no) vicec(omite), dominis illius feodi. Quare volo et firmiter precipio quod prenominati monachi predictas xx. acras terre habeant et teneant in perpetuam elemosinam … sicut

23 24 25

Ibid. 216. Ibid. 216–17. Vincent, ‘Charters of Henry II: Inspeximus Revisited’, 104, referring to examples and discussion of this formula in Delisle, Recueil, 153–5. 26 BL Harley MS 1885 (Dunstable cartulary) fol. 73 (90*); Acta, no. 162 (605H). Richard de Lucy, the justiciar, one of Henry II’s most loyal and trusted aides, retired in 1178 and died in 1179. 27 Vincent, ‘Charters of Henry II: Inspeximus Revisited’, 106, quoting (with commentary) a contemporary source, the Battle Chronicle, which refers to the routine usage of this clause: ‘Now, whereas in the charters and muniments given by various persons at different times concerning the same matter, it is the custom that the later documents mention the earlier ones, so that the latter seem to require the evidence of the former, for example in such words as sicut carta illa, vel illius N., testatur’ (Chron. Battle, 308–13).

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Hugo illas eis dedit et carta sua confirmauit et sicut carte predictorum Arn(ulfi) Lexou’ episcopi et Walerann(i) vicecom(itis) testantur. Testibus …28

A survey of the entirety of the 3,200 acts of Henry II did not seem feasible or necessary to make my point here. Instead I have surveyed as a sample the first 1,000. These are effectively a random sample, the only connection between them being that the names of their beneficiaries follow sequentially in alphabetical order. Within this sample, I searched for references to charters that were relied upon by the beneficiary to obtain the king’s confirmation. This is normally recorded in the royal charter using the formula ‘sicut carta … testatur’. In the survey, I did not count this type of charter if it was said to have been issued by a bishop or abbot for an ecclesiastical beneficiary, since the extensive and sophisticated use of writing in the twelfth century in the ecclesiastical context is well known and indeed recognized as providing the inspiration and model for secular bureaucracies. I did, however, note references to charters said to have been issued by bishops or abbots for the benefit of laymen, since these help to support my case that it was thought worthwhile by both parties – the ecclesiastical institution and the layman – that a transaction between them should be recorded in writing and preserved. Of the sample of 1,000 items, 115 (11.5 per cent) refer to charters issued by laymen. As noted above, not all of these 1,000 items are confirmation charters. Some, for instance, are diplomatic instruments such as letters to Pope Alexander III. Others are procedural writs, but these are not entirely irrelevant, because the charters of the beneficiary are occasionally mentioned in writs issued in the earlier part of the reign.29 Some are royal acts known only as ‘mentions’, lacking diplomatic formulae. Thus the actual proportion of royal confirmation charters referring to charters by laymen would be rather higher than 11.5 per cent. It is even possible, in the case of confirmation charters that do not survive in the original, that later copyists omitted the clause ‘sicut carta … testatur’. The total number of laymen’s charters recorded will be even greater than 115, because several different lay charters are frequently referred to within a single royal confirmation.30 The references to the confirmation of charters by laymen in charters of Henry II can be divided into two categories. The first consists of specific references to the charter or charters of a named layman or laymen. The second consists of more general references, typically referring to the beneficiary’s possession of ‘the charters of the donors’. There is some overlap between the two categories, since not 28 29

Manchester, John Rylands Library, Beaumont Charter no. 52; Acta, no. 419 (225H). e.g. Acta, no. 232 (748H), Binham priory, at (English) Bicknor (Glos.) (1155 × May 1172, ?1155 × Aug. 1158): mandate to the king’s ministers in the hundreds of (South) Erpingham, Holt, and North Greenhoe (Norf.), to ensure the monks’ possession of their lands and the wood of Edgefield as granted by Peter de Valognes, as held by the monks at the death of Henry I, and as their charters attest (‘sicut eorum testantur’); Acta, no. 303 (3325H), Bridlington priory, at Stamford (1155 × Mar. 1166): mandate to the sheriff and others of Yorkshire, to ensure the canons’ possession of the vill of Bessingby (Yorks. E.R.) and of the land which William the constable held of the fee of Earl Gilbert of Ghent as their charter attests (‘sicut carta sua testatur’); Acta, no. 343 (1725H), Bruton priory, at Worcester (1163 × 1164): mandate to R(otrou) bishop of Evreux and R(eginald) de Saint-Valery, to ensure the canons’ possession of the church of Lion-sur-Mer (Calvados) and the 12 acres of land granted by Hubert de Pierrepont, as held by them at the time that the king last crossed (into England), as attested to them by the charter of Hubert and the charter of William de Moion (‘sicut eis testatur carta ipsius Huberti et carta Willelmi de Moion’). 30 e.g. the pancarte confirmation for Barberi abbey (Delisle, Recueil, no. 750; Acta, no. 92 (1979H), issued 1182 × 1189), which specifies as many as ten separate charters by laymen, led by Robert Marmion and his son Robert. The detailed terms of their donations, including laudatio parentum, seemingly derive from the texts of these charters.



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infrequently a royal charter lists numerous donations, of which only particular ones are specified as being evidenced by the charter or charters of named donors, but concludes with the general formula ‘sicut carte donatorum testantur’. These cases seem to be limited to those where the particular donor singled out for mention was very important, as will be seen below. Most confirmation charters are for ecclesiastical beneficiaries seeking the confirmation of a particular donation, perhaps by the founder and his descendants. To select one example of many, when Henry II visited Carlisle in 1186 he issued a confirmation charter for Brinkburn priory (Northumberland) at the petition of William Bertram, son of Roger Bertram and grandson of William Bertram, the founders of the priory, confirming the site of the priory (‘in quo loco fundata est predicta ecclesia, et cum parte silue sue sicut determinatum est in carta predicti Rogeri’) and all its possessions and liberties given by the said William and Roger, and conceded and confirmed by their charter (‘a prefato Willelmo et Rogero data sunt eis et concessa et carta sua confirmata’).31 This is an example of monastic and cathedral archives carefully cataloguing and storing the charters of lay patrons as ‘title deeds’ for the perpetual enjoyment by the saint they served of the lands, rights, and revenues given by the faithful, donors great and small.32 It was therefore with the same mind-set that they would produce them at the royal chancery to obtain a royal charter of confirmation. It is, however, remarkable how many of these royal confirmations, about 10 per cent, in fact record transactions between laymen, usually between lord and tenant. When these charters are extracted and looked at collectively, it is further remarkable how many of them specifically record obligations of tenure, including prescribed military service due for the land. For example, Henry II confirmed Walter Bloet’s tenure of the vill of Raglan (Monmouthshire) in hereditary fee by the service of one Welsh knight (‘per seruicium unius militis Gualensis’), as granted by Richard son of Earl Gilbert (of Pembroke) and attested by the earl’s charter (‘sicut carta comitis Ricardi quam inde habet testatur’).33 Another example, perhaps on a less elevated social scale, is the charter recording the king’s confirmation for Roger of Benniworth of the lands granted by William de Roumare’s father and grandfather at East and West Keal (Lincolnshire) and the unidentified ‘Riz’, with the service of Hugh of Steeping, to hold for the service of six knights, just as William de Roumare conceded this and as his charter confirmed (‘sicut ipse Willelmus de Romara eam ipsis concessit et carta sua confirmauit’).34 Yet another example is a charter for Roger fitz Reinfrey, recording the settlement of a dispute in the curia regis and confirming the charter of Roger de Mountchesney, the lord of the land in question (in Dunmow, Essex), which provided that Roger fitz Reinfrey was to hold the land of him for the service of a twelfth of a knight’s fee.35 In another charter for Roger

31 32

BL Stowe MS 926 (Brinkburn cartulary) fols 91v.–92r.; Acta, no. 307 (2385H). For a general overview of the development of charters, monastic archives, and production of cartularies, comparing East and West Francia, see Georges Declerq, ‘Originals and Cartularies: The Organization of Archival Memory (Ninth–Eleventh Centuries)’, in Charters, ed. Heidecker, 147–70. 33 Acta, no. 244 (2230H), at Northampton, July 1173 or July 1174. 34 Acta, no. 209 (29H), at Bur-le-Roi, Oct. 1166 × 1172. It is possible that William of Roumare’s charter put into written form an arrangement first made orally between his grandfather and Roger’s ancestor. Other examples include Acta, no. 168 (1036H): Roger de Beauchamp, referring to charter of Gilbert fitz Ralph, at Nottingham (Aug. 1175 × Aug. 1181, ?July/Aug. 1181); Acta, no. 196 (2257H): Hamo Beler, referring to charter of Roger de Mowbray, at Tours (Feb. 1156 × Mar. 1157). 35 Cartulary of St Mary Clerkenwell, ed. W. O. Hassall, London 1949, 4–5 no. 4; Acta, no. 991 (2947H).

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fitz Reinfrey, which can be dated quite precisely to the second half of 1175, Henry II confirms a soke in London awarded by Simon, earl of Huntingdon, for which the service due is one bezant per annum, ‘sicut carta sua testatur’.36 Although confirmation charters for laymen were often obtained from Henry II’s chancery at places in Normandy or Anjou, they nearly all related to estates on the other side of the Channel. One reason for the imbalance is undoubtedly differences in preservation: the survival of documents concerning laymen was even worse in France than in Britain.37 Another reason might be developments in the legal system in England, specifically the appearance of final concords in the second half of the reign.38 The existence of a royal charter of confirmation implies certainty and stability of tenure but may in fact mask the recent determination of a dispute over the tenement concerned. Final concords were a new way of registering agreements between parties who had been in dispute over land; a proliferation of royal confirmation charters for laymen, setting out the obligations of tenure (whether financial or military), may reflect the beginnings of the system of final concords in the mid1170s. The royal charters are difficult to date precisely, but there does seem to be a preponderance from the 1170s and 1180s. On the other hand, some can be positively dated to before 1175, and even if there is in fact a larger number from after that date, this may be just a reflection of the ever-increasing production and reliance upon charters in society throughout the twelfth century. In view of the poor rate of preservation of these transactions between laymen, it is remarkable when charters referred to in Henry II’s confirmations survive as originals. Such a case is the complicated one involving Robert of Arden, archdeacon of Lisieux, Ralph de la Haye, and Roger de Mowbray. At Argentan, some time between 1165 and 1167, Henry II confirmed Robert of Arden’s tenure in Hampton in Arden (Warwickshire), reciting that the land was given by Roger de Mowbray to Ralph de la Haye (in exchange for land in Yorkshire), and sold by Ralph to Robert of Arden with the consent of Roger de Mowbray and his son Nigel, to hold of Roger and his heirs in chief by the service of half a knight, just as the charter of Roger attests (‘sicut carta predicti Rogeri de Moubrai testatur’).39 The charter of Henry II survives in the original single-sheet parchment with seal attached, and, even more remarkably, so do half a dozen original charters concerning these transactions, one of which must be the charter of Roger de Mowbray referred to in the royal confirmation.40 The second category is confirmation charters that refer generically to ‘the charters of the donors’ in the possession of the beneficiary. The context is usually a general confirmation charter purporting to confirm all the possessions and rights and liberties of a monastery, listing a number of donations (sometimes a very large number), large and small, made by the founders and patrons and faithful of the local community. There are also rare instances of charters confirming the awards of land and rights by various patrons to an individual layman. An example of the latter is the charter of Henry II for Robert fitz Richard of Bassingham. The royal charter confirms to Robert all the tenures and possessions he has reasonably acquired in

36 37 38 39 40

BL Harley Charter 43.C.26; Acta, no. 990 (3H). Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 72. I am grateful to various participants at the Battle conference for this point. Acta, no. 74 (274H). Birmingham Central Reference Library, Wingfield Digby MS A10. The other charters are Wingfield Digby MSS A1–A6; BL Cotton Charter xi.35; Add. Charter 21175. Published in Charters of the Honour of Mowbray, ed. Greenway, nos. 330–7, esp. nos. 330, 332–4.



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the realm from whomsoever he should hold them. The tenures and possessions are not named, but the charter ends in the usual way, with the royal mandate that Robert should hold all the aforesaid just as his charters and chirographs attest to him (‘sicut carte et cyrographa sua ei testantur’).41 The charter of Reiner fitz Berengar mentioned above was possibly another example.42 The donations are usually simply recited as a list with the name of each donor and the property they donated. After reciting such a list, it is conventional for the draftsman to add a royal mandate (‘Quare volo et firmiter precipio’) that the beneficiary shall have and hold the property in peace, ending with the formula ‘sicut carte donatorum testantur’.43 This leaves us not knowing whether all the donations listed were evidenced by charter, and if not, which ones or how many were. Matters are not helped by the confirmation charters which combine a general reference to the charters of the donors with the donation of a named donor attested by a specific charter. On analysis of the charters in this sample, these are characterized by the named donor being a person of great importance, a count or earl, or courtier, who was also the founder or principal patron of the beneficiary. A sort of hybrid is the general confirmation charter for Aumale abbey listing possessions in Normandy and England and the names of the donors. This includes the general formula ‘sicut carte donatorum testantur’, as well as specific reference to a charter of the count of Aumale (‘sicut carta eiusdem comitis testatur’). Some specific references to awards made by individual donors which were attested by their charters appear at the end of the list. Were these perhaps more recent awards received since the last major confirmation? Does this imply that the awards listed earlier in the text which do not mention charters were never attested by the charters of the donors? There is no good reason to think so, in view of other possible explanations for the selective reference to donors’ charters. Finally, there are confirmation charters in which numerous gifts by different named donors are recited, but only one or two are referred to as being attested by the donor’s charter. For example, a confirmation charter for the foundation of the Empress Matilda, the abbey of Notre-Dame du Vœu at Cherbourg, listing various benefactions includes the confirmation of what Roger de Magneville held in the manor of Octeville, just as his charter attests (‘sicut carta eiusdem Rogeri testatur’).44 The circumstances behind the specific mention of certain charters cannot now be fathomed, yet there must have been cogent reasons for this inconsistent drafting. One possibility is that the property was in dispute, and the beneficiary wanted a specific reference to the charter that provided evidence of title. Another possibility is unselective copying from earlier documents. A third group, which I have already mentioned, comprises charters involving reference to a charter issued by a bishop, abbot, or other ecclesiastic for the benefit of a layman, now relied upon by the layman to obtain a royal confirmation. I separ­ 41

Arundel Castle, Duke of Norfolk MSS, HMC Box 1, no. 48; Acta, no. 122 (350H), at London, Mar. 1163 × Mar. 1166, or Mar. × June 1170. 42 See above, note 20. 43 e.g. Acta, no. 93 (1538H), Aunai abbey, at Domfront (1156 × June 1159): ‘sicut donatorum carte testantur’; Acta, no. 132 (983H), Bath abbey, at Argentan (Apr. 1180 × 1185): ‘sicut eadem sunt eis rationabiliter data et concessa et cartis donatorum confirmata’; Acta, no. 280 (1864H), Boscherville, abbey of St-Georges, at Lillebonne (Aug. 1177 × 1182, ?Aug. 1177 × July 1181): ‘sicut carta regis H(enrici) aui mei et carte aliorum donatorum suorum testantur’. 44 Acta, no. 575 (1987H), at Caen (Apr. 1185 × 1189), although possibly not authentic. An original charter of Roger de Magneville – probably that referred to here – survived in Saint-Lô, AD Manche until 1945 (Inventaire sommaire des archives de la Manche, I, p. 296, H1960; CDF, no. 934).

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ated these from the others because they were clearly subject to ecclesiastical influence in terms of creating written records, but they are relevant because the layman who was the beneficiary of the charter must have preserved it. An example is two charters for Alexander de Barentin, the king’s butler. In the first, the king confirms to Alexander and his heirs ‘all his tenements however reasonably acquired’, listing various lands and tenements in Surrey, Kent, and London, naming those from whom Alexander acquired them, including the abbot and convent of St Augustine’s, Canterbury, the convent of Christ Church, Canterbury, the abbot and convent of Chertsey, and Richard (of Ilchester), archdeacon of Poitou. This charter concludes with the formula ‘just as the chirographs and charters which they have attest’ (‘sicut cyrographa et carte quas inde habent testantur’).45 In the second, Henry II confirms to Alexander de Barentin and his sons Richard and Thomas various lands and tenements in London given them by Richard (of Ilchester), bishop of Winchester, the uncle of Richard and Thomas, as attested by his charter (‘sicut carta eius testatur’).46 Another example, again surviving in the original outside a monastic archive, is the royal confirmation for one Geoffrey Ballard of the ‘reasonable’ award to him of a certain messuage at St Ives (Huntingdonshire) by the abbot and convent of Ramsey abbey for a rent of 20s. per annum, just as the charter of the abbot and convent attests (‘sicut carta ipsius abbatis et conuentus testatur’), and that Geoffrey and his heirs should have and hold the same just as the abbot and convent conceded and gave and confirmed by their charter (‘sicut prefatus abbas et conuentus ipsi Gaufr(ido) et heredibus suis tenenda concesserunt et dederunt et carta sua confirmauerunt’).47 As mentioned above, the significance of this third category is that although the charters were originally produced by important members of the clergy – who had ample resources for their production – laymen were apparently deemed to have a use for them. Their lay recipients, Alexander de Barentin and his family in London, and Geoffrey Ballard in a burgeoning market town, apparently preserved these charters themselves, ready for use to defend their title, or in this case to secure it by royal confirmation. This is nicely illustrated by the following case from the plea rolls. In pleas of the crown for Lincolnshire in 1202,48 Andrew of Edlington was appealed for entering the house of his uncle, Thorald of Edlington, and committing robbery and violence such that Thorald died. Thorald’s son John claimed that, among other offences, Andrew stole Thorald’s charters ‘about his inheritance’ (‘de hereditate sua’). Andrew, in his defence, claimed that he was Thorald’s heir and had gone to see his uncle, on his deathbed, in the house that would descend to him. It would not be surprising, therefore, if he was interested in getting his hands on the charters, if there was indeed any truth in John’s appeal. The interest of this case for us is the undisputed fact that a layman of the middling sort stored in his own home a collection of charters that were regarded as valuable for evidencing his hereditary rights in the second half of the twelfth century (Thorald died, perhaps of old age and certainly leaving an adult son and nephew, at the turn of the thirteenth century).

45 46

Westminster Abbey Muniments, no. 660; Acta, no. 102 (229H), at Westminster, 1175 × 1180. Westminster Abbey Muniments, no. 662; Acta, no. 101 (229H), at Clarendon, probably 1175 × 1185. 47 BL Add. Charter 34019; Delisle, Recueil, no. 671; Acta, no. 90 (73H), at Neufchâtel-en-Bray (Oct. 1174 × 1188, ?Oct. 1174 × Apr. 1175 or Aug. 1177 × July 1178). 48 The Earliest Lincolnshire Assize Rolls, AD 1202–1209, ed. D. M. Stenton, Lincoln Record Society 22, 1926, no. 594 (Assize Roll 479); see J. H. Hudson, The Formation of the English Common Law, London 1996, 171.



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In conducting this kind of survey, it becomes clear that Henry II’s confirmation charters for monasteries – the vast majority – display inconsistency in their references to the charters of donors. Some refer to the charters of donors by name, some only generically, in a formula referring to ‘the charters of the donors’. Many do not refer to the charters of donors at all, just listing the names of the donors and their donations. Given the precision and consistency of chancery practice, it is likely that this inconsistency reflects the circumstances in which royal confirmations were issued. We might conclude that certain monastic beneficiaries took care to produce the charters of their lay patrons, or at least to ensure by some means that they were mentioned in the royal confirmation. But there could be apparent inconsistency even within the same monastic archive, even, or perhaps especially, one like Abingdon abbey which was very archivally minded. One confirmation charter of Henry II for Abingdon includes confirmation of a meadow and pasture by which William de Courcy increased the alms first given by his father, as the charter of William attests (‘sicut carta eius testatur’). Another royal confirmation charter lists the same awards to Abingdon but omits reference to William de Courcy’s charter.49 The deficiency may be the result of omission by the cartulary copyist, or it may be intentional, dictated by the circumstances in which the charter was obtained. This raises the question of the practicalities of how charters came to be drafted before the royal seal was attached. Did the beneficiary produce a draft, at least of the dispositive clauses?50 Different ecclesiastics might have taken different views of what was important in terms of reference to donors’ charters in the royal confirm­ ation charter. A particular abbot might have felt the royal confirmation charter was sufficient, just by listing the property and the names of the donors under the king’s seal. Another might have been anxious to have references to particular charters explicitly incorporated in the royal confirmation, for whatever reason of law or ­politics. Then there is the matter of precedent: some of Henry II’s confirmation ­charters merely recite charters of Henry I, so there was little scope for creative drafting by the beneficiary or the chancery scribe. This is purely a matter for speculation, and more of this below. But what is certain is that with some royal confirm­ ation charters for monasteries containing specific or generic references to charters of lay patrons, and other royal confirmation charters written in similar terms omitting to mention any such charters, it does not seem safe to assume that in the latter cases there were no charters in existence to evidence the beneficiary’s claims. If this reasoning holds, we would need to revise upwards our ideas about the frequency of production of charters by laymen in the twelfth century. Documentary evidence for one’s legitimate enjoyment of land and rights was clearly extremely important already in the twelfth century. Indeed, by the early thirteenth century, a knife that had been ritually broken to commemorate a property transfer was ruled inadmissible as evidence in the curia regis, even though it was securely attached to a relevant charter dated 1148.51 It is almost certainly relevant that, in contrast to the very frequent confirmations of charters attesting the benefi-

49

Acta, nos. 11 (2829H), 23 (500H). For comment on the ‘comprehensive cartularies’ of Abingdon abbey, see Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 74. 50 Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 95. 51 Clanchy, Memory to Written Record, 258. The significance of the two broken knives at Durham is discussed in more detail in M. T. Clanchy, ‘Medieval Mentalities and Primitive Legal Practice’, in Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. Pauline Stafford, Janet L. Nelson, and Jane Martindale, Manchester 2001, 83–94 at 89–93.

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ciary’s rights, the acts of Henry II are almost bereft of references to evidence of investiture by any other means. References to rituals of livery of seisin by wands of foliage, knives deposited on altars, and other means really are exceptional. One is from the record of a dispute determined in the king’s presence at Angers in 1168. Having agreed to concede certain land to the abbey of Saint-Aubin at Angers, by the hand of the king, the two brothers involved invested the abbot with a certain staff (‘cum quodam baculo’).52 It will be noted that this transaction was also carefully recorded by the monks of Saint-Aubin, and the particular document just quoted is probably a memorandum drafted by the monks rather than a product of the royal chancery, hence unusually forthcoming on the details. The case just cited was contemporary, dated 1168, but such charters usually refer to events of an earlier period. An extremely long confirmation charter or pancarte for Saint-Etienne at Caen includes the award of William, count of Evreux, and his wife of a church which they gave to the abbot by a certain branch (‘per quendam ramum’).53 A confirmation charter or pancarte for Aunay abbey appears to recite the terms of a charter of Richard du Hommet, confirming the gift of certain land which Richard purchased, with the consent of its lord and with Richard placing ‘it’ upon the altar, ‘sicut carta Ric(ardi) testatur’.54 A tithe of ‘new’ fish given by the men of Dover to the priory of St Martin at Dover was also said to have been offered ‘upon the altar’ of the priory.55 What it meant to offer a gift of land, or fish, ‘upon the altar’ of the beneficiary church was apparently understood by twelfth-century scribes and their readers, so as not to require elaboration. To the case of the knife just mentioned may be added another example from the same institution, Durham cathedral priory, in which a writ of Henry II refers to the transfer of land ‘by the sword’ of the donor, but again this transaction was historical, and witnesses had to be summoned to prove it.56 It seems fitting that, by the reign of Henry II, judicial procedure dependent on the use of documents such as royal writs was engaged with a much older procedure that involved symbolism and not writing. Finally, Henry II himself, later in the reign, furnishes an illustration of the importance of charters as symbolic objects. Having issued a charter for Christ Church cathedral, Canterbury, confirming its liberties and in honour of its saints in October/ November 1175,57 according to Gervase of Canterbury, two years later on Palm Sunday (21 April 1177) the king visited Canterbury and placed the charter upon 52

Acta, no. 59 (1631H); Cartulaire de l’abbaye de St-Aubin d’Angers, ed. B. de Brousillon and E. Lelong, 3 vols, Documents Historiques sur l’Anjou 1–3, Paris 1903, II, 157–8 no. 664; Delisle, Recueil, Introduction, 284, and no. 267. There are, however, two contemporary cases of the use of gold rings for livery of seisin in transactions confirmed by Henry II; interestingly in both cases the ring was produced by a bishop: Acta, nos. 592 (689H), 1734 (3916H). 53 Caen, AD Calvados H1835; Acta, no. 410 (739H), at Caen (1156 × May 1162). William count of Evreux died in 1118 (Daniel Power, The Norman Frontier in the Twelfth and early Thirteenth Centuries, Cambridge 2004, 376), hence the record of his award is from a much earlier period than this charter. 54 Acta, no. 89 (769H), Aunai abbey, at Mortain (May 1172 × 1189, ?May 1172 × July 1181). 55 London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 241 (Dover cartulary), fol. 36r. (35r.); Acta, no. 778 (1005H). Acta, no. 410 (739H) also contains several references to gifts by laymen ‘upon the altar’ (super altare) of the abbey church of St Stephen, but again what was placed upon the altar to signify the gift is not specified. 56 Original writ: Durham University Library, Archives and Special Collections, D. & C. Durham, 2.1.Reg.2; Acta, no. 808 (159H), issued early in the reign at Bridgnorth, probably on Henry II’s campaign there in the summer of 1155. 57 Original: Canterbury Cathedral Library, Chartae Antiquae C19; Acta, no. 464 (105H).



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the tomb of St Thomas.58 (Either the king had a copy or more probably – from what is known of chancery practice at this date in not keeping copies of royal acts – the monks went to their archive and presented the charter to the king for this purpose.) The significance of the formula ‘sicut … carta testatur’ is that the king has seen, heard, or been made aware of the contents of a charter or charters in the beneficiary’s possession, conveying to the beneficiary the land and/or rights which are now confirmed in the king’s charter, implicitly in the same terms as the beneficiary’s charter. This brings to mind the evolution of the royal inspeximus, expounded so eloquently by Nicholas Vincent.59 Unlike the inspeximus, however, which recites the beneficiary’s earlier charter verbatim, the ‘sicut … carta testatur’ form can involve anything from a very cursory summary to quite a full recitation of the charter being confirmed. Again, this must be due to the particular wishes of the beneficiary and the circumstances of issue of the confirmation, whether in terms of practical drafting (was the benficiary’s charter actually in front of the chancery clerk drafting the confirmation?) or in legal terms (what did the beneficiary seek to achieve with the royal charter?). Moreover, the royal inspeximus tended to recite the confirmations of previous monarchs, rather than reciting private charters. Léopold Delisle made the acute observation that neither the king nor one of his chancery clerks would normally expect to be in any position to certify the legitimacy of the beneficiary’s tenure, based solely on the charter which was proffered for confirmation. It would be a different matter if the royal confirmation followed the determination of a dispute in favour of the beneficiary in the presence of the king or his deputy, in which case the legitimacy of the beneficiary’s tenure had been investigated and approved.60 Delisle argued that the formula ‘as the charter attests’ could have a legal significance beyond its face value. It indicated that the beneficiary had actually produced a charter as evidence of title, but it also specifically refrained from warranting the beneficiary’s tenure, by going no further than confirming that the beneficiary had produced a charter which purported to convey the relevant rights. Delisle continued rather piquantly, si les bénéficiaires lisaient attentivement leurs chartes, ils devaient voir que la confirmation n’entrainaît en aucune façon la garantie du roi. La donation était confirmée telle que la charte du donateur l’avait indiquée: Sicut carta donatoris testatur, mais cette charte devenait nulle s’il était reconnu que l’auteur avait disposé d’un bien dont il n’était pas légitime propriétaire.61

This was the case, according to Delisle, unless the royal charter also described the tenure or the gift as rationabilem or given rationabiliter, which indicated that the king was satisfied as to its legitimacy.62 While this is a superficially appealing argument, one still has to consider the significance of the charter produced by the 58

Acta, no. 464 (105H); The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, RS 73, 1879–80, I, 261–2. 59 Vincent, ‘Charters of Henry II: Inspeximus Revisited’. 60 e.g. the act of Henry II confirming a settlement between Reginald, bishop of Bath, and Henry de Tilly, in the king’s presence in 1176/7. Among other singularities of this document, Henry II’s confirmation of a charter of Henry I in favour of the bishop is referred to with the formula, ‘carta . . . quam ego coram baron(ibus) meis vidi et inspexi’: Cal. Chart. R. 1300–26, 471–2; Acta, no. 126 (984H); discussed in Vincent, ‘Charters of Henry II: Inspeximus Revisited’, 117. 61 Delisle, Recueil, Introduction, 155. 62 Ibid. 155–6. An example is another charter for Roger fitz Reinfrey (Clerkenwell Cartulary, 4–5 no. 4; Acta, no. 991 (2947H)), recording the settlement of a dispute in the curia regis and confirming the charter of the lord of the land in question (in Dunmow, Essex).

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beneficiary. If the king or his servants really had no idea about the validity of the beneficiary’s tenure, then one wonders why the confirmation charter was issued (apart of course from the offer of a large sum of money). I would suggest that the simple production of the donor’s charter justified the issue of a confirmation, which in turn secured the beneficiary’s legal position. As noted above, the private charter was self-contained: it narrated and represented in itself the authorization for the disposition to the beneficiary and its own means of authentication (seal, witnesses). Respect for the form itself enabled the royal chancery to issue confirmations based upon the evidence of a private charter. This discussion has tended to focus on the king and the royal chancery, and on the beneficiaries (mostly ecclesiastical) who collected the charters of lay donors and produced them when required to obtain royal confirmation. But I have also tried throughout to stress the large numbers of charters produced by laymen for laymen. As noted above, in the region of 10 per cent of Henry II’s confirmations referring to laymen’s charters involved such charters. There can be no doubt that these charters really existed, as various examples cited in this paper illustrate, and many more illustrations could be assembled. It is not possible in most cases to produce the charter of the layman relied upon to obtain the royal confirmation. First there is the general problem of lack of preservation, but in addition it would be quite logical, especially in later generations, to neglect the original charter once the royal confirmation had been obtained. In a few cases, however, both exist, either in the original single-sheet manuscript or a cartulary copy. An example is a charter for Beaubec abbey confirming the award by Hugh Talbot of land at Feltwell (Norfolk). In this case, the sealed single-sheet originals of Hugh’s charter (dated 1162) and the royal confirmation charter have been preserved together.63 Another is the case of Robert of Arden, archdeacon of Lisieux, and Roger de Mowbray, mentioned above. These documents were not figments of the imagination of the monastic beneficiaries or the scribes of the royal chancery. Even if the document produced to obtain the royal confirmation in the reign of Henry II was itself a forgery (in the sense that it had been fabricated by the beneficiary and not issued under the seal or other authority of the named donor), it would still be relevant to demonstrate the importance of writing as evidence for tenure. Scholarship on the use of writing and its importance in the central Middle Ages has been prolific since the 1970s, and the general mood is a positive one. This is helped by the recognition that literacy is an ambiguous expression: does it mean to read, or write, or both, in Latin, or the vernacular? A more helpful way of invest­ igating the subject is through the relationships medieval people had with the written word. The ability to read was more widespread than the ability to write, which could be seen as the role of a specialized, clerical profession. Laymen need not have been able to do either to appreciate the role and function of the different types of documents they might encounter or even own themselves, by belonging to a ‘textual community’.64 A pertinent suggestion is made by Kathryn A. Lowe, who contrasts Anglo-Saxon royal documents with the chirograph form: laymen who could not read 63

BL Harley Charter 111.B.48; Delisle, Recueil, no. 168; Acta, no. 164 (67H). The charter of Hugh Talbot is BL Harley Charter 112.D.57. 64 See the review article, Charles F. Briggs, ‘Literacy, Reading and Writing in the Medieval West’, JMH 26, 2000, 397–420; elegantly summarized in David Postles, ‘Country Clerici and the Composition of English Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Charters’, in Charters, ed. Heidecker, 27–42 at 27–8. Particularly relevant is Ralph V. Turner, ‘The Miles Literatus in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century England: How Rare a Phenomenon?’, American Historical Review, 83, 1978, 928–65, reprinted in his Judges, Administrators and the Common Law in Angevin England, London 1994, 119–36.



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the text of a chirograph could nevertheless see the parts first separated and later fitted back together.65 Under the Plantagenets, ironically, chirographs evolved into the tripartite form closely bound up with royal justice.66 Much of this proliferation of documents can be blamed on the Plantagenet regime. Nicholas Vincent has recently proposed that in addition to the many writs issued and disposed of once they had served their purpose, other forms of documentation were routinely used in the course of the royal administration. Members of the household of Henry II received letters of appointment to their offices, and it is possible that persons crossing the Channel on the king’s business carried royal letters commanding a seaman to provide a ship and safe passage without demanding payment, or ensuring a friendly reception on landing.67 If there were any doubt on this score, one should reflect on the writs mentioned in any membrane of the pipe rolls, and then on what documentation lies behind them, such as writs of liberate, financial records of sheriffs and holders of escheated lands, and so on. A quite staggering view emerges of the sheer volume of slips of parchment that must have been flying around in the course of the Plantagenet government of England and Normandy.68 Sir James Holt has drawn attention to the proliferation of writs in the second half of Henry II’s reign, the paradox being that as writs became much more common, they ceased to be preserved in such numbers because now they were returnable to court and not preserved or copied by the beneficiary. ‘Behind the surviving English and Norman documents of Richard’s reign there was a vast and diversified use of legal writs which are only represented occasionally among the survivors.’69 The more one thinks about society in England, and probably Normandy too, under the Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet kings, the more it is apparent that at least the upper echelons of society were constantly coming into contact with the written word. Literate people were part of every community, as parish priests, chaplains, and regular canons, and thus virtually everyone had access to texts, albeit at second hand.70 This leads to a question at the core of this enquiry: Who wrote the laymen’s charters? Obviously the proliferation of royal writs and charters was made possible by a staff of professional clerks in the chancery, issuing increasingly standardized writs. Monasteries might well have offered their services to draft charters for the laymen whom they had persuaded to offer pious benefactions. That leaves the small but not insignificant number of charters issued by laymen for laymen. David Postles addressed this very question and found evidence that ‘country clerici’ offered these services. Those identified ranged in social status from the Louis clericus, identified as a servant of Robert Mauduit at Rockingham castle around 1200–20, to ­unbeneficed clerks known to the authorities for forgery and drunken brawling. Generally, they

65

Kathryn A. Lowe, ‘Lay Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England and the Development of the Chirograph’, in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage, ed. P. Pulsiano and E. M. Treharne, Aldershot 1998, 161–204 at 178. 66 Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings, 200. 67 Vincent, ‘Court of Henry II’, 285–6, 293–4, 306; and see commentary on the letters of Master David of London (Acta, no. 1630 (5167H); Z. N. Brooke, ‘The Register of Master David of London and the Part He Played in the Becket Crisis’, in Essays in History Presented to Reginald Lane Poole, ed. H. W. C. Davis, Oxford 1927, 227–45). 68 Vincent, ‘Regional Variations’, 73. 69 Holt, ‘Acta: Historical Implications’, 140. 70 Nicholas Orme, ‘Lay Literacy in England, 1100–1300’, in England and Germany in the High Middle Ages, ed. Alfred Haverkamp and Hanna Vollrath, Oxford 1996, 35–56 at 41–6.

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were probably beneficed as chaplains, with the use of the title clericus indicating those of unbeneficed status.71 Postles’s evidence comes from the proliferation of peasant charters in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. It at least supports the conjecture that laymen of aristocratic status, as our twelfth-century examples of lords issuing charters would have been, could have employed their chaplains, and the more general proposition that the production of charters was not the monopoly of religious houses and the royal chancery.

71

Postles, ‘Country Clerici’, 31–42.

REINVENTING NORMANS AS CRUSADERS? RALPH OF CAEN’S GESTA TANCREDI Natasha Hodgson In many respects Ralph of Caen had the most ‘Norman’ credentials of any histor­ian of the First Crusade, since his family hailed from Caen or near by and he shared a tutor, Arnulf of Chocques, with the sister of Duke Robert II of Normandy. Although Guibert of Nogent was scornful of Arnulf’s talents, Ralph seems to have been particularly well educated, especially in the classical poets and historians. Ralph did not accompany Arnulf on the First Crusade, but joined the entourage of Bohemond of Taranto during his recruitment tour of France in 1106, and taking part in the crusade expedition of 1107 as a chaplain. Later he travelled to the Holy Land and served Bohemond’s relative Tancred in Antioch, but after Tancred’s death in 1112 he sought out the patronage of his old tutor Arnulf, now patriarch of Jerusalem. He started writing the Gesta Tancredi around that time, possibly while a canon of the cathedral church in Jerusalem, and dedicated it to Arnulf at some point before the patriarch died in 1118. Ralph’s training in Normandy, his participation in the 1107 crusade, his close contact with the First Crusade leaders, and the time he spent in the settler societies of Antioch and Jerusalem all meant that he was extremely well placed to write a history which was largely original and independent of other accounts. Why, then has he hitherto received so little attention, both from historians of crusading and in the ongoing debate about Norman identity? Much in Ralph’s history deserves reappraisal, but this article will focus primarily on its contribution to the debate about Norman identity on the First Crusade. 

Guibert described him as ‘Not dull in dialectical learning, although he had made the least use of grammatical texts’: Guibert of Nogent, Dei gesta per Francos et cinq autres textes, ed. Robert B. C. Huygens, Turnhout 1996 [cited hereafter as Guibert], 290. See also Laetitia Boehm, ‘Die Gesta Tancredi des Radulph von Caen: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichtsschreibung der Normannen um 1100’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 75, 1956, 47–72; Henri Glaesener, ‘Raoul de Caen, historien et écrivain’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, 46, 1951, 5–21.  The Gesta Tancredi of Ralph of Caen: A History of the Normans on the First Crusade, ed. and trans. Bernard S. Bachrach and David S. Bachrach, Aldershot 2005 [cited hereafter as Bachrach and Bachrach], ‘Introduction’, 1–5. For the Latin edition of Ralph’s history: Ralph of Caen, Gesta Tancredi, in Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens occidentaux, 5 vols in 6, Paris 1844–95, III, 603–716 [cited hereafter as Gesta Tancredi].  For information on Ralph’s relationship to other First Crusade texts, see John France, ‘The Use of the Anonymous Gesta Francorum in the Early Twelfth-Century Sources for the First Crusade’, in From Clermont to Jerusalem: The Crusades and Crusader Societies, 1095–1500, ed. Alan V. Murray, Turnhout 1998, 29–42.  Beside the editions and scholarly studies mentioned above, particular themes in his work are addressed by Kaspar Elm, ‘O Beatas idus ac prae ceteris gloriosas! Darstellung und Deutung der Eroberung Jerusalems 1099 in den Gesta Tancredi des Raoul von Caen’, in Es hat sich viel ereignet, Gutes wie Böses: Lateinische Geschichtsschreibung der Spät- und Nachantike, ed. Gabriele Thome and Jens Holzhausen, München 2001, 152–78; and Jean-Charles Payen, ‘L’Image du grec dans la chronique normande: sur un passage de Raoul de Caen’, in Images et signes de l’Orient dans l’Occident médiéval, Aix-en-Provence 1982, 267–80.

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The Gesta Tancredi was not just a fanciful eulogy of Tancred and his Guiscardian heritage: contrary to the opinion of some recent studies, it provides a wealth of information about a transitional period for the Norman image. By considering the perceived characteristics of the gens Normannorum and the ideals of crusading knighthood, this article illustrates how the development of crusade ideology both complemented and clashed with the idea of Normannitas as historians began to write about crusading. It elucidates its conclusions by considering the accounts of desertions at the siege of Antioch in 1098 which highlight issues of ethnic identity on crusade. At least two major obstacles must be addressed before turning to the sources. The first is defining a truly Norman perspective on crusader history. Over the past twenty-five years scholarship has challenged the idea that crusading was a Norman ‘achievement’. Topics addressed include the role of Normans on the First Crusade; how far Norman, Anglo-Norman, and Italo-Norman contingents shared a common identity; their settlement in Antioch and the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem; and how long they continued to perceive themselves to be Normans. The crusading careers of individuals such as Bohemond of Taranto, Duke Robert II of Normandy, and Richard of Salerno have also been considered. A significantly ‘Norman’ perspective has been observed in three Anglo-Norman chroniclers who devoted considerable attention to crusading: Orderic Vitalis, William of Malmesbury, and Henry of Huntingdon. One can add to these De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, a Second Crusade history of the 1147 siege of Lisbon. Representing the Italo-Norman perspective we have the anonymous Gesta Francorum and the Historia belli sacri, besides Ralph



e.g. David C. Douglas, The Norman Achievement, 1050–1100, Berkeley CA 1969, 64–81, 89–109; idem, The Norman Fate, 1100–1154, London 1976, 156–93.  Emily Albu, The Normans in their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion, Woodbridge 2001, 145–79; John France, ‘The Normans and Crusading’, in The Normans and their Adversaries at War: Essays in Memory of C. Warren Hollister, ed. Richard P. Abels and Bernard S. Bachrach, Woodbridge 2001, 87–101; Thomas S. Asbridge, The Creation of the Principality of Antioch, 1098–1130, Woodbridge 2000; Alan V. Murray, ‘How Norman was the Principality of Antioch? Prolegomena to a Study of the Origins of the Nobility of a Crusader State’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. Katherine Keats-Rohan, Woodbridge 1997, 349–59; Alan V. Murray, ‘Ethnic Identity in the Crusader States: The Frankish Race and the Settlement of Outremer’, in Concepts of National Identity in the Middle Ages, ed. S. Forde, L. Johnson, and A. V. Murray, Leeds 1995, 59–73; Alan V. Murray, ‘The Origins of the Frankish Nobility of the Kingdom of Jerusalem’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 4, 1989, 281–300. See also Graham Loud, ‘Norman Italy and the Holy Land’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar, Jerusalem 1992, 49–62; Emily Albu, ‘Norman Views of Eastern Christendom: From the First Crusade to the Principality of Antioch’, in The Meeting of Two Worlds: Cultural Exchange between East and West during the Period of the Crusades, ed. Vladimir P. Goss, Kalamazoo 1986, 115–21; Hans E. Mayer, ‘Angevins versus Normans: The New Men of King Fulk of Jerusalem’, American Philosophical Society, 133, 1989, 1–25.  As well as France, ‘Normans’, which discusses the relative roles of Bohemond and Duke Robert II of Normandy, see Emily Albu, ‘Probing the Passions of a Norman on Crusade: The Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanum’, ANS 27, 2004, 1–15; Kenneth Baxter Wolf, ‘Crusade and Narrative: Bohemond and the Gesta Francorum’, JMH 17, 1991, 207–16; George T. Beech, ‘A Norman-Italian Adventurer in the East: Richard of Salerno, 1097–1112’, ANS 15, 1992, 25–40. There is arguably further scope for work on Tancred, as his most recent biographer is Robert L. Nicholson, Tancred: A Study of his Career and Work in their Relation to the First Crusade and the Establishment of the Latin States in Syria and Palestine, PhD thesis, University of Chicago, 1938, published New York 1978.  For their main narratives of the First Crusade and early settlement: Orderic, V, 4–191; Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, I, 592–707; Huntingdon, 422–43. The First Crusade is only given passing attention in the interpolations into Jumièges, and in the later Italo-Norman histories: below.  De expugnatione Lyxbonensi, ed. and trans. Charles Wendell David, 2nd edn, New York 2001 [cited hereafter as De expugnatione].



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of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi.10 Each source has its own problematic idiosyncrasies, but more significantly they share with other crusade narratives a second impediment to their use for the study of regional or racial identity. Pope Urban II’s call for the First Crusade at Clermont in November 1095 met with an overwhelming response. Chroniclers highlighted the wide range of participants, often including lists of contingents from particular regions or ethnic backgrounds.11 Universal participation demonstrated the popularity of crusading and emphasized the divinely inspired nature of the undertaking. In order to achieve success, however, different groups needed to act in unison, and on behalf of God rather than in their own interests. Diversity in dress, languages, and cultures was considered to be transcended by unity under the sign of the cross. The need to emphasize unity could be restrictive for chroniclers, because calling attention overtly to the achievements of a single individual or contingent might detract from the true leader of the expedition, Christ himself. As Guibert of Nogent asserted, ‘God … did not want the glory of his name given to some other, for he himself was the sole leader.’12 After establishing the popularity of crusading by listing diverse participants, authors were usually at pains to employ simple terminology to describe crusade armies as a whole. As France has shown, most fell back on the Roman terminology of Francia or Gaul, and described the Western settlers as gens Francorum or Latins in order to distinguish them from indigenous Greek or Syrian Christians.13 The stress on divinely ordained unity is frustrating for the student of Norman identity in crusade texts. Even the histories with a Norman perspective often described Norman participants as Franks or Latins, using the same umbrella terms as French writers such as Robert of Rheims and Guibert of Nogent. Guibert explicitly hijacked the achievements of the Italo-Norman Bohemond of Taranto to enhance French prestige: ‘Since his family hailed from Normandy, a part of France, and since he had obtained the hand of the daughter of the king of the Franks, he might very well be considered a Frank.’14 Discussion of the Normannitas of crusaders and settlers has become increasingly dependent upon the study of personal names and the use of particular ‘ethnic’ ter­minology, but these are not the only means of gauging Norman identity among participants. Already by the time of the First Crusade Norman histories and chansons had created a mythical gens Normannorum with qualities that would be recognized by both Norman and non-Norman audiences.15 Writers such as Geoffrey

10 I have excluded Walter the Chancellor, Bella Antiochena, ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer, Innsbruck 1896, from this list because there is very little overt sense of ‘Norman’ identity, possibly indicative of political sensibilities during the late 1120s when it was written. See Murray, ‘How Norman?’, 353, 358–9. 11 e.g. Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana (1095–1127), ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer, Heidelberg 1913 [cited hereafter as Fulcher], 161, 202–3. Guibert, 89, expressed surprise that even the barbaric Scots took part. 12 Guibert, 328. 13 France, ‘Normans and Crusading’, 91. See also Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonisation and Cultural Change, 950–1350, London 1993, 18–23. 14 Guibert, 106. He later refers to this marriage as ‘obscuring the base origins of his ancient ancestors’: ibid. 138. 15 According to Loud the actual Norman ‘myth’ was that they were a distinct people with their own character, but once this was promulgated through a combination of eleventh-century histories and chansons de geste ‘it became reality’. This gens consisted of two components comprising common descent or ‘stock’ (leading to shared physical characteristics), and Geisteshaltung — their mentalité: G. A. Loud, ‘The Gens Normannorum: Myth or Reality?’, ANS 4, 1981, 104–16. See also Nick Webber, The Evolution of Norman Identity, 911–1154, Woodbridge 2005; R. H. C. Davis, The Normans and their Myth, London 1976; Albu, Normans in their Histories.

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Malaterra characterized the Normans as cunning, quick to avenge injury, eager for profit, and prepared to travel far and wide and suffer many hardships to achieve it. The Normans were flatterers who distributed their largesse astutely in order to maintain a good public image, but needed a firm hand to keep them in check, and they enjoyed the trappings of martial life, fine horses, weapons, and armour, and traditional noble pastimes such as hunting and falconry.16 At least some of the qualities displayed by Normans in crusade histories – ambition, aggression, largesse, avarice, bravery, or treachery – would have been instantly recognizable to an audience as quintessentially Norman, whether or not they were explicitly described as being Norman. These qualities were part of the Norman reputation or fama, which brought its own benefits and detriments to the image of Normans on crusade. By far the best recognized, if controversial, ‘Norman’ source for the First Crusade is the Gesta Francorum. The primacy of the Gesta as the earliest and most influential narrative for the First Crusade continues to attract debate, and its status as a single-authored text of lay Italo-Norman perspective is still not secure. In 1993 Morris argued that the Gesta was composed or compiled by a cleric, but this idea has not been universally accepted.17 Many years earlier, Bréhier, Krey, and Fink suggested that certain interpolations may have been made to the original text.18 The proposition of a lost source shared in common with other First Crusade authors has been mooted for many years,19 and in a recent article Rubenstein has breathed new life into the theory. He proposed the prior existence of a collection of sermons or stories he refers to as the ‘Jerusalem History’. He claims that this text was compiled by subsequent historians from a variety of versions rather than originating with the anonymous author of the Gesta.20 We currently await the outcome of a new study by Bull on the authorship of the text. One of the cornerstone arguments for the Gesta Francorum as multi-authored or compiled work is the way in which the author appears to change his attitude towards Bohemond of Taranto as the text proceeds. While Bohemond is unquestionably the hero in the early stages of the narrative, the author becomes increasingly disenchanted with the motives of crusade leaders, finally deciding to leave Bohemond at Antioch and travel on to Jerusalem. Albu has suggested that the author’s sense of his own Norman identity and loyalty to Bohemond was eroded by the hardships of the journey and disillusionment with the crusade leaders. France’s view, on the contrary, was that the author only ever had a limited sense of Norman identity, least of all 16 Geoffrey Malaterra, De rebus gestis Rogerii Calabriae et Siciliae comitis et Roberti Guiscardi ducis fratris eius, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, V (1), 2nd edn, ed. Ernesto Pontieri, Bologna 1925–8, 8. 17 Colin Morris, ‘The Gesta Francorum as Narrative History’, Reading Medieval Studies, 19, 1993, 55–71. For criticism of this argument, see France, ‘Use of the Anonymous Gesta’, 30. See also Jay Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum, and who was Peter Tudebode?’, Revue Mabillon, 16, 2005, 179–204 at 187–8. Set pieces such as the conversation between Kerbogha and his mother certainly suggest that the Gesta is in fact a far more sophisticated piece of literature than its contemporaries gave it credit for: Wolf, ‘Crusade and Narrative’; Natasha R. Hodgson, ‘The Role of Kerbogha’s Mother in the Gesta Francorum and Selected Chronicles of the First Crusade’, in Gendering the Crusades, ed. Susan B. Edgington and Sarah Lambert, Cardiff 2001, 163–76. 18 Histoire anonyme de la première croisade, ed. Louis Bréhier, Paris 1924, pp. v–viii. See also August C. Krey, ‘A Neglected Passage in the Gesta and its Bearing on the Literature of the First Crusade’, in The Crusades and Other Historical Essays Presented to Dana C. Munro, ed. Louis J. Paetow, NewYork 1928, 68–76; Harold S. Fink, ‘The Foundation of the Latin States, 1099–1118’, in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 6 vols, Philadelphia (vol. I) and Madison WI (vols II–VI) 1955–89, I, 368–409 at 391. 19 The Hills refer to this as an ‘Ur-Gesta’: Peter Tudebode, Historia de Hierosolymitano itinere, ed. John Hugh Hill and Laurita L. Hill, Paris 1977 [cited hereafter as Tudebode], 22–3. 20 Rubenstein, ‘What is the Gesta Francorum?’.



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a shared identity with Normandy or Norman England. The Gesta Francorum gave only a limited role to Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, compared to the French texts, and even Bohemond and Tancred are periodically referred to as Franks.21 Albu came to the conclusion that the author of the Gesta may have found the crusade a kind of cathartic spiritual transformation, but that for him the Norman princes ‘seemed unimproved by their crusading experience’.22 The Gesta’s treatment of the two Norman leaders differs. Bohemond’s lust for booty and desire for land were understood to be typically Norman qualities, and his decision to remain at Antioch thus represented the triumph of his Normannitas over his commitment to the crusader cause. Tancred, who travelled on to Jerusalem, never received the same acclaim as his uncle early in the text, but the author remained consistent in his flattery, using adjectives such as fortis or prudens, or naming him miles Christi.23 Perhaps Tancred does come across as grasping when he sought to capture a Christian fortress against Bohemond’s wishes, but he is hardly the rash, self-absorbed hothead that Albu portrayed.24 In Tancred’s quarrel with Baldwin of Boulogne over Tarsus, the author described how the citizens wanted to be ruled by Tancred, that miles Christi who had fought against the Turks so bravely.25 During the desertions at Antioch, the crusade leaders took an oath that they would to go on to Jerusalem to improve morale in the army, but Tancred went one step further. He pledged that as long as he had forty knights, ‘he would not turn aside either from this battle or from the march to Jerusalem.’26 The incident at Jerusalem when Tancred raged at the murder and suicide of his Saracen prisoners is somewhat ambiguous: Albu interprets it as a simple case of thwarted bloodlust.27 Alternatively, Tancred was probably lamenting the loss of potential ransom, but there was also a matter of honour involved, as he and Gaston of Béarn had given the prisoners their standards for protection.28 In comparison, the Gesta author implied that Bohemond of Taranto had broken his word to some of the noble inhabitants of Marra whom he had promised to save from death, an incident which Ralph of Caen passed over.29 As well as his portrayal of Tancred, it also seems that undue emphasis has been placed on the Gesta author’s decision to desert Bohemond and travel on to Jerusalem. The author, like other crusaders, was first and foremost a pilgrim, and in any case, the crusades necessitated fluidity in social and personal bonds when 21

Albu, Normans in their Histories, 152–5; Albu, ‘Probing the Passions’, 14; France, ‘Normans and Crusading’, 88–9, 91–3. Robert does feature in a story about the capture of a golden standard from a Turkish emir at Ascalon, but this is after Bohemond has fallen from prominence in the history: Anonymi Gesta Francorum, ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer, Heidelberg 1890 [cited hereafter as Gesta Francorum], 494–8. 22 Albu, ‘Probing the Passions’, 2, 14. 23 Gesta Francorum, 197, 202, 218, 223. 24 Ibid. 164–5; Albu, Normans in their Histories, 164. 25 Gesta Francorum, 222. He even refuses to despoil Christians (‘ego namque Christianos nolo ­expoliare’): ibid. 223. 26 Ibid. 340–1. 27 Albu, Normans in their Histories, 150. 28 Gesta Francorum, 472–4. For recent detailed discussion of accounts of the Jerusalem massacres: Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘The Jerusalem Massacre of July 1099 in the Western Historiography of the Crusades’, Crusades, 3, 2004, 15–75; David Hay, ‘Gender Bias and Religious Intolerance in Accounts of the “Massacres” of the First Crusade’, in Tolerance and Intolerance: Social Conflict in the Age of the Crusades, ed. Michael Gervers and James M. Powell, New York 2001, 3–10; Penny J. Cole, ‘ “O God, the Heathen Have Come into Thy Inheritance” (Ps. 78.1): The Theme of Religious Pollution in Crusade Documents, 1095–1188’, in Crusaders and Muslims in Twelfth-Century Syria ed. Maya Shatzmiller, Leiden 1993, 84–111 at 89–96. 29 Gesta Francorum, 407–8. See also Hay, ‘Gender Bias’, 5; Gesta Tancredi, 679.

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death, famine, and poverty abounded. Tancred himself came under criticism from Raymond of Aguilers for switching his allegiance from Count Raymond IV of Toulouse to Godfrey of Bouillon during the march to Jerusalem, a decision that was doubtless born of political and financial expediency.30 Ultimately, questions over the anonymous author’s attitude towards Bohemond, his comparatively ambivalent stance towards Duke Robert, and the nature of the text’s authorship mean that the Gesta Francorum is perhaps not the best gauge of notions of Norman identity in the early crusades. In the event that the Gesta Francorum could be proven to be a multi-authored compilation, as Rubenstein has suggested, these previous readings would need to be reassessed in any case. Contemporary reworkings of the Gesta (or an early version of it) often enjoyed more popularity and, naturally, reflected different perspectives according to patronage and audience. Robert the monk, who wrote from the heart of French royal authority in Rheims, produced the most popular First Crusade history, as measured by extant manuscripts.31 In Robert’s history Hugh of Vermandois took centre stage, but the duke of Normandy also had a higher profile than in the Gesta Francorum.32 Baudri, abbot of Bourgueil near Angers, who also based his First Crusade history on the Gesta Francorum, was copied and read in the twelfth century. We know little about his family’s background, but Davis (and more recently Webber) included Baudri’s Carmina on the Norman Conquest as a key text in their assessments of developing Norman identity.33 Baudri boasted Adela of Blois, the daughter of William the Conqueror, among his literary patrons.34 His First Crusade history post-dated the Carmina, by which point he had become archbishop of Dol on the border of Normandy, but like Robert of Rheims his historical focus was firmly fixed on Hugh of Vermandois and the French contingent. Orderic Vitalis knew Baudri well, and told how, unhappy with his congregation of ‘unruly Bretons’, the archbishop often retreated to his church’s estates in Normandy, visiting and teaching at centres of Norman scholarship: Fécamp, Saint-Wandrille, and Jumièges.35 Unsurprisingly it was to Baudri, rather than the Gesta Francorum, that Orderic turned for his account of the First Crusade, a fact which, along with embarrassment about Grandmesnil desertions at Antioch, led Chibnall to suggest that Orderic deliberately passed up the opportunity to aggrandize the activities of Norman participants.36 Orderic himself was a monk at the well established Norman monastery of SaintÉvroul, founded in the 1050s by the Giroie and Grandmesnil families. Born of mixed parentage in England and calling himself an Englishman, his perspective was firmly fixed on the Anglo-Norman ‘people’. Orderic’s monastery also had close links to the monastery of Sta Eufemia, founded by the Giroie in Norman Italy. 30

Le Liber de Raymond d’Aguilers, ed. John Hugh Hill and Laurita L. Hill, Paris 1969, 112. Ralph made no mention of this and considered Tancred to be equal in leadership with Raymond of Saint-Gilles and Robert of Normandy at the siege of Arqah, simply stating that Bohemond returned to Antioch after Marra and was later missed at the siege of Jerusalem: Gesta Tancredi, 680, 687. 31 The Gesta survives in some seven manuscripts, three of those from the twelfth century, whereas Robert’s history exists in an impressive total of ninety-four manuscripts, thirty-nine dating from the twelfth century: Rudolf Hiestand, ‘Il Cronista medievale e il suo pubblico: alcune osservazione in margine alla storiographia delle crociate’, Annali della facoltà di lettere e filosophia dell’università di Napoli, 27, 1984–5, 207–27. 32 Ibid. 227. 33 Davis, Normans and their Myth, 50; Webber, Evolution, 137–41. 34 Les Œuvres poétiques de Baudri de Bourgueil, ed. Phyllis Abrahams, Paris 1926, 198–200. 35 Orderic, V, 188–91. 36 Ibid. pp. xiii, xvii. He may, however, have exaggerated Robert of Normandy’s role at Latakia: ibid. 270–3.



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William of Malmesbury was also of mixed heritage and has suffered similar criticism as an historian of the crusades. William has been censured for over-reliance on Fulcher of Chartres’s 1106 redaction, although Thomson has recently reappraised the value of his individual contribution; he may also have exchanged information with Orderic.37 Both William and Henry of Huntingdon appear to have capitalized on the potential for eulogizing the Norman role on crusade, especially the leadership of Duke Robert. Henry justified his decision to include a crusade narrative on the grounds that ‘it would be impossible to keep silent about the wonderful and mighty works of God … since they concern the duke of the Normans’.38 He attributed to Robert a speech given by Bohemond in the Gesta Francorum, when crusaders were fleeing at Dorylaeum, and praised him for dispatching three Turks in moments.39 William of Malmesbury praised Robert for his brave feats of arms at Ascalon and at Antioch, where he was credited with slaying Turkish general Kerbogha.40 Both William and Henry asserted that Robert had been offered the crown of Jerusalem before Godfrey of Bouillon, but criticized him for refusing this honour and invoking divine displeasure because his demurral stemmed not from modesty but from reluctance to shoulder such a difficult burden.41 Notably, neither made a particular attempt to link Bohemond or Tancred with their Norman heritage when praising their crusading successes.42 The Norman ‘credentials’ of these three twelfth-century historians are well known, but the fact that they relied heavily on the work of others has created difficulties in examining their own ideas about Norman identities on crusade. A lesser known author, but one with a particularly ‘Norman’ perspective and characteristics, was the fighting priest Raol, who wrote about the conquest of Lisbon during the Second Crusade in 1147.43 Raol’s emphasis on the importance of unity and right intent for a successful crusade has been considered in detail by Phillips.44 Loud pointed out that even in the mid-twelfth century Raol repeatedly referred to the troops in his contingent as ‘the Normans and the English’.45 The two groups almost invariably acted together, especially in contrast to certain other groups such as the Flemings and the men of Cologne.46 As Thomas points out, however, motivational speeches to both groups focused on their Norman rather than English heritage.47 It should also be noted that while Raol travelled with and favoured the Anglo-Norman contingent

37 38

Rodney M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, 2nd edn, Woodbridge 2003, 178–89. Huntingdon, 426–9, 428 n. 53. Henry also described Robert as ‘invictus’ when leading the first charge at Harim and splitting a Turk down to his breast with one blow: ibid. 432–3. 39 Ibid. 422–3. 40 Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, 652–3, 702–3. 41 Huntingdon, 442–3. 42 William asserted that Bohemond’s family was Norman: Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, 608–9. 43 For the identification of the author: Harold Livermore, ‘The Conquest of Lisbon and its Author’, Portuguese Studies, 6, 1990, 1–16. 44 Jonathan Phillips, ‘Ideas of Crusade and Holy War in De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi (The Conquest of Lisbon)’, in The Holy Land, Holy Lands, and Christian History, ed R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 36, Woodbridge 2000, 123–39. 45 Loud, ‘The Gens Normannorum’, 115. 46 Interestingly despite the rapacious reputation of the Normans it was the other groups who were criticized for looting the city when the Normans and English remained at their posts, ‘for [to them] good faith and scruples of conscience were matters of the highest import’. Raol also described the ‘Franks’ building two separate churches for burying the dead, one for the Flemings and the men of Cologne, and another for the English and Normans: De expugnatione, 133–5. 47 Hugh M. Thomas, The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066– 1220, Oxford 2003, 247.

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of Hervey de Glanville, it is uncertain whether he himself came from England or the Continent.48 Why, then, has Ralph of Caen been so underused in comparison to these other texts? If he was a forthright apologist for the Norman race, it is surprising that he has received little attention from historians of the Norman ‘myth’. He was largely ignored by Davis and Chibnall, and receives only cursory treatment by Albu in comparison to the Gesta Francorum.49 He has also been mistrusted as a source by historians of crusading, for a number of reasons. Firstly, he was not an eye-witness of the First Crusade, though he did have close links with participants. Secondly, he waited for a considerable amount of time before starting his history between 1112 and 1118, claiming that he did not want to write while Tancred was still alive, for fear that people would assume he was writing for flattery or patronage. Unfortunately, even modern historians have accused him of exactly that, dismissing his history as ‘Norman panegyric’ or a ‘paean to the Normans and their Guiscardian line’.50 Asbridge asserts that because the Gesta Tancredi was ‘by nature … designed to provide a laudatory account of Tancred’s life’ the whole narrative account must be biased in both the selection and recollection of events. Asbridge admits that Ralph occasionally berated himself for straying from his stated purpose, and that he could be critical of his hero.51 Ralph freely acknowledged that Tancred was the focus of his history, but he also bemoaned the lack of contemporary authors willing to write serious histories of the First Crusade, suggesting that he had intentions of doing both. With conventional medieval modesty he asserted that he had delayed writing to see if someone better qualified would take on such an important work. Edgington, while agreeing that the Gesta Tancredi is a much underused and undervalued text, criticized Ralph’s ‘rabid anti-Poitevin’ stance.52 Ralph’s partisan attempts to discredit the discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch have also been treated with suspicion, although he was not the only contemporary to voice scepticism.53 Even Raymond of Aguilers, champion of the veracity of the Lance, was criticized by Peter Bartholomew for having doubts, though the author used this episode as a rhetorical device in his text.54 A final reason for questioning the historical accuracy and contemporary importance of the Gesta Tancredi revolves around the incompleteness of the only surviving manuscript.55 However, the Historia belli sacri, compiled in the 1130s at an important centre for Italo-Norman history, Monte Cassino, found Ralph’s text of sufficient quality to make considerable use of it, despite having access to many other sources, as France has shown.56 Ralph of Caen’s historical cachet has also suffered because large amounts of his 48 49

Livermore, ‘Conquest’, 6–7. Davis, Normans and their Myth; Marjorie Chibnall, The Normans, Oxford 2000, 107–24; Albu, Normans in their Histories, 164–79. 50 France, ‘Normans and Crusading’, 90. 51 Asbridge, Creation of Principality of Antioch, 7–8. 52 For Ralph’s views on the Poitevins: Gesta Tancredi, 651. Susan B. Edgington, ‘The First Crusade: Reviewing the Evidence’, in The First Crusade: Origins and Impact, ed. Jonathan Phillips, Manchester 1997, 55–77 at 60. See also Albu, ‘Probing the Passions’, 11–12. Dudo of Saint-Quentin, who may have been a literary model for Ralph, displayed a similar antipathy towards them (below): Dudo of SaintQuentin, A History of the Norman People, ed. and trans. Eric Christiansen, Woodbridge 1998, 69. 53 For a full discussion, see Colin Morris, ‘Policy and Visions: The Case of the Holy Lance at Antioch’, in War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J. O. Prestwich, ed. John Gillingham and James C. Holt, Cambridge 1984, 33–45. 54 Liber de Raymond d’Aguilers, ed. Hill and Hill, 123–4. 55 Asbridge, Creation of Principality of Antioch, 7–8. 56 France, ‘Use of the Anonymous Gesta’, 37.



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narrative were written in verse. His grand prosimetric style has been thought to lack the religious sense of an ‘official crusade history’ given by other major chron­ iclers, especially in comparison to the ‘raw, reliable reportage’ style of the Gesta Francorum.57 The Bachrachs assert that his decision to cast the battle of Dorylaeum in verse suggested that ‘he was signalling his readers or listeners that his account was not as soundly based in fact as he would have liked’.58 They also argue that the preponderance of Tancred’s appearances in the prose sections of the work suggests that they were intended to be interpreted as factual. Such distinctions between fact and fiction based on the presence of prose and verse are precarious. In retelling the battle scenes of the First Crusade Ralph was traversing old ground which would have been familiar to most audiences. There was also a strong classical tradition of casting ‘factual’ history in epic verse, especially battles, and several ostensibly factual narratives of crusade expeditions were written entirely in verse, such as that of Gilo of Paris which appeared almost concurrently with Ralph’s history.59 Guibert of Nogent deliber­ated whether to cast his Dei gesta Francorum in verse or prose, and having settled on prose still included lines of poetry where he considered it appropriate.60 Some writers in prose drew information from poetic narratives; Albert of Aachen used the Chanson d’Antioche.61 Like Ralph of Caen and Guibert, Robert of Rheims included lines of poetry, and it is on this basis that Sweetenham argues that he shared a lost source with Gilo, a history written in Latin hexameters.62 Fulcher of Chartres, Bartolf of Nangis, Guibert of Nogent, Robert of Rheims, and Ralph himself all featured in Pabst’s groundbreaking study of the prosimetrum, or ‘mixed form’, in medieval literature, and Ziolkowski asserts that accounts of the Crusades constituted ‘a sizeable subgenre’ of extant historical prosimetra.63 Even Ralph’s literary style has come under fire: Albu condemned his ‘pompous syntax’ and ‘second-rate bombast’ which ‘seems foolish after the simplicity of the Gesta Francorum’.64 But it was that very simplicity, displayed by the anonymous author, which attracted criticism and purportedly inspired contemporary historians such as Robert of Rheims, Baudri of Bourgueil, and Guibert of Nogent to write their own narratives.65 Neither Ralph of Caen’s decision to intersperse parts of his history with verse nor his focus on specific heroes should be regarded as particularly unusual at this time. Both factors suggest that he was deliberately aiming his message towards an elite audience, ecclesiastical and possibly lay, using verse to display his literary skill and engage the audience, and encouraging them to identify 57

Bull warns that such assumptions about the Gesta are misleading: Marcus Bull, The Miracles of Our Lady of Rocamadour, Woodbridge 1999, 5. 58 Bachrach and Bachrach, 7. 59 Gilo’s history is thought to have been written before 1118: Gilo of Paris, The Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, ed. and trans. Christopher W. Grocock and Elizabeth Siberry, Oxford 1997, p. xxiv. 60 Guibert, 79–84. 61 Susan Edgington, ‘Albert of Aachen and the Chansons de Geste’, in The Crusades and their Sources: Essays Presented to Bernard Hamilton, ed. John France and William G. Zajac, Aldershot 1998, 23–37. 62 Gilo of Paris, Historia Vie Hierosolimitane, p. lx; Robert the Monk’s History of the First Crusade: Historia Iherosolimitana, trans. Carol Sweetenham, Aldershot 2005, 61. 63 Bernhard Pabst, Prosimetrum: Tradition und Wandel einer Literaturform zwischen Spätantike und Spätmittelalter, Köln 1994, 841–65; Jan Ziolkowski, ‘The Prosimetrum in the Classical Tradition’, in Prosimetrum: Crosscultural Perspectives on Narrative in Prose and Verse, ed. Joseph Harris and Karl Reichl, Woodbridge 1997, 45–65 at 55–7. Ziolkowski does not include Bartolf of Nangis in this list, but adds the thirteenth- century Historia Constantopolitana of Gunther of Pairis. 64 Albu, Normans in their Histories, 176–7. 65 Guibert, 80; Robert of Rheims, Historia Hierosolymitana, in Recueil des historiens des croisades: historiens occidentaux, III, 717–882 [cited hereafter as Robert of Rheims], at 721; Baudri of Bourgueil, Historia Jerosolimitana, ibid. IV, 1–111 [cited hereafter as Baudri] at 9–10.

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with Tancred as a model crusader in the traditional didactic historical mould. His was not the first history written in the Latin East with a view to encouraging new crusades from the West by inspiring ecclesiastics and laymen alike.66 As a result of suspicions about the value of Ralph as an historical source, the sense of Norman ‘identity’ which emerges from his text has been treated as a selfimposed literary construct which was probably not reflective of aristocratic sens­ ibilities among Norman crusaders and settlers at the time.67 Exactly the same thing could be said about the eleventh-century historians such as Dudo of Saint-Quentin, William of Jumièges, William of Poitiers, Amatus of Monte Cassino, William of Apulia, and Geoffrey Malaterra, who were so instrumental in creating the myth of a gens Normannorum, as Loud has shown.68 Historians of the eleventh and early twelfth century were not so much in the business of recording an existing identity as in forging one from a disparate group of peoples who may or may not have identified themselves as ‘Norman’ at the time. The Bachrachs disagree with Albu that Ralph presented an exaggeratedly ‘Norman’ view of the First Crusade. They point out that even Ralph was occasionally guilty of using the catch-all term of Franks to refer to Bohemond and Tancred, that he often praised France (Gaul) as well as Normandy, and held an ambivalent opinion of the French Normans, illustrated by his account of the character of Duke Robert and the deserters from Antioch.69 He was no more critical of the duke, however, than other pro-Norman crusade authors. Orderic Vitalis described Robert as ‘a weak duke, sunk in sloth and voluptuousness’ and bemoaned the fact that Normandy was ‘wretchedly tormented by the feuds of her sons’.70 Although writing from a Frankish perspective, Guibert of Nogent’s criticisms of Robert were strikingly like Ralph’s, down to his propensity for tears.71 Conversely, Ralph did praise Robert of Normandy’s role at Dorylaeum, when, remembering his Norman heritage as a fighter and son of the Conqueror, he rallied troops in danger of flight.72 Throughout Ralph’s text, the Norman and Guiscardian heritage of both Bohemond and Tancred are emphasized. The lack of information about Tancred’s father (variously called William or Odo the good marquis) is particularly telling: Ralph celebrated Tancred’s Norman heritage through his mother Emma, besides his position as an ‘even more lofty nephew’ of his mother’s brothers, ‘who had demonstrated the glory of their military prowess beyond their homeland, Normandy’.73 Robert Guiscard was treated almost as the archetypal Norman, whose exploits and cunning were known everywhere, and whose deeds Tancred aimed to emulate, although his grandfather’s reputation was used against Tancred in his dispute with Arnulf of Chocques.74 In terms of a common identity between Normans and Apulians, the role of Bohemond, Tancred, and Robert of Normandy in the vanguard at the battle of Dorylaeum was emphasized; they set out ‘as if with one common thought, they sought to propagate the unique glory of their fatherland’.75 This may have been misleading, as Ralph effectively ignored the role of Robert of Flanders and the 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75

e.g. Fulcher, 115. Albu, Normans in their Histories, 165–6. Loud, ‘The Gens Normannorum’. Bachrach and Bachrach, 14–15. See Gesta Tancredi, 616, 662–3. Orderic, V, 27. Guibert, 133. Gesta Tancredi, 621–2. Ibid. 605; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 21. e.g. Gesta Tancredi, 675, 700. Ibid. 621; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 45.



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Greek general Tatikos, but it was an error of omission rather than deliberate falsehood. The Gauls, especially the Normans, were praised for standing with the men of Apulia against the Poitevins in the conflict over spoils at Antioch, but Ralph made it clear that unity among the crusaders was more important, as Tancred disapproved of shedding Christian blood.76 Ralph’s presentation of Normanness in the Gesta Tancredi may have derived from his use of Dudo of Saint-Quentin’s history, another prosimetric text, as a literary model, one which would have been well known in Ralph’s sphere of influence and which Loud asserts was aimed at a courtly audience.77 Ralph made it clear that other writers had already commemorated the deeds of leaders such as Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, among others. His aim was to celebrate his Antiochenus princeps.78 As historians of the First Crusade searched for a means to express new events of biblical proportions – the capture and settlement of the Holy Land – it was natural that they should turn to the most recently emerging trends in historical literature for inspiration and guidance, much of which centred on the Normans. As a group, their military activity at the frontiers of Christendom was already taking on Christian dimensions in the Italian historiographical school,79 and this may have provided a blueprint for portraying crusaders. The development of crusading to the East did hold parallels with early Norman activities in Italy and northern Iberia which had begun as pilgrimage and mercenary warfare.80 It is not inconceivable that crusade authors recognized Norman characteristics promulgated by creators of the Norman ‘myth’ to be well suited to crusading: Normans were brave, adventurous, bellicose, and in need of a spiritual focus for their aggression. This was a double-edged sword, however, when one considers the perceived Norman predilection for greed, lust for booty, and propensity for in-fighting. Unfortunately, what Albu calls ‘the dark side of Normanness’81 clashed violently with ideas about the proper distribution of booty, unity, and right intent in the context of crusading. Nowhere was this better illustrated than in Hervey de Glanville’s speech to those of his men who wished to abandon the siege at Lisbon in 1147. He praised the Norman characteristics of ‘continual valour’ and their ‘military spirit, ever tempered by the experience of greatest hardships’. They could not be accused of idleness, but envy, which had not affected their allies, ‘crept in among [them] as a handmaid’. The would-be deserters were accused of attempting to break bonds of allegiance, and of cowardice and lust for booty – fairly standard Norman traits – and yet Normandy was portrayed as the mother of their gens, and it was her reputation they risked through their actions.82 The assumption that Normans were more concerned with booty and territorial 76 77

Gesta Tancredi, 676. For the shedding of Christian blood, see ibid. 633, 638, 675. Bachrach and Bachrach, 8–9 n. 24; Albu, Normans in their Histories, 176–7; van Houts asserts that Dudo ‘became the starting point for all later Norman historiography’: Elisabeth van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. Christopher Harper-Bill and Elisabeth van Houts, Woodbridge 2002, 103–21 at 105. See also Loud, ‘The Gens Normannorum’, 108. 78 Gesta Tancredi, 646. 79 Chibnall, Normans, 119. 80 The Normans in Europe, ed. and trans. Elisabeth van Houts, Manchester 2000, 225–6. Across Europe, the careers of Roger of Tosny and Robert Bordet in Spain, Robert Crispin and Roussell of Bailleul in Byzantium, and the Hauteville clan in southern Italy meant that Norman mercenaries already functioned on the borders of Christendom and were brought into conflict with the Muslims as well as Byzantines and Lombards. As early as 999 a group of pilgrims helped the Lombards defend Salerno against Muslim attack. 81 Albu, Normans in their Histories, 108. 82 De expugnatione, 107–9.

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conquest than the spiritual aspects of crusading is not a new one. Historians such as Haskins and Douglas took the view that Norman involvement in crusading and the settlement of Antioch were extensions of the Norman ‘achievement’: activities of conquest and colonization in France, England, and the southern Italian states.83 Particular emphasis has been placed on Bohemond of Taranto’s ambitions in the Byzantine Empire. Disinherited by his younger half-sibling Roger, Bohemond was forced to carve a niche for himself against the Byzantines in southern Italy. His motivation for taking the cross has long been a matter for speculation, even among contemporaries: whether he wished to press for a powerful title within the Byzantine Empire, or whether indeed his ultimate aim as a crusader was to supplant the emperor.84 Tancred, like his older relative, was an ambitious lord who deliberately undertook feats of daring to attract a retinue and win booty, and his territorial aims were evident when he established his own principality in Galilee before Bohemond’s captivity called him away to act as regent of Antioch in 1101. However, Ralph of Caen was keen to distinguish between the attitudes of Bohemond and Tancred towards booty. Bohemond was portrayed as easily led astray by the promise of the wealth of Constantinople when he received Emperor Alexius’s ‘invitation’ during the First Crusade. He was seen to assume the yoke of homage in return, which Tancred famously tried to avoid by crossing the Bosphoros in disguise.85 Both were displaying traditional ‘Norman’ characteristics: Bohemond avarice, and Tancred cunning. In comparison to Bohemond, however, Tancred still needed to establish his own wealth and reputation, and such feats of daring were a necessary and honourable way to accomplish this. Famously, when the army was crossing the river Vardar, Tancred plunged into the river to rescue the rearguard who came under attack.86 This gained the crusaders much booty, and earned Tancred the loyalty of many warriors. Nonetheless, true to the Norman stereotype he was a generous lord and prepared to borrow money if necessary to keep his supporters out of poverty: ‘he was in a position of begging on behalf of others … even when war and booty enriched him.’87 When Ralph bemoaned Baldwin of Boulogne’s seizure of Tarsus, which had been won by Tancred’s efforts, he described his hero’s anger at the loss of such rich booty, but he asserted that Tancred’s decision to acquiesce rested on his desire to avoid shedding Christian blood, an opinion shared by the Gesta Francorum.88 In 1104, when Bohemond left Antioch to seek help in the West, he reputedly stripped it of all its wealth, leaving Tancred so poor that he even abstained from wine so that his fellow soldiers would not suffer from famine.89 In these ways Ralph underlined Tancred’s endurance and commitment to the Christian cause through personal sacrifice, which outweighed his love for booty. The First Crusade coincided with a highly significant period in the development of medieval warrior culture. The values of the knightly class as a social group were 83 Charles Homer Haskins, The Normans in European History, New York 1915; Douglas, Norman Fate, 156–213. 84 Especially the hostile Greek chronicler Anna Comnena: The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter, Harmondsworth 1969, 329. See also Jonathan Shepard, ‘When Greek Meets Greek: Alexius Comnenus and Bohemond in 1097–98’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 12, 1988, 185–277; Krey, ‘Neglected Passage’. 85 Gesta Tancredi, 612–14. 86 Ibid. 608–9. 87 Ibid. 610; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 29. 88 Gesta Tancredi, 633–4; Gesta Francorum, 223. 89 Gesta Tancredi, 713.



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increasingly based on a blend of military and Christian ideals. The Norman ‘myth’ also had a role to play in this process of reform. On accepting conversion and settling in Normandy the Normans had embarked upon a process of transformation from pagan warriors to Christian knights, and through the systematic ­ foundation of monasteries, first at ducal and then at aristocratic levels, they confirmed their commitment to that reform and continued to develop their ‘reputation’ through literary and artistic patronage.90 Ralph’s reasons for borrowing from Norman histor­ iographical trends may not have rested solely on his Norman origins and influences, or on the role of Normans in crusade and settlement. Crusading was born from this mixture of lay and ecclesiastical values that were gradually shaping perceptions of Christian knighthood, and played an important role in attempts to restrict and direct violence in a socially acceptable manner. From the outset, crusade preachers focused on unrestrained violence against clergy, women, and the poor, and on brigandish behaviour, in order to motivate knights to take the cross.91 The Normans were also famed for squabbling among themselves, but there is no indication that Urban II marked them out them specifically in his speech at Clermont.92 The enthusiastic Norman response to the crusade message, however, indicates that at least some of them had spiritual as well as territorial concerns. Ralph of Caen wrote of Tancred’s moral struggle with the demands of a secular military life and his desire for earthly glory: ‘his soul was at a crossroads. Which of the two paths should he follow: the Gospels or the world?’93 The dilemma of the natural-born warrior was solved by the advent of crusading, a ‘new means of earning salvation’94 that did not necessitate giving up arms for the cloister. Just as the triumphs of crusade armies were represented by the idea of diverse groups working in unison, so periods of disunity could heighten antagonisms between different contingents; notions about the characteristics of certain ethnic sub-groups became more apparent, and ‘the dark side of Normanness’ came to the fore. Accordingly, the final section of this article will briefly consider desertions at the siege of Antioch, where Ralph of Caen reveals some of his ideas about how the advent of crusading clashed with the image of the gens Normannorum. At Antioch the army endured a terrible seven and a half-month siege before finally capturing the city through Bohemond of Taranto’s ‘Norman’ wiles on 3 June 1098, only to be besieged itself by a large army under Kerbogha of Mosul. The crusaders were put under enormous pressure from famine and their unity began to disintegrate, with deserters climbing over the walls to escape. The designated leader of the host, Count Stephen of Blois, had already retreated to the nearby town of Iskenderun, claiming to be severely ill. Deciding the situation was hopeless, Stephen returned to the Byzantine court, where he informed the emperor of the crusaders’ dire straits, then returned home to France. The Gesta Francorum was Stephen’s harshest critic, branding him a coward (imprudens), who had only been pretending to be ill.95 Of the later Anglo-Norman historians, Henry of Huntingdon

90 Cassandra Potts, Monastic Revival and Regional Identity in Early Normandy, Woodbridge 1997; Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Washington DC 1997. 91 Fulcher, 136–7; Guibert, 113; Robert of Rheims, 728; Baudri, 14. 92 Two eye-witness accounts suggest that Urban made his appeal specific to the French: Guibert, 109; Robert of Rheims, 727–8. 93 Gesta Tancredi, 606; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 22. 94 Guibert, 87. 95 Gesta Francorum, 353.

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accused Stephen of fleeing ‘like a woman’ from the siege.96 Orderic Vitalis, in a unique account, told how Stephen’s Norman wife Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, persuaded the count to take the cross again for the expedition of 1101 ‘between conjugal caresses’.97 Ralph of Caen was less damning than the Gesta and gave an abbreviated account of Stephen’s desertion. He agreed that it was the count’s advice which persuaded the emperor against helping the crusaders, but made it clear that the emperor’s army would be outnumbered four to one.98 Ralph also accepted the veracity of Stephen’s illness as his reason for withdrawing from the siege.99 He even provided unique information about the count’s participation in a battle against a Turkish relief force at an earlier point in the siege. The Bachrachs have interpreted Ralph’s lenience towards Stephen as a mark of deference to his Norman wife Adela, but Ralph, unlike Orderic and Guibert of Nogent, made no explicit mention of her.100 Among other deserters from Antioch, Guibert included the elusively titled William of Normandy and his brother Alberic. He deliberately failed to mention the towns from which they came because he claimed close friendship with some members of their family.101 His audience evidently had a very good idea of who those deserters were, and thus he drew attention to their ignominy and their Norman origins while claiming to protect them from shame. In fact, at least some of the deserters who climbed over the wall of Antioch to escape Kerbogha’s siege were named in almost every other source.102 They even appeared in the chronicle of Orderic Vitalis, despite the fact that William, Ivo, and Alberic were from the family of his patrons, the Grandmesnils.103 Ralph of Caen, like most of these other authors, felt no compunction about naming names, but his account also made specific reference to their Norman origins, and how they betrayed the reputation of their race by their cowardly behaviour. In the face of such want and such daily difficulties … some of the troops considered the idea of flight. This was a worthy, noble group inclined toward battle that, up to this time, had enjoyed praise for its worthiness. These were William and his brothers Albert [Alberic] and Ivo, all three having the family name Maisnil. There was also Ralph of Fontanella from the Touraine. Alas and shame, it was Normandy who sent forth the brothers. Everywhere the Normans had victory and were the glory of the world. This people were victorious over the English, the Sicilians, the Greeks, the Campanians and the Apulians. The people of Maine, Calabria, Africa and Japix serve them. Oh that shame should come from such a lineage!104

96

Huntingdon, 436–7. For more detail see James A. Brundage, ‘An Errant Crusader: Stephen of Blois’, Traditio, 16, 1960, 380–94. 97 Orderic, V, 325. 98 Gesta Tancredi, 658–9. 99 Ibid. 649. 100 Bachrach and Bachrach, 14; Orderic, V, 325; Guibert, 132. Ralph simply mentions that Stephen had connections to the English king: Gesta Tancredi, 616. 101 Guibert, 217. 102 In Albert of Aachen’s account William of Grandmesnil is associated with the attempted escape of William the Carpenter in January 1098 (Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. and trans. Susan Edgington, Oxford 2007, 304–5, 310–11). The Gesta Francorum (332–3) identified the escapers on the night of 10 June 1098 as William of Grandmesnil, Alberic his brother, Guy Troussel, and Lambert the Poor. Peter Tudebode added William of Bernella, William brother of Richard, and Ivo of Grandmesnil to this list: Tudebode, 97. 103 Ivo of Grandmesnil and Miles of Bray (father of Guy Troussel) returned and took part in the 1101 crusade. 104 Gesta Tancredi, 662; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 101.



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Ralph’s ideas about a shared Norman identity are explicitl here, and his vehement criticism draws an interesting contrast with his portrayal of other fugitives. William the Carpenter was a French deserter at Antioch, and his betrayal was considered shocking because of his family connections to Hugh of Vermandois. Nicknamed ‘Carpenter’ because of his battle-style, he became ‘the shade of a great name’, when he and Peter the Hermit tried to flee and were brought back to the camp in shame and ignominy by Tancred himself.105 The Gesta Francorum described how William spent the night in Bohemond’s tent lying on the ground, before a very public dressing down by the angry crusade leader until his French compatriots intervened.106 Robert of Rheims presented a more French-oriented view: William was an excellent warrior who was pardoned on the grounds that it was hunger, not cowardice, which caused him to flee, and by virtue of his relationship to Hugh of Vermandois.107 Guibert of Nogent almost entirely ignored William’s role, and directed Bohemond’s vehemence against Peter the Hermit, exploiting the situation to discredit unsanctioned crusade preaching, and, in parallel to Ralph’s treatment of the Grandmesnils, focused on the shame Peter inflicted upon the French race.108 In the Gesta Tancredi, Ralph emphasized that both William and another deserter, Guy the Red, were ‘not obscure’ men, but important knights of the king of France.109 Bohemond’s dressing-down was even more direct: ‘You are noble and your path is clear. Your tents shall remain here and will be set aside as a public latrine to the eternal shame of your name and your family.’ However, Ralph shared Robert of Rheims’s opinion that ‘the stimulus of hunger condemned them to infamy’ and this was the reason that they went to join Count Stephen. In his opinion, these men ‘shared a common generation and a common manner of life, all hated labour and sought after pleasure. They were fighters. In between wars, however, they were accustomed to luxury.’110 Ralph almost treated the French deserters like Stephen, William, and Guy the Red with a degree of leniency, for though they were skilled on the battlefield, they were not so inured to the suffering required by crusade as the Normans. Those Normans who did flee, however, contravened one of their most basic qualities – military tenacity – and thus brought shame upon their gens. They all stood in stark contrast to his vision of Tancred as an ‘amazing fighter for whom labour is desirable, war is safety, leisure is difficulty, and difficulties are matters of ease’ and who had ‘rid himself of arrogance and lust’.111 Tancred was also seen to develop through the Gesta Tancredi from a man preoccupied with his own glory and booty, to a more contemplative character, if still prone to acts of bravery. Nowhere is this more apparent than his solo sojourn before the siege of Jerusalem to the Mount of Olives, where he observed the city which he desired. Ralph evidently intended this to be interpreted as spiritual desire, as Tancred was willing to offer his life in order to kiss the base of Mount Calvary. This event was followed by a prophetic encounter with a hermit, and an attack by five soldiers whom Tancred defeated single-­handedly, after which he returned to camp with no thought for taking the horses and armour of the fallen.112 His transformation was complete. In later accounts where he took booty, his generosity to the ­Christians 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112

Guibert, 178. Gesta Francorum, 258–61. Orderic Vitalis (V, 75) did not include speeches; Robert of Rheims, 782. Guibert, 179–81. William was viscount of Melun and Gatinais; Guy the Red was count of Rochefort. Gesta Tancredi, 650–1; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 86. Gesta Tancredi, 629, 610; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 56, 28. Gesta Tancredi, 683–6.

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in the army was consistently emphasized, both when he stripped the temple in Jerusalem and in defending himself against the charges of Arnulf of Chocques.113 In the course of this article, I have argued for a re-evaluation of Ralph of Caen’s Gesta Tancredi in the context of ideas about crusading and Normannitas. Ralph has been eschewed as an historian of the First Crusade because of his favouritism towards Tancred and vilification of the Poitevins, his penchant for verse and anecdotal stories, and his high literary style. He has also been mistrusted by historians of Norman identity because he lacks consistency in his terminology, and because, in the words of Albu, Ralph’s ‘sycophantic pose’ compared poorly with the earlier Gesta Francorum, which has been interpreted as a more down-to-earth text of Norman perspective.114 The Gesta Tancredi, however, provides us with a wealth of information about Norman identity and crusade ideology through Ralph’s portrayal of a hero of Norman character and lineage, battling with his own instinctive behaviour in order to transform himself into a crusader. Tancred does desire booty and fame, and he occasionally acts rashly because of his immense bravery and battlelust. In Ralph’s view he was able to rise above the ‘the dark side of Normanness’ in a way that his older relative failed to do. While Bohemond remained to consolidate his rule over Antioch, Tancred ‘remembered that Jerusalem was the reason for his journey and that he had set out on pilgrimage to go through Antioch, not for the sake of Antioch’.115 Ralph’s sense of Normanness in the Gesta Tancredi relied less on the awareness of a shared Norman mentalité, if indeed one can be said to have existed at all, and more on how individual Normans used the traditional attributes of their gens to meet the new challenge of crusading with varying degrees of success. Bohemond, and to an extent the shamed Norman deserters from Antioch, formed an old guard, unable to transcend the less reputable aspects of the Norman character that were self-serving and led to dissention, rapaciousness, and betrayal. His hero Tancred, on the other hand, had been forged through his military experiences in Italy, as a child of Normandy trained in Calabria,116 and had earned his reputation as a crusader. He represented a new breed of Norman hero, fighting for the cause of Christendom despite his desire for worldly gain. Focusing on the career of Tancred, rather than Bohemond, meant that Ralph was able to achieve something that the Gesta Francorum could not: he transformed a knight of thoroughly Norman character and heritage into a new type of Christian warrior ready for a new war of conquest – a crusader.

113 114 115 116

Ibid. 695–6, 701. Albu, Normans in their Histories, 178–9. Gesta Tancredi, 674; trans. Bachrach and Bachrach, 119. Gesta Tancredi, 610.

KINGS, LORDS, CHARTERS, AND THE POLITICAL CULTURE OF TWELFTH-CENTURY WALES Charles Insley The development of Wales during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in terms of its political and social structures and legal and cultural institutions, has seen much attention over the last twenty years from scholars who have sought to explore the impact of the Normans in the British Isles and locate Wales’s experience in an Insular context; the work of Robin Frame, Huw Pryce, John Gillingham, Robert Bartlett, and above all the late Sir Rees Davies has been enormously influential here. Nevertheless, Welsh political culture in the twelfth century has received less detailed attention than it might. The first problem is to define what we might mean by ‘political culture’ in the twelfth century. What was it? What were its features? Moreover, no historian would wish to sustain the argument that the political values, customs, and norms of society in, say, the Vale of Glamorgan were necessarily the same as those of Llŷn or Eifionydd in Gwynedd: we should be addressing the political cultures of Wales in the plural.

The Europeanization of political culture in Wales The broad background to this paper is the transformation of Welsh society during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, what Sir Rees Davies identified as ‘far reaching and multi-faceted changes’. These changes fit into a much wider process of social, political, and cultural transformation in Europe’s peripheral zones identified by Robert Bartlett in his important and influential Making of Europe. This process, which Bartlett termed the ‘Europeanization’ of Europe, saw the political and social cultures of the heartlands of Europe – France, Germany, England – exported to the margins of Europe: the ‘Celtic’ world, Scandinavia, eastern Europe and the Balkans, the further parts of the Iberian peninsula. There were a number of agencies for this process of cultural transformation and penetration, but Bartlett identified missile weapons, the armoured cavalryman, and the stone castle as particularly influential, especially in Britain and Ireland. What this paper seeks to do is explore some of the ways in which Welsh political culture was ‘Europeanized’ in the twelfth century – by 

R. Frame, The Political Development of the British Isles, 1000–1400, Oxford 1990; A. H. Pryce, Land, Law, and the Church in Native Wales, Oxford 1995; J. Gillingham, The English and the Normans in the Twelfth Century, Woodbridge 2000; R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 1146–1222, Oxford 1982; idem, The Making of Europe, London 1993; R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1987, republished as Age of Conquest: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1991; idem, Domination and Conquest: The Experience of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, 1100–1300, Cambridge 1990; idem, The First English Empire: Power and Identities in the British Isles, 1093–1343, Oxford 2000.  Davies, First English Empire, 109; idem, Age of Conquest, 213–51.  Bartlett, Making of Europe, 269–91.  Ibid. 60–84, esp. 76–7; Davies, Domination and Conquest, 39–40.

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which we might mean the import of Anglo-French political norms and values into Wales – and ask whether, indeed, ‘Europeanization’ is an entirely helpful concept. The transformation of Welsh society happened in different ways and at different times, in response to a range of stimuli. For Davies, Anglo-Norman conquest was the key determinant of change, especially in the south, but immigration and cultural and political imitation were also major factors. The chronology is rather hazy, as is its geographic extent – marcher Wales was clearly more ‘Europeanized’ in some respects at an earlier date than Pura Wallia. We can physically map the extent of English lordship in Wales through the twelfth century, but it is much harder to map the influence of Anglo-French political culture; in some respects, even in the twelfth century, parts of Pura Wallia were, in terms of political culture, more ‘Anglicized’ than the native lordships much closer physically to English political power and influence. Nevertheless, historians over the last twenty years have seen the transformation of Welsh society as gathering momentum only at the very end of the twelfth century, and in full flow in the thirteenth. In the political sphere, it was the thirteenth century that saw increasing dynastic and diplomatic contact between Welsh rulers and their English neighbours; more surviving charters and other memoranda; and the greater use by Welsh rulers, especially the most powerful, of stone castles and armoured horsemen in war. Attention is often focused on the thirteenth century because it is richer in surviving source material and more seems to have been happening. In part, however, this may be simply a function of the greater survival of evidence, raising the old conundrum of whether we are dealing with absence of evidence or evidence of absence. It is undoubtedly true that charters, letters, and other memoranda survive in much greater quantities from the thirteenth century, and it is hard to resist the conclusion that this is because there was more activity and more recording of that activity. Having said that, we should at least note that the vast majority of acta that survive from the last two centuries of native rule in Wales are preserved in English royal copies made in either the chancery or the exchequer and that, therefore, we should not forget that an element in the survival of Welsh material might be changes in the habits and practices of the institutions of English central government, rather than factors in Wales itself. The function of this paper, then, is to explore the hazy frontier of this process of Europeanization in the twelfth century, in particular the influence of AngloFrench political values, norms, customs, and institutions on native lords and society. Bartlett’s model of ‘Europeanization’ is undoubtedly useful, but not without its flaws. Both Frederick Suppe and more recently Sean Davies have sought to qualify Bartlett’s assertion of the military backwardness of the Welsh compared to the military sophistication of the Normans. In this, Bartlett might be swayed a little too much by Gerald of Wales’s description of Welsh military capabilities. Gerald asserted in the Description of Wales that the Welsh could not compete with the Norman way of fighting and consistently avoided pitched battle. However, as both Suppe and Davies argue, it is likely that the Welsh were by no means unfamiliar with the role of armoured cavalry and fortifications earlier than the late eleventh or  

Davies, Age of Conquest, 111–210. The Acts of Welsh Rulers, 1120–1283, ed. A. H. Pryce with C. L. G. Insley, Cardiff 2005 [hereafter cited as AWR], 47–58; Davies, Age of Conquest, 254–7; Bartlett, Making of Europe, 76–7.  F. C. Suppe, Military Institutions on the Welsh Marches: Shropshire, AD 1066–1300, Woodbridge 1994; S. Davies, Welsh Military Institutions, 633–1283, Cardiff 2004.  Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, VI, 209–10, 220–1, 226, Davies, Welsh Military Institutions, 4–6.



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twelfth century. The Welsh avoidance of pitched battle was in fact a feature of the conduct of war across Europe: ravaging, ambush, and evasion were central to military strategy everywhere, since they denied an opponent supplies and rendered his lordship impotent. Pitched battles were generally avoided if possible, for the obvious reason that they were exceptionally risky undertakings.10 Nevertheless, on the occasions when Welsh forces engaged in pitch battle with their Anglo-Norman opponents, they were capable of securing victories, as they did in 1136 and 1145.11 If anything, as Suppe demonstrates, warfare in the March of Wales, at least in Shropshire, was characterized by English response to and imitation of Welsh modes of fighting, in particular the establishment of lightly armed horsemen or mun­tatores in the area around Oswestry.12 The crucial difference between the Welsh and the English or Anglo-Normans was not technological or tactical; rather, the much larger resources of the English state, and even some of the marcher earldoms such as Gloucester and Chester, enabled them to concentrate forces in a way that most Welsh rulers could not. Even then, such concentration of resources was no guarantee of success, as Henry II found in 1165.13 Moving away from explicitly military comparisons, Huw Pryce’s recent paper on ‘Welsh Rulers and European Change’ has explored some of the broader methodological problems of the notion of ‘Europeanization’.14 In particular, Pryce draws out two important conclusions: first, we should not overstate the extent to which Welsh elites were integrated into an Anglo-French cultural world during this period, compared to, let us say, the Scottish political elite. By and large, Welsh elites did not take an active role in English political life, nor did Welsh rulers attract significant numbers of English and other foreigners into their service.15 This is especially true of elites in Pura Wallia, where cultural imitation only went so far. Second, and perhaps more relevant in the light of what follows here, we should not see change as something simply imposed from outside, or as a dialogue between native and nonnative or progressive and conservative forces; rather, ‘imitation of external example belonged to wider process of change whose character was determined above all by the struggle for power’.16 In other words, Welsh rulers may have imitated external exemplars not just because those exemplars were imposed, or simply external, but because imitation may have brought material advantages for lords attempting to construct political hegemonies within Wales, such as Owain Gwynedd, Madog ap Maredudd, and Rhys ap Gruffudd. What I wish to do here is to raise some general questions about shifts in political culture(s) in the twelfth century and look in detail at one aspect, the way in which native rulers conceived of and expressed their lordship, in particular through the vocabulary of power in charters and narrative sources. I will argue that although we tend to see the rule of thirteenth-century Welsh lords such as Llywelyn ap Iorwerth and Llywelyn ap Gruffudd as embodying this process of Europeanization or Angli 10

Suppe, Military Institutions, 1–5, 143–51; Davies, Welsh Military Institutions, 143–217. Davies, Welsh Military Institutions, 111, 125–40; J. Bradbury, ‘Battles in England and Normandy, 1066–1154’, in Anglo-Norman Warfare, ed. M. Strickland, Woodbridge 1992, 182–93. 11 Davies, Welsh Military Institutions, 129; Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. T. Jones, Cardiff 1952, s.a. 1136. 12 Suppe, Military Institutions, 63–87, 125–42. 13 Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1165. 14 A. H. Pryce, ‘Welsh Rulers and European Change’, in Power and Identity in the Middle Ages: Essays in Memory of Sir Rees Davies, ed. A. H. Pryce and J. Watts, Oxford 2007, 37–51. 15 Ibid. 41–2. 16 Ibid. 39, 46–50.

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cization, the mid-twelfth century saw important but historically neglected changes in the way certain Welsh rulers, or at least the people who drew up their acta, envisioned the nature of their authority and sought to explain that authority to an audience beyond Wales.

Political culture How then, might we define ‘political culture’ in this context? Rees Davies explored this question at some length in his Ford Lectures of 1998.17 Davies argued that the ‘essence’ of political culture was not just to be found in the institutions and processes of governance, but also in the values, assumptions, habits, behaviours, language, and rhetoric by which societies, in Davies’s words, ‘construe and justify the exercise of power’.18 By looking at charter evidence, we can examine not just these processes of governance, but also the assumptions that underpinned them, especially in terms of the language with which those who drafted the charters and correspondence of native rulers described their power. It is, of course, difficult to separate shifts in political culture from wider social change, although the pace of change may have been different. From the late eleventh century and certainly from the early twelfth, Welsh rulers were in touch with wider European political culture, and one might suggest that such exposure led to swifter changes in Welsh political culture than in other more deeply rooted social customs. That said, political culture was a function of wider cultural norms. Slavery provides a salient example, not least because the practice of slavery was one of the distinctive features identified by English and Anglicized commentators such as William of Malmesbury or John of Salisbury as highlighting the barbarity and ‘otherness’ of Welsh and more generally Celtic society.19 Slavery seems to have been on the wane in later twelfth-century Wales, although it survived the post-Norman Conquest demise of slavery in England long enough to become a distinctive and, in English eyes, deeply uncivilized characteristic of Welsh society.20 Slavery, though, and the gathering of slaves, were intimately linked to the function and conduct of war in Welsh and Irish societies (in particular) in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As Wyatt argues, slaving in eleventh- and early twelfth-century Wales was not just confined to predatory Hiberno-Norse raiders: Welsh rulers such as Gruffudd ap Cynan and Rhys ap Tewdwr used warfare as a means of generating slaves, as did Gruffudd’s sons Owain and Cadwallon.21 After the battle of Mynydd Carn in 1081, the Vita of Gruffudd ap Cynan notes that he devastated the lands of his dead rival, Trahaearn ap Caradog, and captured many slaves, while his southern Welsh contemporary Rhys ap Tewdwr used slaves as payment for his troops in 1087.22

17 18 19

Davies, First English Empire, 89–112. Ibid. 101–2. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 166; The Letters of John of Salisbury (1153–1161), ed. W. J. Miller, Oxford 1955, 136; J. Gillingham, ‘Conquering the Barbarians: War and Chivalry in Twelfth-Century Britain’, HSJ 4, 1992, 67–87 at 67–73; M. Strickland, War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217, Cambridge 1996, 313–14; D. Wyatt, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan and the Hiberno-Norse World’, Welsh History Review, 19, 1998–9, 595–617 at 615–17. 20 Pryce, Native Law, 110, 146, 167, 174–7, 227. 21 Wyatt, ‘Gruffydd ap Cynan’, 600–3; P. Holm, ‘The Slave Trade of Dublin, Ninth to Twelfth ­Centuries’, Peritia, 5, 1986, 317–45 at 341. 22 Wyatt, ‘Gruffydd ap Cynan’, 606; The History of Gruffydd ap Cynan, ed. and trans. A. Jones,



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The demise of slavery, therefore, was not just the demise of a particular social custom, but also a shift in the way Welsh elite society conceived of, justified, and conducted war. The conduct and institutions of war in Wales during this period are a large subject and not one which I propose to cover here, except to note that imitation of external example, in castle-building or the use of armoured cavalry for instance, was also a function of internal pressures, such as shifts in the assumptions which underpinned the conduct of war and, indeed, politics more generally. Two things in particular have made me think that the twelfth century might have seen more significant developments in Welsh political culture than is generally accepted. The first is a comment by Sir Rees Davies, where he suggested that ‘The difference between the elaborate odes of the great Welsh poet, Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr and the Dialogue of the Exchequer by his contemporary, Richard fitz Neal, is a measure of the cultural chasm within the British Isles.’23 Davies was highlighting the contrast between the emerging civil service and professional judiciary in England and the hereditary poets and remembrancers of Welsh society, between a heroic political culture and one steeped in law and administration. On one level, this is a perfectly reasonable comparison, but it does perhaps over-emphasize the ‘cultural chasm’. If we compared the odes of Cynddelw or Prydydd y Moch with the sometimes equally elaborate and hyperbolic world of Geffrei Gaimar or Wace, would the chasm seem so wide?24 The second is an article I published in 2002 about the early years of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth’s rule in Gwynedd at the very end of the twelfth century.25 This article sought to use charters and poetry to reconstruct the sequence of events in the 1190s by which Llywelyn established himself as sole ruler of Gwynedd. The article also argued that Llywelyn’s long rule encompassed some of these shifts in political culture inasmuch as it drew a contrast between the violent segmentary strife of the 1180s and 1190s in Gwynedd, which I argued typified twelfth-century political norms in Wales, and the way in which Llywelyn dealt with the execution of William de Braose in 1230, which seemed to indicate a much more ‘civilized’ thirteenth-century approach to the solving of political crises.26 Llywelyn discovered Braose in his wife Joan’s chamber and executed him at Crogen, near Bala, on 2 May 1230.27 This execution provoked a flurry of diplomatic correspondence, from Llywelyn to Braose’s wife Eva, to his lord and brother-in-law William Marshal II, and to Stephen Segrave.28 The correspondence makes it clear that William was executed not for the personal injury he had caused Llywelyn, but for the serious transgression of Llyw­elyn’s princely dignity and authority, in other words, for the public rather than private offence he had caused.29 In particular, Llywelyn’s letter to William Marshal makes it clear that Llywelyn had acted this way because of the pressure his own ­ optimates had put him under, whatever Llywelyn’s private feel-

Manchester 1910, 131; The Annales Cambriae, ed. J. W. ab Ithel, RS 20, 1860, s.a. 1087; Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1081. 23 Davies, First English Empire, 131. 24 G. Gaimar, L’Estoire des Engleis, ed. A. Bell, Oxford 1960; Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, ed. and trans. J. Weiss, Exeter 1999. 25 C. L. G. Insley, ‘The Wilderness Years of Llywelyn the Great’, Thirteenth Century England, 9, 2002, 163–73. 26 Ibid. 173. 27 Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1230. 28 AWR, nos. 261–3. 29 L. J. Wilkinson, ‘Joan, Wife of Llywelyn the Great’, Thirteenth Century England, 10, 2003, 81–93 at 90; R. C. Stacey, ‘Divorce Medieval Welsh Style’, Speculum, 77, 2002, 1107–27.

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ings about the matter.30 Llywelyn’s concern in this episode for diplomatic and legal niceties, as well as the embryonic distinction between public and private in Venedotian political culture, can be contrasted with the sequence of events which accompanied Llywelyn’s rise to power thirty or so years earlier. About 1194 Llywelyn allied himself with two of his cousins (Gruffudd and Maredudd ap Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd) and an uncle (Rhodri ab Owain Gwynedd) against another uncle, Dafydd ab Owain Gwynedd.31 A year later the cousins turned on Rhodri, who was defeated and died shortly afterwards.32 Finally, between 1199 and 1202 Llywelyn turned on his cousins: Gruffudd died at Aberconwy abbey in 1200 and Maredudd was expelled from his lordship in Meirionydd in 1202.33 This sequence, I argued, was very similar to earlier twelfth-century segmentary strife in Powys and Arwystli, in which the death of a single ruler provoked a series of violent struggles between their sons and grandsons, brothers sought to displace each other, and the sons of the dispossessed turned on their dispossessors.34 This is precisely the sort of violent dispute that contemporary observers, especially Gerald of Wales, saw as the besetting problem of Welsh society and its custom of partible inheritance.35 There are important points of similarity between events in Powys between 1111 and 1125, Arwystli between 1129 and 1130, and Gwynedd between 1194 and 1200, but also significant points of difference which were underplayed in my earlier article.36 Between 1111 and 1125 six members of the Powysian dynasty, all descendents of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, were killed or mutilated by other members of the dynasty (Fig. 1).37 Cadwgan and ­Iorwerth ap Bleddyn were killed by their nephew Madog ap Rhirid. Madog was blinded in turn by his cousin Owain ap Cadwgan in 1113.38 Owain himself was killed by Flemings in 1116 while on campaign in Deheubarth.39 His youngest brother Maredudd was killed in 1125 by another brother, Morgan ap Cadwgan.40 So far, this sequence of events had involved the sons of Rhirid and Cadwgan ap Bleddyn, but in 1125 the segmentary strife widened as the sons of another of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn’s sons, Maredudd, got involved, with the murder of Ithel ap Rhirid by Gruffudd ap Maredudd.41 Finally, in 1130 another of Maredudd’s sons, Madog, castrated and blinded Owain ap Cad­wgan’s son Llywelyn.42 There were a number of issues at play in this sequence of killings and blindings.43 Foremost was a struggle to control Powys, where Maredudd ap Bleddyn’s branch of the dynasty emerged in sole control in the later 1120s. This was certainly the main explanation given by the Brut y Tywysogyon, which recorded the reallocation of lordships following each act: after the blinding of Madog ap Rhirid in 1113, for instance, the Brut noted that Owain ap Cadwgan and Maredudd ap Bleddyn shared Madog’s lands, Caereinion and parts 30

AWR, no. 262; see also J. Crump, ‘Repercussions of the Execution of William de Braose: A Letter from Llywelyn ab Iorwerth to Stephen de Segrave’, Historical Research, 73, 2000, 197–212. 31 Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1194; Insley, ‘Wilderness Years’, 166. 32 Insley, ‘Wilderness Years’, 166. 33 Ibid. 166–71. 34 Ibid. 173. 35 Giraldi Cambrensi Opera, VI, 225; Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 162–3, 199–200. 36 Insley, ‘Wilderness Years’, 173. 37 K. L. Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan: A Rebel Revisited’, HSJ 13, 1999, 65–74. 38 Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1113. 39 Ibid. s.a. 1116. 40 Ibid. s.a. 1125. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. s.a. 1130. 43 See David Stephenson’s thorough exploration of this sequence of events, below, ‘The “Resurgence” of Powys in the Late Eleventh and Early Twelfth Centuries’, pp. 189–90.



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Figure 1  Family politics in early twelfth-century Powys 1 Bleddyn ap Cynfyn (d. 1075)

2 Madog (d. 1088)



3 Rhirid (d. 1088)



7 Ithel (d. 1125; k. by 13) 8 Madog (blinded by 9 in 1113)

4 Cadwgan 9 Owain (d. 1111; k. by 8) (d. 1116)

10 Einion (d. 1124)



11 Morgan (d. 1128)



12 Maredudd (d. 1125; k. by 11)

18 Llywelyn (blinded and castrated by 6 in 1130)



5 Iorwerth (d. 1111; k. by 8)



6 Maredudd (d. 1132)

13 Gruffudd (d. 1128)

19 Owain Cyfeiliog (d. 1197)



14 Madog (d. 1160)

20 Llywelyn (d. 1160)

15 Iorwerth Goch

21 Gruffudd Maelor (d. 1191)



16 Hywel (d. 1142)

22 Owain Fychan (d. 1187)



17 Cadwgan (d. 1163)

23 Owain Brogyntyn



24 Elise

of Deuddwr and Aberriw, between them.44 This strife was also fuelled by external factors, notably the struggle for political power in Deheubarth (especially after the emergence of Gruffudd ap Rhys), into which various branches of the Powysian dynasty were sucked. A further factor was the involvement in the succession politics of both Powys and Deheubarth of Llywarch ap Trahaearn, king of Arwystli. The sequence of events that followed Llywarch’s death sometime after 1124, his last recorded appearance in the sources, also has resonances with the Venedotian succession sixty years later, where once again the sons of dispossessed brothers, in this case the sons of Llywarch’s brothers Meurig, Griffri, and Owain, turned on 44

Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1113.

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their cousins (Fig. 2). Llywarch ap Trahaearn had emerged as sole ruler of Arwystli in the first decade of the twelfth century, following the death of his brothers Meurig and Griffri at the hands of Owain ap Cadwgan of Powys.45 In 1129–30 his sons and nephews engaged in a vicious two-year bloodbath that left all of Llywarch’s sons dead, blinded, or castrated.46 The opening act was the murder by Maredudd ap Llywarch of his cousin, son of his uncle Meurig ap Trahaearn, and the blinding of two other cousins, sons of another uncle, Griffri ap Trahaearn. Maredudd was then killed by Ieuaf, son of a third uncle, Owain ap Trahaearn. Ieuaf also blinded two of his own brothers, while another of his brothers, Llywelyn, killed Maredudd ap Llywarch’s brother, Iorwerth. Llywelyn ab Owain was subsequently blinded and castrated by the ruler of Powys, Maredudd ap Bleddyn, presumably as part of a Powysian attempt to take advantage of Arwystli’s implosion and perhaps in revenge for Llywarch ap Trahaearn’s involvement in earlier events in Powys. Ieuaf ab Owain was killed in 1130 by his cousin Madog, sole surviving son of Llywarch ap Trahaearn. In yet another twist, Madog ap Llywarch was then killed by his cousin Meurig ap Meurig ap Trahaearn. Finally, Meurig was himself blinded and castrated in 1131.47 The Brutiau do not name Meurig’s mutilator, but we could perhaps point the finger at Hywel ab Ieuaf ab Owain, who emerged as sole ruler of Arwystli from the early 1130s until his death in 1185. Although these events, like those sixty years later in Gwynedd, were a function of segmentary strife, it is not clear how typical the level of violence described in the Brutiau was of earlier Welsh politics. As David Stephenson outlines elsewhere in this volume, the Brutiau entries for the early twelfth century are unusually detailed, especially about matters concerning Powys, Arwystli, and northern Deheubarth, and were possibly composed at the same time as the events described: Stephenson suggests Daniel ap Sulien, archdeacon of Powys and member of the familia of Llanbadarn Fawr, who died in 1127, as a possible author.48 Elsewhere in the Brutiau, such lurid descriptions of violence are few and far between; indeed, the annals themselves are much more laconic, both before and after the period 1100–30. Why might this be the case? If Stephenson is correct, and Daniel ap Sulien was the author of this section of the Brutiau, then the level of detail and comment might reflect the close relationship between the author and both the individuals and the area concerned. Events in Gwynedd in the 1190s had a similar segmentary element but they were attended by nothing like the same level of violence that had earlier characterized Powys and Arwystli. Although the death of Owain Gwynedd in 1170 unleashed a quarter of a century of instability in Gwynedd, there was remarkably little violence, certainly of the blinding and castrating sort. In the same year as his father’s death, Hywel ab Owain was killed by his brother Dafydd, but he seems to have been the only casualty of the fight for control of Gwynedd that ensued. Rhodri ab Owain died within a year of his defeat by his nephews Gruffudd and Maredudd ap Cynan and Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, although the Brut does not record any suspicious circumstances. For the other losers in this struggle, exile and political exclusion rather than death seem to have been the price. Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain died as a monk at

45 46 47 48

Ibid. s.a. 1106. Ibid. s.a. 1129–30. Ibid. s.a. 1131. Stephenson, ‘ “Resurgence” of Powys’, below, pp. 187–8; Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan’, 74, suggests that the annals were composed during the rule of Owain Cyfeiliog.



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Figure 2  Family politics in early twelfth-century Arwystli 1 Trahaearn ap Caradog (d. 1081)

2 Llywarch (d. 1124 × 1129)

6 Maredudd (k. by 12)











7 Iorwerth (k. by 16)











8 Madog (k. by 9)







3 Meurig (d. 1106)

9 Meurig (mutilated by 17?)









10 son 2 (k. by 6)







4 Griffri (d. 1106)

11 son 1 (blinded by 6)









12 son 2 (blinded by 6)







5 Owain

13 Ieuaf (k. by 8)











14 son 2 (blinded by 13)











15 son 3 (blinded by 13)











16 Llywelyn (blinded and castrated by Maredudd ap Bleddyn of Powys in 1131)







17 Hywel (d. 1185)

Aberconwy.49 What is unclear is whether his retreat to the cloister was voluntary; our sources are entirely opaque about the circumstances. It may be that this was an entirely voluntary course of action: Gruffudd had been a benefactor of the abbey, and his contemporary in southern Powys, Owain Cyfeiliog, had similarly retired to his foundation of Strata Marcella shortly before his death in 1197. However, one might also suggest that Gruffudd ap Cynan may have been forced into the cloister after being defeated by his cousin Llywelyn.50 Whatever the circumstances of Gruffudd’s entry into the cloister, the Venedotian succession was markedly less bloody than the earlier events further south. In the context of a discussion of the Anglicization of political culture, this is surely significant, since the norm in the Anglo-French world was not to butcher or mutilate one’s rivals and opponents, but to imprison or exile them.51 As Gillingham demonstrates, 49 50

Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1200. A. D. Carr, ‘Prydydd y Moch, Ymateb Hanesydd’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1989, 161–80 at 162–3. 51 J. Gillingham, ‘Killing and Mutilating Political Enemies in the British Isles from the Late 12th Century to the Early 14th Century: A Comparative Study’, in Britain and Ireland 900–1300: Insular Responses to Medieval European Change, ed. B. Smith, Cambridge 1999, 114–34 at 114.

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politics in later twelfth-century Wales was becoming less bloody than it had been earlier, though this point should not be overstressed.52 Although the participants in the succession disputes following the death of Owain Gwynedd showed a considerable degree of restraint and mercy, elsewhere in Wales murder and mutilation were still a feature of political clashes. Owain ap Caradog, a nephew of the Lord Rhys, was murdered by his brother Cadwallon in the early 1180s, while in 1187 Owain Fychan of northern Powys was murdered by his cousins Gwenwynwyn and Cadwallon ab Owain Cyfeiliog.53 Gillingham cites other examples of killing and mutilation in the 1190s, notably the murder of Einon o’r Porth, lord of Elfael, in 1191.54 What is striking about this later twelfth-century violence is that it generally happened in those parts of native Wales – Powys, Elfael – nearest to the March and England and most exposed to English political culture. In both Gwynedd and Deheubarth, this type of violence seems to have been on the wane; it is notable that the death of the Lord Rhys in 1197 did not spawn the sort of violent succession disputes seen earlier. This apparent disparity in behaviour highlights the problems of trying to map cultural frontiers during the Middle Ages. In this case, the elite of Pura Wallia seem to have assimilated Anglo-French norms of political conduct in a way that their contemporaries further east had not. Why this should be the case is unclear. It is possible that the level of violence used in Powys and the native lordships of the March reflected English treatment of the native aristocracy, which was often much less chivalrous than the norm in England.55 It is possible, too, that Powys’s highly fragile sense of cohesion made segmentary conflict much more lethal than in Gwynedd.

Princely styles in charters and chronicles The level of political violence in succession disputes such as these is one way of looking at the penetration of Anglo-French political norms even into Pura Wallia; how Welsh lords might have used the potential of ‘royal styles’ in charters is another. There are, however, a number of issues to be addressed before the significance of the titles accorded to Welsh rulers in their acta and in the native narrative sources can be established. The key questions concern the processes by which the charters were produced and authenticated, as well as the pattern of their survival.56 There are forty surviving native acts which can be plausibly dated to the twelfth century and in which the grantor is given some sort of style: three from Arwystli, six from Deheubarth, thirteen from Gwynedd, seven from Gwynllŵg, and eleven from Powys and its components (Appendix, Table 1). The final text is a remarkable letter, preserved in Gerald of Wales’s tract on the rights and status of St David’s, in the name of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth of Gwynedd, Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog of southern Powys, Madog ap Gruffudd Maelor of northern Powys, and Gruffudd, Maelgwn, Rhys, and Maredudd, sons of the Lord Rhys of Deheubarth.57 There are very good grounds to doubt the authenticity of the text. The letter is in support 52 53

Ibid. 121. Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, VI, 69 (bk 1, c. 7); Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1187; Gillingham, ‘Killing and Mutilating’, 117–18. 54 Gillingham, ‘Killing and Mutilating’, 117; Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1191. 55 Gillingham, ‘Killing and Mutilating’, 120. 56 AWR, pp. 132–42. 57 AWR, no. 220.



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of Gerald’s campaign to secure the bishopric of St David’s, which Gerald argued was the metropolitan see of Wales. Gerald’s own writings are the only witness for the document, and it is tempting to see it as a fabrication in support of Gerald’s claims.58 Nevertheless it cannot be completely dismissed as spurious, and even if we are to regard it as a fabrication, it dates from the early thirteenth century and is testament to how at least one contemporary observer, Gerald, viewed the power of the princes of Pura Wallia. The remaining charters are all of reasonable authenticity or, at the very least, have some sort of authentic basis which may include the royal style. There are no surviving charters from Glamorgan, Senghenydd, Maelienydd, or Elfael in which the grantor is accorded a title; the possible significance of this will be discussed later. This is a small number of charters, all for ecclesiastical beneficiaries. Nevertheless, Wales, both native and the March, was undoubtedly a charter-using society in the twelfth century, though on a far smaller scale than England. Native Welsh diplomatic traditions appear to have been swiftly overwritten by Anglo-French diplomatic forms: only a handful of the surviving twelfth-century charters betray any influence of older, native diplomatic traditions.59 The rapid assimilation by the Welsh of Anglo-Norman diplomatic leads into the key question which we need to address before using the styles and titles of these charters: by whom were they produced and did native rulers have any influence over their diplomatic? In other words, are Welsh royal styles a useful tool for examining the ways in which native rulers themselves constructed and articulated notions of power and authority, or are they simply the whim and invention of a handful of monastic scribes? There is almost certainly no entirely satisfactory answer to this question.60 It is very likely that beneficiary diplomatic dominated charter production in twelfth-century Wales, although it is equally likely that correspondence was drafted by clerks working for a princely or lordly household on a permanent or, perhaps more likely, ad hoc basis.61 Nowhere in native Wales, even in the thirteenth century, do we see an institution comparable to the English chancery. Llywelyn ap Iorwerth seems to have had something approximating to a writing office by the later 1230s: thirteenthcentury charters from Gwynedd are notable for their high degree of standardization, certainly in comparison to the charters of other Welsh lords, and we can see hints of something approaching a secretariat in attendance on the prince.62 Pryce suggests a more helpful definition of chancery, as an institution responsible for the validation of acta issued in the prince’s name, not necessarily their production.63 This approach is especially significant for questions about the level of influence exerted by Welsh princes over the content of the acts issued in their names; in the final analysis, it was someone working for the prince who attached his seal to the charter.64 We should not, however, overstate the case, even for Gwynedd, and it is likely that in the twelfth century almost all charters were produced by or on behalf of the beneficiary. This almost certainly explains the rapid dominance of English diplo58 59

AWR, pp. 370–1. See, for instance, AWR, no. 480; A. H. Pryce, ‘The Church of Trefeglwys and the End of the “Celtic” Charter Tradition in Twelfth-Century Wales’, Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies, 25, Summer 1993, 15–54. 60 AWR, pp. 132–6. 61 AWR, p. 133. 62 D. Stephenson, The Governance of Gwynedd, Cardiff 1984, 26–39; J. B. Smith, Llywelyn ap Gruff­udd, Prince of Wales, Cardiff 1999, 319–29. 63 AWR, p. 134. 64 AWR, p. 140.

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matic forms, since a number of the beneficiaries of Welsh lords’ largesse, at least for those grants that survive, were Benedictine or Augustine houses such as Margam, Haughmond, Basingwerk, and Goldcliff, also patronized by Anglo-Norman lords and whose scribes would have been steeped in English or Continental diplomatic norms. Even those Cistercian houses descended from Whitland, such as Strata Florida, Strata Marcella, Valle Crucis, Cwm-Hir, Aberconwy, and Cymer, which were much more avowedly Welsh in their affiliation, made extensive use of the basic writ-charter form, even if in rather more eclectic ways.65 Did Welsh lords have any influence on the intitulationes in the charters produced in their name? This, too, is a difficult question to answer, but it is possible – probable even – that they did. First, Welsh lords quickly adopted seals as a means of authenticating their charters, the earliest surviving being that of Cadell ap Gruffudd, king of Deheubarth.66 Even if twelfth-century Welsh lords did not have writing offices as such, they presumably had an individual responsible for the lord’s seal and for using it on documents. This individual, if not the lord himself, would surely have had an interest in making sure that what went out under the seal was acceptable. The relative consistency of title or style used in some of this – admittedly small – sample also suggests that the titles used were often common currency. Even where unusual or inconsistent styles were used, this cannot necessarily be dismissed as scribal whim. Relevant in this context is Rhys ap Gruffudd’s impressive confirmation charter for Strata Florida, dated 1184.67 This has two different styles, one in the opening protocol and one in the notification. In the protocol, Rhys is described as ‘prince of the Waleses’ (Walliarum princeps), an odd phrasing to which we shall return. In the notification he is described as ‘proprietary prince of South Wales’ (Sudwallie proprietarius princeps). Both these are unusual styles, and their very idiosyncrasy suggests they were included for a reason, rather than simply being the whim of the draftsman. As Pryce has demonstrated, proprietarius princeps is a completely novel and unique usage, and it is likely, as both Pryce and Smith argue, that proprietarius is a rendering of the Welsh term priodor, meaning proprietor, that is, someone with a four-generation right to a piece of property:68 in this case, Rhys ap Gruffudd was stressing his lineage back to Tewdwr, the father of the Rhys killed by the Normans in Brycheiniog in 1093.69 It is unlikely that the scribe of the charter simply invented this style: its use in this charter was clearly deliberate. This charter was an important document; it confirmed all of Rhys’s substantial gifts to Strata Florida and was modelled, in part, on the bull issued by Pope Alexander III for the abbey.70 It is possible to suggest that for such a significant grant, to an institution with a very strong link with the dynasty of Deheubarth, Rhys ap Gruffudd felt it necessary to include in his title of ‘prince of South Wales’ wording that stressed his dynastic inheritance and legitimacy. If it can be argued that rulers had some input into the charters produced in their name, especially in the intitulationes, did these titles actually mean anything? Diarmait mac Carthaig, king of Desmond in the late twelfth century, used a royal 65 66

AWR, p. 133. AWR, no. 22; D. Crouch, ‘The Earliest Original Charter of a Welsh King’, Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies, 36, 1989, 125–31. 67 AWR, no. 28. 68 AWR, pp. 96–7; J. B. Smith, ‘Treftadaeth Deheubarth’, in Yr Arglwydd Rhys, ed. N. A. Jones and A. H. Pryce, Cardiff 1996, 18–52 at 34. 69 Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1093. 70 AWR, pp. 99–100.



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style based on that of the Emperor Frederick I, but no one – probably not even Diarmait himself – would pretend that the two were in any way comparable.71 There is evidence, however, that the intitulationes of Welsh lords were taken seriously by contemporaries. During the 1160s Owain Gwynedd seems to have employed two styles in his correspondence, ‘king of Wales’ (rex Wallie) and ‘prince of Wales’ (princeps Wallie).72 The significance of this shift, indicating perhaps that Owain conceived of himself in a superior relationship to the other rulers of Pura Wallia, but subordinate to Henry II, has been well explored by Michael Richter, Beverley Smith, and most recently Huw Pryce;73 it is clear, however, from a letter that Thomas Becket wrote to Hugh de Champfleury, bishop of Soissons and chancellor to Louis VII of France, that Henry II was extremely annoyed by Owain’s adoption of the style ‘prince’. In a world of increasingly rigidly defined political hierarchies and relationships, intitulationes assumed an ever more significant role in establishing and demonstrating status and power. What, then, do the styles of native Welsh lords tell us about political culture during the twelfth century? The first point, alluded to above, is the shift from ‘king’ to ‘prince’. Owain Gwynedd seems to have been the first Welsh ruler to adopt this title, followed by his son-in-law and rival, Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth. Rhys’s sons also used the title after his death in 1197. Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog also adopted the title ‘prince’ in the first few years of the thirteenth century, possibly as a response to the nascent power of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth. As Smith, Crouch, and Pryce have all noted, this shift seems to have been a response by native lords to the problems posed by the ubiquity of the title rex for rulers eager to dominate their neighbours and to locate themselves in the new Anglo-French political order.74 The adoption of ‘prince’ allowed rulers such as Owain to place their claims to wideranging power in a European framework of political terminology. This terminological shift has been well explored; however, where these kings and princes were kings and princes of has been largely overlooked. The terminology used here and the way in which it developed are also revealing about the impact of AngloFrench political culture on Wales. Those twelfth-century charters which accord the grantor a style describe the grantor in a number of ways, either with a rank (e.g. ‘king of the Powysians’, ‘prince of Wales’) or with just a simple ­ toponymic (e.g. ‘of Caerleon’, ‘of Brogyntyn’. In the handful of surviving charters in which he is accorded a title, Owain Gwynedd is usually styled ‘king of Wales’, with the exception of his correspondence with Thomas Becket and Louis VII in 1165 and 1166, where he is styled ‘king of the Waleses’ (rex Walliarum) and ‘prince of the Waleses’ (princeps Walliarum).75 In one of Becket’s letters, Owain is addressed as ‘prince of the Welsh’ (Walensium princeps).76 His sons and grandsons used variations of the less exalted titles of ‘king’ or ‘prince’ of North Wales. In one charter Dafydd ab

71

M. T. Flanagan, ‘The Context and Uses of the Latin Charter in Twelfth-Century Ireland’, in Literacy in Medieval Celtic Societies, ed. A. H. Pryce, Cambridge 1998, 113–22 at 121. 72 AWR, nos. 192–6. 73 J. B. Smith, ‘Owain Gwynedd’, Transactions of the Caernarvonshire Historical Society, 32, 1971, 8–17 at 16; M. Richter, ‘The Political and Institutional Background to National Consciousness in Medieval Wales’, in Nationality and the Pursuit of National Independence: Historical Studies, 11, ed. T. W. Moody, Belfast 1978, 37–55 at 45–8; A. H. Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd and Louis VII: The Franco-Welsh Diplomacy of the First Prince of Wales’, Welsh History Review, 19, 1998, 1–28; AWR, 74. 74 Smith, ‘Owain Gwynedd’, 16; Pryce, ‘Owain Gwynedd’, 22–5; D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300, London 1992, 85–93. 75 AWR, no. 196. 76 AWR, p. 74.

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Owain used rex, but in all his others he was styled ‘prince’.77 Gruffudd ap Cynan and Llywelyn ap Iorwerth both used variations of princeps Norwallie.78 Further south, in Deheubarth, ‘prince’ rather than ‘king’ was the preferred title for Rhys ap Gruffudd and his successors. In his one surviving charter Rhys’s elder brother Cadell ap Gruffudd was styled ‘Cadell son of King Gruffudd’.79 He also attested Bishop Meurig of Bangor’s confirmation of Hywel ab Ieuaf’s grants to Haughmond abbey as ‘Cadell, king of South Wales’.80 Rhys alternated between ‘Wales’ and ‘South Wales’ in his style. In his earliest surviving charter, from the late 1160s or 1170s, he was Rhys ‘son of Gruffudd, prince of Wales’.81 In his confirmation for Strata Florida, discussed above, he was both ‘proprietary prince of South Wales’ and ‘prince of the Waleses’.82 His successors at the end of the twelfth century were occasionally styled ‘prince of South Wales’ and it seems likely that this also had been Rhys’s style towards the end of his rule.83 Both Maelgwn ap Rhys and his son Maelgwn used the style ‘son of Rhys, prince of South Wales’.84 In Arwystli, only Hywel ab Ieuaf used a royal style, although given the thin survival of charters from Arwystli, caution should be exercised in drawing conclusions.85 Nevertheless, any pretensions to kingship and the use of exalted titles seem to have been abandoned by Hywel’s successors Meurig, Cadwallon, Owain o’r Brithdir, and Dafydd ab Owain o’r Brithdir. This must surely reflect the complete domination of Arwystli by its neighbours from the 1150s, first Powys and Deheubarth and later Gwynedd. The use of styles was much more patchy in Powys, in part a reflection of the poor survival of Powysian charters. Madog ap Maredudd was styled ‘king of the Powysians’ (rex Powissensium) in his charter for Trefeglwys, dating from 1132 × 1141.86 None of his sons or nephews used such exalted titles. Maredudd ap Hywel of Penllyn and Edeirnion was styled ‘lord of the province of Edeirnion’ (dominus prouincie que dicitur Edeyrniaun) in his sole surviving act of 1170; Owain Brogyntyn was simply ‘Owain of Porkington’ (an Anglicization of Brogyntyn).87 Only one of Owain Cyfeiliog’s charters survives, in which Owain has a patronymic but no more (filius Grifini).88 However, the style adopted by his son Gwenwynwyn, ‘son of Owain Cyfeiliog’ (filius Owini de Keueilliauc), suggests that Owain probably used the style ‘of Cyfeiliog’. Gwenwynwyn himself in his early acts called himself ‘son of Owain Cyfeiliog’.89 However, at the very end of the twelfth century, or perhaps more likely the first few years of the thirteenth, he adopted the style ‘prince of Powys’ (princeps Powisie), adding ‘lord of Arwystli’ (dominus de Arwistili) for one surviving charter.90 As has already been suggested, this was almost certainly in response to southern Powys’s shaky state and the increasing power of Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, especially since Llywelyn claimed (and indeed took) Arwystli from Gwenwynwyn in 1208, following Gwenwynwyn’s humiliation at the hands of King 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

AWR, nos. 198–200. AWR, nos. 206, 213, 216, 218, 220. AWR, no. 22; Crouch, ‘Earliest Original Charter’, 129–31. The Cartulary of Haughmond Abbey, ed. U. Rees, Cardiff 1985, 222, no. 1219. AWR, no. 26. AWR, no. 28. AWR, nos. 35, 46, 63. AWR, nos. 46, 63. AWR, nos. 1–2. AWR, no. 480. AWR, nos. 482, 492–5. AWR, no. 539. AWR, nos. 541–2, 544. AWR, nos. 548–9.



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John.91 Elsewhere in twelfth-century Wales, Hywel ap Iorwerth, lord of Gwynllŵg, was styled ‘Hywel of Caerleon’ or ‘Hywel, lord of Caerleon’ in seven surviving charters from the last years of the century.92 What then are we to make of this variable and eclectic use of styles in twelfthcentury Wales? The first point is an obvious one, in that the small size of the sample and the very patchy survival of native charters from the twelfth century mean that any conclusions have to be very tentative. With that reservation in mind, a few observations can be made. First, only in Gwynedd and to a lesser extent in Deheubarth was the ruler given a style at all in his acta, beyond a patronymic. In most of Wales, and certainly southern and marcher Wales, intitulationes were very rare in any form. In Powys the use of styles seems to have been very inconsistent and largely contingent on political crises: this would appear to be the case for Gwenwynwyn ab Owain’s revival of ‘prince of Powys’. There is also a distinction in the styles that were used, between those that expressed lordship over a large area or a people (‘prince of North Wales’, ‘king of the Powysians’) and those which expressed lordship over a smaller district (‘of Edeirnion’, ‘of Porkington’) or a particular place (‘of Caerleon’). The former expressed a level of political ambition and posturing absent from the latter, which were much closer to the styles adopted by English baronial and gentry families. A further contrast can be drawn: whereas the lords of Edeirnion simply adopted a style based on the district over which they ruled, it is likely that Hywel ap Iorwerth of Gwynllŵg was attempting to capitalize on the legendary Arthurian associations of Caerleon.93 As Pryce notes, Hywel was the earliest Welsh ruler to adopt a style referring to the seat of his power, a development which ‘reveals his openness to aristocratic fashion in England and France’.94 What does this all suggest? Although the Anglo-Norman writ-charter was adopted very quickly throughout Wales, most Welsh rulers did not seek to exploit its capacity for advancing particular political claims or agendas. The irony here is that those Welsh lords closest to English lordship and most exposed to English documentary culture, for instance the lords of Glamorgan, Maelienydd, and Elfael, were the least likely to have exalted styles or titles – or indeed any title at all – in their charters. There are a number of possible reasons for this. On the hazy frontier of English and Welsh culture in the March, native lords may have felt their Welsh identity to be under threat, and therefore styles in charters that expressed lineage and native descent may have been more important than the making of claims to particular authority. It is almost certainly the case that by the later twelfth century these areas were securely under the domination or hegemony of English lords such as the earls of Gloucester or Pembroke and thus the scope for native lords to make ambitious claims in their charters about the nature of their rule was much less. It is possible that lords also faced internal resistance to the development or articulation of exalted titles; perhaps their own men were unwilling to see lords adopting titles that might indicate an intensification of lordship. Pryce makes the point that the resistance of the uchelwyr to Llywelyn ap Iorwerth’s attempts to overwrite Welsh inheritance custom in favour of his younger son Dafydd should not necessarily be seen in terms of the entrenched conservatism of the uchelwyr, rather that Llywelyn’s dynastic innovations were ‘detrimental to their own interests’.95 The same might be true for 91 92 93 94 95

Davies, Age of Conquest, 229. AWR, nos. 469–75. AWR, p. 117; Crouch, Image of Aristocracy, 274. AWR, p. 117. Pryce, ‘Welsh Rulers’, 47.

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the absence of developed intitulationes outside the three major princi­palities, and in the thirteenth century outside Gwynedd. By the second half of the twelfth century, intitulationes that expressed wideranging political authority were confined to the big three, Gwynedd, Deheubarth, and Powys, which seems in large part to reflect political reality. There were, however, significant shifts in the way these rulers expressed the nature of their rule, which seem to parallel shifts in the conception of political power and authority across Britain. Some of the earliest styles expressed lordship over people. Madog ap Maredudd was ‘king of the Powysians’, while Owain Gwynedd occasionally used the style ‘prince of the Welsh’. When Maredudd ap Bleddyn died in 1132, the Brut described him as ‘the splendour and defence of the men of Powys’.96 Again, Maredudd’s power was expressed in terms of his lordship over men, possibly in part a function of the difficulty of defining the Powysian kingship in an explicitly territorial fashion in the first few decades of the twelfth century.97 In this respect, however, these styles were no different from those of the English and Scottish Crowns, both of which expressed their regality over people, not places, as ‘king of the English’ and ‘king of Scots’. In the case of the English, however, the later twelfth century saw a shift towards expressing authority over places or over a particular political and geographic entity. By the end of the twelfth century the king of England was not rex Anglorum but rex Anglie. The same seems to be true in Wales, with the increasing emphasis on kingdoms or principalities – South Wales, North Wales, Powys – rather than on people. Rulership expressed not in ethnic terms but in terms of a single political unit seems to have been a development across northern Europe as a whole, reflective of regnal solidarities. In this respect, Owain Gwynedd and his successors and Rhys ap Gruffudd were perhaps much more in tune with shifts in European political culture than we might otherwise think. The other striking fact about rulers’ styles, as articulated in both Deheubarth and Gwynedd from the second quarter of the twelfth century, is the emergence of Wallia as a territorial description. It was mirrored in the language of the Brut y Tywysogyon. While Wales was referred to as Wallia by outsiders, the use of Wallia and its various forms in charters from the early twelfth century represents its earliest use by native rulers. Until the early twelfth century the political power of Welsh rulers was described by the Brut as lordship over ‘the Britons’ (Brytanieit). In 1102, for instance, the Red Book of Hergest referred to Iorwerth ap Bleddyn being promised his share of the ‘land of the Britons’.98 By the 1120s, however, Wallia seems to have emerged as the term preferred by Welsh rulers. In a charter of the Venedotian ruler Gruffudd ap Cynan, dating from 1120, reference is made to ‘Gruffudd and all the clergy and people of Wales’ (Criphinus et universus clerus totius Gvalis et populos).99 It is likely that the rapid adoption of ‘Wales’ as a territorial and political description within Wales was closely related to the ever-closer engagement by the political elite of native Wales with the Anglo-Norman and Anglo-French world in which Wales was increasingly enmeshed during the twelfth century. The description of a lord’s authority in terms of Wallia, or a portion of it, was comprehensible to outsiders in a way that expressing rulership over the Britons may not have been. The reference to Wales in the plural (Walliarum) in the intitulationes of both 96 97 98

Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1132. Stephenson, ‘ “Resurgence” of Powys’, below, pp. 190–3. Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. T. Jones, Cardiff 1955, s.a. 1102. 99 AWR, no. 191.



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Owain Gwynedd and Rhys ap Gruffudd is also curious and unlikely to be a simple scribal howler. Pryce suggests that the use of the plural might indicate a claim by Rhys to a wider hegemony than just Deheubarth.100 The possibility that Wallia might have multiple meanings is supported by the Brut y Tywysogyon. In 1175 Rhys ap Gruffudd attended a royal council at Gloucester, taking with him ‘all the princes of Wales’ (dywyssogyon Kymry).101 They included the lords of Maelienydd, Elfael and Gwerthrynion, Glamorgan, Senghenydd, and Caerleon. Wales in this context clearly meant that part of Wales over which Rhys held sway, rather than the whole of Pura Wallia. It is possible, therefore, that when both Owain and then Rhys claimed to be king or prince of the Waleses, the style was intended to encompass not just their immediate sphere of influence, but the whole of native Wales. It is perhaps worth at this stage considering whether the Brut might provide evidence for the development of the vocabulary of political power in Wales. Caution must be exercised. The various versions of the Brut (Peniarth MS 20, the Red Book of Hergest, and the confusingly named Brenhinedd y Saesson) are independent Welsh translations and adaptations of a Latin chronicle probably compiled in the late thirteenth century, just after the English conquest of native Wales, at the Cistercian abbey of Strata Florida from annalistic material first collected at St David’s, Llanbadarn Fawr, and then Strata Florida. Although the Latin text as a whole was not composed much before the later thirteenth century, there are undoubtedly older sections within it, sections which may have been more or less contemporary with the events they described.102 It is, in A. D. Carr’s words, a ‘self-consciously historical work’.103 This makes it a tricky proposition for the historian looking for reliable information about the political language of the twelfth century, since we cannot be certain that the Welsh copyist or translator of the various texts rendered like for like. For instance, when the Welsh version has ‘prince’ (tywysog), we should not assume that the Latin original had princeps. Indeed, the evidence of the charters suggests that princeps was an innovation of the 1160s, yet the Brut described Gruffudd ap Cynan as ‘prince of Gwynedd’ (dywyssauc Gwyned) on his death in 1137. This style might therefore be a later interpolation, either by the Welsh translator or the original Strata Florida annalist in the 1280s. In general, the title ‘prince’ is far more common in the Brut than either ‘lord’ (arglwyd) or ‘king’ (brenhin), which must in large part reflect the fact that when the Latin compiler was working in the late thirteenth century, ‘prince’ had become the foremost title of native Welsh rulers. However, despite these important caveats, the way in which rulers were described in the Brut might support the charter evidence. With the exception of the early reference to Gruffudd ap Cynan as ‘prince’, the Brut only accords Welsh rulers titles from the second half of the century (Appendix, Table 2). This seems to bear out the charter evidence, although since we have so few early twelfth-century charters, this can only be a very tentative conclusion. In general, the Brut also supports the suggestion that the terms in which lordship was expressed shifted during the second half of the twelfth century towards the increasingly exclusive use of territorial titles. In the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries, when the Brut makes reference to lordship at all, it is to lordship over men: an example might be the well known entry 100 101 102

AWR, p. 97. Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, s.a. 1174. Stephenson, ‘ “Resurgence” of Powys’, below, p. 189; Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan’, 68–74; J. Harrison, ‘A Note on Gerald of Wales and Annales Cambriae’, Welsh History Review, 17, 1994–5, 253– 5. 103 Carr, ‘Prydydd y Moch’, 163.

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for 1093 recording the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr of Deheubarth in Brycheiniog and the ‘fall’ of the ‘kingdom of the Britons’.104 We might also add the example of Maredudd ap Bleddyn referred to above, where the king was described as the splendour and defence of the men of Powys.

Conclusions This has been only a tentative and cursory discussion of the problems posed by trying to examine what we might mean by political culture in twelfth-century Wales. There is much more that can be done, such as relating to the charters the different ways in which the Brut variants wrote about native rulers and native political power. This discussion has also ignored the considerable body of evidence formed by the court poetry of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Poets such as Prydydd y Moch and Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr certainly did discuss the political power and aspirations of their clients and accorded them sometimes florid and resonant titles.105 The poets could also offer a commentary on and even a critique of the political behaviour and norms of the courts they frequented. Nevertheless, the charter evidence perhaps provides a slightly different way of looking at the political culture of Pura Wallia from the generally hostile perspective offered by English historians of the mid-twelfth century such as William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon, or even Gerald of Wales, who although conscious of and even proud of his Welsh descent, thought the Welsh violent and ungovernable and far too fond of war. Perhaps if we looked at the English of the twelfth century solely through the lens of Geffrei Gaimar or Wace we might form a different opinion of the civilized nature of English political culture.

104 105

Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, s.a. 1093. See the odes in Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, IV: Gwaith Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, ed. N. A. Jones and A. P. Owen, Cardiff 1995; Cyfres Beirdd y Tywysogion, V: Gwaith Llywarch ap Llywelyn ‘Prydydd y Moch’, ed. E. M. Jones and N. A. Jones, Cardiff 1991.



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Appendix

Table 1  Styles Used in Twelfth-Century Welsh Charters AWR no. 1 2 4

Principality Arwystli Arwystli Arwystli

Date 1143×1151 1145×1151 1185×1208

Ruler Hywel ab Ieuaf Hywel ab Ieuaf Meurig ap Hywel

22

Deheubarth

1143×1151

Cadell ap Gruffudd

26

Deheubarth

1165×1197

Rhys ap Gruffudd

28

Deheubarth

1184

Rhys ap Gruffudd

35

Deheubarth

1198

Maelgwn ap Rhys

46

Deheubarth

1176×1195

Hywel ap Rhys

63

Deheubarth

1198×1227

Maelgwn ap Maelgwn

192 193 194 195 196

Gwynedd Gwynedd Gwynedd Gwynedd Gwynedd

1140 1163×1165 1163×1165 1164×1165 1165×1166

Owain Gwynedd Owain Gwynedd Owain Gwynedd Owain Gwynedd Owain Gwynedd

198 199 200

Gwynedd Gwynedd Gwynedd

1177×1187 1177×1190 1186×1194

Dafydd ab Owain Dafydd ab Owain Dafydd ab Owain

202

Gwynedd

1186×1194

Emma, wife of Dafydd

206

Gwynedd

1194×1199

213

Gwynedd

1194×1202

Gruffudd ap Cynan ab Owain Llywelyn ap Iorwerth

216

Gwynedd

1196×1202

Llywelyn ap Iorwerth

218

Gwynedd

1199?

Llywelyn ap Iorwerth

220

Gwynedd

1199×1201

Llywelyn ap Iorwerth

Style Heuel rex Arguestli’ Hoelus rex Arewestil Meuric filius Hoel de Arwist’l Cadellus filius Grifini regis Resus filius Griffini princeps Wallie Resus Walliarum princeps; Resus Sudwallie proprietarius princeps Mailgun filius Resi princeps Suthwallie Hywel filius Resi Suthwallie principis Mailgun iunior filius Mailgonis filii Resi principis Suthwallie Oenus rex Wallie Owinus rex Wallie Ow[inus] rex Wallie O[winus] Walliarum rex Owin[us] Walliarum princeps David rex filius Owini David rex Norwallie David filius Owini princeps Norwallie Emma soror Henrici regis, uxor David filii Owini principis Norwallie [Grifinus] Kynan filius Northwallie princeps L[ewelinus] princeps Northwallie L[ewelinus] princeps Norwallie Lewelinus Geruasii filius totius Norwallie princeps Lewelinus filius Iorwert princeps Norwallie

152

Charles Insley

220

Powys

1199×1201

220

Powys

1199×1201

220

Deheubarth

1199×1201

Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Madog ap Gruffudd Maelor Gruffudd ap Rhys

220

Deheubarth

1199×1201

Maelgwn ap Rhys

220

Deheubarth

1199×1201

Rhys ap Rhys

220

Deheubarth

1199×1201

Maredudd ap Rhys

469 470 471 472 473

Gwynllŵg Gwynllŵg Gwynllŵg Gwynllŵg Gwynllŵg

1184×1217 1184×1217 1184×1217 1184×1217 1184×1217

Hywel ap Iorwerth Hywel ap Iorwerth Hywel ap Iorwerth Hywel ap Iorwerth Hywel ap Iorwerth

474

Gwynllŵg

1184×1217

Hywel ap Iorwerth

475

Gwynllŵg

1184×1217

Hywel ap Iorwerth

480

Powys

1132×1141

Madog ap Maredudd

482

Powys/Edeirnion

1170

Maredudd ap Hywel

492 493 494 495 541

Powys/Edeirnion Powys/Edeirnion Powys/Edeirnion Powys/Edeirnion Southern Powys

1186×1202 1186×1202 1186×1202 1186×1202 1185

542

Southern Powys

1187

544

Southern Powys

1191

548

Southern Powys

1197×1208

Owain Brogyntyn Owain Brogyntyn Owain Brogyntyn Owain Brogyntyn Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog

549

Southern Powys

1197×1208

Gwenwynwyn ab Owain Cyfeiliog

Wenunwen et Madocus principes Powisie Wenunwen et Madocus principes Powisie Grifinus et Mailgo, Resus ac Mareducis filii Resi principes Suthwallie Grifinus et Mailgo, Resus ac Mareducis filii Resi principes Suthwallie Grifinus et Mailgo, Resus ac Mareducis filii Resi principes Suthwallie Grifinus et Mailgo, Resus ac Mareducis filii Resi principes Suthwallie Hoelus de Karl’n Hoelus de Karl[iun] Hoelus de Carliun Hoelus de Carliun Hoelus dominus de Carlyon Hoelus dominus de Karliun Hoelus dominus de Karl[iun] Madauc rex Powissensium Mareduth filius Howel, dominus prouincie que dicitur Edeyrniaun Owinus de Porkinton’ Owinus de Porkinton’ Owinus de Porkinton’ Owinus de Porkinton’ Wennunwen filius Oweni de Keveyllauc Gwenvnwen filius Owini de Keueilliauc Guenoingven Owini filius de Keueilliac Wennunwen Powisie princeps et dominus Arwistili Wenunwin Owini filius princeps Powis

Source: The Acts of Welsh Rulers, 1120–1283, ed. A. H. Pryce with C. L. G. Insley, Cardiff 2005



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Table 2  Titles Used in the Brut y Tywysogyon Version Pen. 20

Date 1137

Ruler Gruffudd ap Cynan

Style dywyssawc Gwyned (prince of Gwynedd) dywyssawc Gwyned (prince of Gwynedd) vrenhin Powys (king of Powys) dywyssawc Gwyned (prince of Gwynedd) dywyssawc Gwyned (prince of Gwynedd) arglwyd Powys (lord of Powys) tywyssawc Powys (prince of Powys) arglwyd Powys (lord of Powys) tywyssogyon Gwyned (princes of Gwynedd) arglwyd Rhys, tywyssawc Deheubarth (the Lord Rhys, prince of Deheubarth) tywyssawc Gwyned (prince of Gwynedd) tywyssawc Gwyned (prince of Gwynedd) dywyssogyon Kymry (princes of Wales)

Pen. 20

1150

Owain Gwynedd

Pen. 20 Pen. 20

1150 1156

Madog ap Maredudd Owain Gwynedd

Red Book

1157

Owain Gwynedd

Red Book Pen. 20

1157 1160

Madog ap Maredudd Madog ap Maredudd

Red Book Red Book

1160 1167

Red Book

1167

Madog ap Maredudd Owain Gwynedd and Cadwaladr ap Gruffudd Rhys ap Gruffudd

Red Book

1170

Owain Gwynedd

Pen. 20

1174

Cynan ab Owain Gwynedd

Pen. 20

1174

Pen. 20

1185

Pen. 20 Pen. 20

1191 1196

Pen. 20

1197

Pen. 20

1201

Rhys ap Gruffudd; Cadwallon ap Madog of Maelienydd; Einion Clud of Elfael; Einion ap Rhys of Gwrtheyrnion; Morgan ap Caradog of Glamorgan; Gruffudd ab Ifor of Senghenydd; Iorwerth ab Owain of Caerleon Hywel ab Ieuaf arglwyd Arwystli (lord of Arwystli) Gruffudd Maelor arglwyd Powys (lord of Powys) tywyssogyon Gwyned (princes of Rhodri ab Owain Gwynedd; Gruffudd and Maredudd ab Cynan; Gwynedd) Llywelyn ap Iorwerth Rhys ap Gruffudd tywysawc Deheubarth (prince of Deheubarth) Gruffudd ap Rhys ap Gruffudd tywyssawc Kymry (a prince of Wales)

Sources: Brut y Tywysogyon: Peniarth MS. 20, ed. T. Jones, Cardiff 1941; Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. T. Jones, Cardiff 1952; Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. T. Jones, Cardiff 1955

IDENTIFYING THE WARRIOR ON THE PRE-HERALDIC BATTLEFIELD Robert Jones The battle had reached a crisis point. Hard-pressed by the English, the Normans and their allies were convulsed by a rumour: that William had been killed. The left wing broke and ran. The duke, William of Poitiers wrote, seeing a great part of the opposing force springing forward to pursue his men, rushed towards them, met them as they fled and halted them, striking out and threatening with his spear. Baring his head and lifting his helmet, he cried ‘Look at me? I am alive, and with God’s help I will conquer. What madness is persuading you to flee? What way is open to escape?’ At these words they recovered their courage.

In his work on the twelfth-century birth of heraldry, Adrian Ailes uses this episode as an example of the difficulties that the knights of the pre-heraldic eleventh century had in being recognized on the battlefield. He cites similar examples: the rallying of the English by Edmund Ironside in 1016, when the king also lifted his helmet to show his face, Robert Curthose’s near-slaying of his father at Gerberoy in 1079, and Rufus’s near-miss in 1091; on the two latter occasions the assailant’s hand was stayed only when he recognized his intended victim’s voice. Ailes argues that before the development of heraldry it was almost impossible for the individual warrior to be identified. In the first third of the twelfth century, he suggests, shield designs became more systematized and ordered, but only after 1150 were the designs on a knight’s shield used consistently, inherited by sons from their fathers, and followed a set of rules as to their shape, position, and colour, which are the defining characteristics of heraldic display. He argues that the driving force for these changes was the development of the couched lance (which, being designed for the thrust rather than for throwing, could be decorated with a pennon), the surcoat, and the shield without a boss. In the course of this paper I intend to argue that there were ample means for the warrior to make himself known even without the benefits of heraldry, that heraldry can be seen as a natural evolution of those pre-heraldic forms, and that changes in the function of display (why a warrior needed to be identified) led to the development of heraldry. Given the great level of scrutiny under which the battle of Hastings has come, it is perhaps surprising that the episode quoted above has been taken at face value. Even R. Allen Brown, whose studies of the battle are most thorough, was content to précis William of Poitiers without further comment, perhaps in his headlong

 

Poitiers, 130–1. Adrian Ailes, ‘The Knight, Heraldry and Armour: The Role of Recognition and the Origins of Heraldry’, in Medieval Knighthood IV, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey, Woodbridge 1992, 1–21.



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rush towards the Malfosse, the focus of his Battle conference paper. Others do not appear to have given it any more attention. If it is to be represented as an example of the importance of a commander to the morale of his men, then it is pertinent to consider whether William’s baring his head could really have stopped his men fleeing: how many of them could see his face? That men could be expected to recognize the face of their lord is suggested by the other occasion in the eleventh century when a commander bared his head to show that he was still alive, Edmund Ironside at the battle of Sherston in 1016. The point about Edmund’s visibility was underlined by the fact that the rumour of his death had begun when Eadric Streona, the treacherous earl of Mercia, displayed the head of one Osmær (who resembled Edmund Ironside), with the words ‘flee English, your king is dead’. Clearly both Eadric and Edmund expected the English host to recognize the features of their king. We know that a lord’s household, both the intimate hosticum and the broader familia, was close to him, serving in a variety of ways, attending his court and witnessing his charters, fighting and living alongside him. That they should recognize him is no surprise. The men who fled at Hastings, however, were not of Duke William’s household. They were, as R. Allen Brown succinctly puts it, ‘the Bretons and other auxiliaries’. How many of them would have known William by his face? How many would have had the opportunity to see him, except (perhaps) at the defence of Dol or Rennes two years previously? One might be tempted to say not many, except that this army of 6,000, big by contemporary standards but not so huge a number of men, had been camped on the beaches of Dives and Saint-Valéry for nearly two months. Although the only pre-battle speech of William’s that we have is the one Wace had him give to his lords immediately before the battle, it strikes me as highly unlikely that during the long wait William did not have time to be among the troops. At the very least he must have visited the contingent commanders. There must have been times when they could have pointed out a figure in the distance and said to each other ‘there’s the bastard’. The real question is not whether men fleeing in battle could have recognized William but whether they would have recognized him. In the heat of battle, with the English storming down the hill in pursuit, how many would have had the presence of mind to pay attention to the faces of those around them? I suspect very few. In the mêlée the details must have given way to the overall impression. As they ran from the English, they were turned by an authority figure shouting at them and lambasting them with the shaft of his spear; precisely which authority figure probably did not matter.



R. Allen Brown, ‘The Battle of Hastings’, reprinted in Anglo-Norman Warfare, ed. M. Strickland, Woodbridge 1992, 161–81.  Ailes, ‘Knight, Heraldry and Armour’, 7. The episode is recounted in The Chronicle of Florence of Worcester, trans. Thomas Forester, London 1854, 128. In discussion after the reading of this paper Ann Williams made the point that both of these episodes can be seen as having been drawn from Classical sources, almost certainly Suetonius, and are therefore a literary topos aimed, particularly in William of Poitiers’s case, at showing the erudition of the author.  On the nature of the Anglo-Norman familia regis (which, for the purposes of this discussion is a reasonable indicator of the nature of familia in general) see M. Chibnall, ‘Mercenaries and the familia regis under Henry I’, in Anglo-Norman Warfare, ed. Strickland, 84–92; J. O. Prestwich, ‘The Military Household of the Norman Kings’, ibid. 93–127; S. Morillo, Warfare under the Anglo-Norman Kings, Woodbridge 1994, 49–1, 60–6.  Brown, ‘Battle of Hastings’, 174.  Wace, The Roman de Rou, trans. Glynn S. Burgess, St Helier 2002, 256–9.

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All of this presupposes that William had no other means of identifying himself than to bare his head. This was not the case, as we can clearly see by looking at the only other source to provide us with a narrative of this episode, the Bayeux Tapestry. Here we see the same narrative as William of Poitiers; the duke rides before his men, helmet pushed back on his head, pointing to himself, attempting to show that he is still alive. The Tapestry, however, makes clear something that William of Poitiers did not. It shows quite clearly that everyone could see that William still lived because his identity was displayed above his head. Not of course the name which the embroiderers so helpfully put above each of the key figures, but the banner that flies at his side. The gonfanon as depicted here, in the hands of a figure conventionally identified as Eustace of Boulogne, is unique in the Tapestry. Not only does it break the border, which usually marks special significance, but also, whereas other banners are shown flat and two-dimensionally, the tails of this one twist and curl in a most natural way. It appears clear to me that this is no mere stylistic variation, but that the designer was attempting to draw attention to and put some energy into this crisis point in the battle. When Wace wrote that all ‘the barons had banners, the knights had pennons’, the distinction he made between the two was a practical one.10 As we see from the rout at Hastings, it was vital that a lord’s men knew he was still with them on the field. The banner flying above the press ensured that. It also provided a focal point, as Wace put it ‘a rallying point for his troops’, and a means of directing their movement across the battlefield. In effect it was an extension of the commander himself, and its loss could be equally devastating. The Rule of the Templars listed the lowering of the banner as one of the greatest crimes a brother could commit, explaining that if the banner is lowered, those who are far off do not know why it is lowered, for good or ill, for a Turk could more easily take or seize it when it is lowered than when it is aloft; and men who lose their banner are very afraid, and may suffer a very great defeat, and because of this fear it is forbidden so strictly.11

It was no less of a sin among the secular knighthood. Henry of Essex ended both his career as a knight and his tenure of the hereditary office of royal standard-bearer when he cast away the royal banner and declared Henry II dead during a skirmish against the Welsh in 1155.12 If the banner fell, then the lord and his men lost their link with each other; given that the banner was invariably at a lord’s side, its loss meant that its owner was almost certainly in dire straits if not already dead. The Tapestry itself uses the symbolism of the link between a lord and his banner in its depiction of the death of Harold. Here the draco standard, which is incidentally the only banner that we can clearly identify as belonging to a particular individual, is shown twice in the same scene, mirroring the dual depiction of Harold as he was killed.13 That it should be the draco that was depicted is interesting, as 

The Bayeux Tapestry: Digital Edition, created by Martin K. Foys, Leicester 2003, scene 37, panel 160.  Bayeux Tapestry, scene 37, panel 161. 10 Wace, Roman de Rou, 238–9. I have discussed the role of the banner more fully in my article ‘What Banner Thine?’ The Banner as a Symbol of Identification, Status and Authority on the Battlefield’, HSJ 15, 2006, 101–9. 11 The Rule of the Templars, trans. J. Upton Ward, London 1992, 157. 12 The Chronicle of Jocelin of Brakelond: Concerning the Acts of Samson, Abbot of the Monastery of St. Edmund, trans. H. E. Butler, London 1949, 70–1. In fact his final removal was as a result of his conflict with Robert de Montfort over the inheritance of the lordship of Montfort, but the loss of the banner was considered sufficiently important a charge that it could be used as a pretext. 13 Bayeux Tapestry, scene 39, panel 168.



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it was not Harold’s personal standard; the latter, we are told, was decorated with ‘the image of an armed warrior’ worked in pure gold.14 The draco was instead the emblem of the house of Wessex and, according to contemporary mythology of the creation of Britain, of Uther Pendragon and Arthur.15 The Tapestry is showing not just the fall of a king but of a dynasty. Ailes recognizes that banners were used as a means of display by pre-heraldic warriors, but differentiates between the flags and banners which led armies into battle and ‘provided a focal point for men to rally under’ (such as the Wessex dragon or the oriflamme, the sacred banner of St Denis) and the personal banners of leaders that ‘presumably provided the only sure means by which they could be identified as being both present and alive’.16 There was certainly a distinction: although the king of France took the oriflamme from the altar of St Denis as he set out on campaign, it was not his personal banner, which was distinct and separate. But the inference that personal banners did not serve as rallying points does not tally with the evidence. In Wace’s narrative of Hastings the only banner William flew was that given to him by Pope Alexander, which he referred to as ‘my banner’ when he asked Thurstan son of Rollo to carry it in the battle.17 In Orderic Vitalis’s account we are told only that Thurstan was the standard-bearer of the Normans.18 Neither account differentiated between types of standard. Wace had already said that a baron’s gonfanon formed a rallying point. We know from Fulcher of Chartres that during the First Crusade the leaders Bohemond of Taranto, Robert Curthose, and Baldwin of Jerusalem bore gold, white, and red banners respectively, and we are told how, during one engagement, Bohemond turned to his standard-bearer Robert, the son of Gerard of Buonalbergo, and instructed him to ‘spur on your swift charger and put heart into the wavering Christians by your courage’.19 This the fellow did, riding ‘right up to the infidels so that he made the streamers of Bohemond’s standard float in the faces of the Turks and with a tremendous shout momentarily checked them’, indicating that the personal banners of commanders on the field must have had a role in the morale, command, and control of troops, especially in the direction of small units such as the familia or conroi. It was vital that such banners be immediately recognizable to a commander’s men; there would be no opportunity for men to recall which image was being displayed by their lord on that particular day. This is borne out by William of Poitiers’s description of Harold’s banner as ‘famous’, as it could surely be famous only if it was flown regularly.20 This is supported by the way in which banners were captured as trophies. Harold’s banner of the fighting man was taken by William and sent to the pope, while Robert Curthose bought the ensign of the emir whom he had struck down at Ascalon from some soldiers and brought it back to his mother’s abbey in Caen.21 After Brémule in 1119 Henry bought the king of France’s standard from the knights who had captured it.22 The going rate for a royal banner would appear 14 15 16 17 18 19

Poitiers, 152–3. Wace’s Roman de Brut: A History of the British, trans. J. Weiss, Exeter 1999, 211. Ailes, ‘Knight, Heraldry and Armour’, 8–9. Wace, Roman de Rou, 260–3. Orderic, II, 172–3. Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, 1095–1127, trans. F. Ryan and ed. H. S. Fink, Knoxville TN 1969, 99, 158; Orderic, V, 78–9. 20 ‘Memorabile quoque uexillum Heraldi, hominis armati imaginem intextam habens ex auro purissimo’: Poitiers, 152–3. 21 Poitiers, 152–3; Orderic, V, 188–9; Wace, Roman de Rou, 305. 22 Orderic, VI, 241.

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to have been twenty silver marks, the price recorded by Orderic for each of those transactions. All this shows that the personal banners of individual warriors were recognizable not only to their own men but also to the enemy. For the banner to be an effective tool of command, and for it to gain the significance which its importance as a trophy suggests, it seems wholly logical that the same banners bearing the same motifs were carried consistently. According to Ailes, the only other means of identification available to the preheraldic warrior was the war cry.23 War cries provide the earliest and longest enduring examples of the consistent use of a means of identification on the battlefield. The French cry ‘Montjoie’ appears in the Song of Roland and continued in use until the mid-sixteenth century, when it was displaced by the simpler cry of ‘France’.24 The Norman cry of ‘Dex Aïe’ or ‘Dieux aide’ persisted for almost as long, appearing regularly until the Hundred Years War, when it was used whether the duchy was pro-French or pro-English. Wace recorded both ‘Montjoie’ and ‘Dex Aïe’ being used during a battle on the river Dieppe in the time of William’s grandfather.25 He also recorded other cries: the Angevins cried ‘Valie’, the men of Theobald of Chartres ‘Chartres’, and the Flemings ‘Arras’. The fact that all the cries listed by Wace were derived from the troops’ local region might lead one to suggest that he made them up, but there is no reason for them to be other than simple, indeed simplicity was desirable. Warriors would need something memorable that would trip off the tongue. The name of their home would be an obvious choice. As an aside, if Wace was accurate in recording of the Flemings’ cry (even if it was of his own time rather than Duke Richard’s), then it offers an insight into the impact of heraldry on other forms of martial display, since by the battle of Courtrai in 1302 the Flemings’ cry had changed to ‘Flanders the Lion’, which must surely reflect the adoption by the counts of Flanders of the lion rampant as their arms.26 Individual cries are rarely found in the source material. Although ‘Monjoie’ derived from Charlemagne’s sword Joiouse, it was used by all the Franks at Rencesvalles, not by Charlemagne alone. Similarly ‘Dex Aïe’ was the Normans’ cry, not just their duke’s. One exception is Meiler FitzHenry, one of Strongbow’s knights involved in the expedition to Limerick, who had a particular devotion to St David and used his name as a battle cry.27 The scarcity of individual cries reflects practicalities. If everyone had his own cry it would be impossible to memorize them all, and it could have become difficult to differentiate one from another. The use of collective battle cries also had a morale-raising function, fostering esprit de corps among those who shared it. Orderic Vitalis tells us that before Ascalon the leaders instructed their foot soldiers ‘how to shout war cries, how to stand firm, how to break through seemingly impenetrable enemy lines, and told them to fear nothing, frequently look bravely at their banners and steel themselves to withstand

23 24

Ailes, ‘Knight, Heraldry and Armour’, 8. The Song of Roland, ed. and trans. Gerard J. Brault, II, London 1978, passim. It was used at Bouvines in 1214 (Philippe Mousket, ‘Historia regum francorum’, ed. A. Tobler, in MGH Scriptorum 26, Hanover 1882, 758–9) and at Worringen in 1288 (Chronique en vers de Jean van Heelu, ou relation de la bataille de Woeringen, ed. J. F. Willems, Brussels 1836, 230). It may still have been used during the Italian wars of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: P. Contamine, Guerre, état et société à la fin du Moyen Age, Paris 1972, 668. 25 Wace, Roman de Rou, 96–7. 26 For the Flemish war cry at Courtrai see The Battle of the Golden Spurs: Courtrai, 11th July 1302, ed. K. DeVries, trans. D. R. Ferguson, Woodbridge 2002, 107. 27 The Deeds of the Normans in Ireland: La Geste des Engleis en Yrlande, ed. Evelyn Mullally, Dublin 2002, 140–1. This is the poem more commonly known as The Song of Dermot and the Earl.



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the blows of the enemy’.28 The Song of Roland recorded that Roland’s troops ‘who heard the call of “Monjoie” would have been reminded of true courage’.29 War cries were perhaps the most basic form of identification on the battlefield, but they were also the easiest to falsify, being easier to change than a banner, shield, or surcoat. The town of Andely was captured in 1119 by French troops who crept in at night and hid in a grain store until the following morning, when Louis’s army was seen outside the gates. As the populace of the town ran for the security of the castle, the French troops joined them, ‘shouting the battle cry of the English’. Once inside, however, they changed their cry to ‘Monjoie’ and captured the stronghold.30 It is interesting that they felt the need to change back to their own cry. Perhaps Louis’s men were so close on their heels that they feared being attacked by their own comrades. It is also possible that uttering a false cry was considered somehow wrong. Peter of Maule and some of the French fugitives from defeat at Bouvines mixed with the pursuing Anglo-Norman force, shouting ‘the war cry of the victors, proclaiming the greatness of King Henry and his men with feigned praises’, but they were no longer actively engaged in the battle, rather were trying to escape unrecognized.31 In the literature of the day it was not war cries but arms and armour that were used to confuse the foe. In Cligés, the eponymous hero donned the arms of one of his slain foes in order to get close to his enemy the Saxon duke, which in turn allowed him to use the duke’s horse in another ruse to defeat the Saxons who were carrying off his bride.32 Later he donned three different coloured armours on three consecutive days of a tournament in order not to be recognized.33 His father Alexander and his companions had used a similar trick to gain access to rebel-held Windsor.34 In the tale of Perceval, we are told the story of how King Gon of Sert was killed by the nephew of his foe Espinogre, who used the ‘evil trick’ (note that it was an ‘evil trick’ when the enemy used it but a ruse when the hero did it) of donning the armour of one of Gon’s slain knights in order to ride up to the unsuspecting king and split him down to the saddle.35 Wace had almost the same story to tell in his Roman de Brut. When Claudius landed at Portchester, invading Britain to seize it from the British King Wider, his most trusted adviser Hamo donned the armour of a dead British knight and was able to join the British troops. This allowed him to ride side-by-side with Wider and kill him. In a further twist to the tale, Wider’s younger brother Arivagus realized that his brother had been slain and performed a quick change of his own, assuming his dead brother’s armour, devise, and horse and leading the British to victory.36 Earlier in this quasi-history the British King Dunwallo had six hundred of his ‘boldest and most experienced warriors’ put on the armour of their dead Scots and Welsh foes in order to reach the enemy leaders Rudac and Stater. In order to protect themselves from attack by their own men as they

28 29 30 31 32

Orderic, V, 180–1. Song of Roland, II, 74–5. Orderic, VI, 216–17. Ibid. 242–3. Chrétien de Troyes, ‘Cligés’, in Arthurian Romances, trans. W. W. Kibler, London 1991, 123–206 at 166–7. 33 Chrétien de Troyes, Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes: II, Cligés, ed. Honoré Champion, Paris 1957, 142. 34 ‘Cligés’, Arthurian Romances, 145. 35 Chrétien de Troyes, Perceval: The Story of the Grail, trans. Glynn S. Bryant, Woodbridge 1982, 273. 36 Wace’s Roman de Brut, 125 ff.

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retreated to their lines, the British then changed back into their own equipment.37 There is further evidence for warriors being recognized by their armour in the tale of Yvain, where Yvain and Gawain ended up fighting each other because both were equipped, as the tale says of Gawain, ‘in such a way that even those who had always known him could not recognize him by the armour he wore’.38 In Erec and Enide Kay failed to recognize Erec because ‘on his armour appeared no identifiable markings; he had taken so many blows on it from sword and lance that all the paint had fallen off’.39 Of course these are fictions. All the key characters were adorned with the most ornate armours. Gilded and bejewelled, they bore as little relation to the eleventh-century knight’s armour as fifteenth-century depictions of the same romance literature did to the armour of that century. ‘Among so many clad in mail, it was impossible easily to distinguish one from another’, as the Gesta Stephani tells us, explaining how a Matildine relief force was able to breach the royalist siege lines around Exeter in 1136.40 To a certain extent this is true. The romance and epic hero is given armour far more heavily adorned than the majority of real milites. We should not, however, think of them as drab and indistinguishable in unadorned iron. The quality and style of armour would help to mark them out. If we look at William in the Bayeux Tapestry we see that he was depicted in the latest development in mail defences, wearing mail chausses or hose, as was Eustace.41 Armour continuously developed throughout our period, with the extension of mail to the legs and hands, the adoption of cuir bouilli (hardened leather) coverings, and changes in the form of the helmet. A man might therefore be recognized by the cut of his armour.42 The helmet offered the greatest variety in style. The basic construction could vary, whether raised from a single sheet of iron or constructed as a spangenhelm, with separate plates riveted to an outer frame. In the early twelfth century the shape changed too, with forward-sloping peaks mimicking the Phrygian caps that were fashionable in the period. There could also be regional variations, such as the face plates adopted in Spain. Helmets also offered the greatest opportunity for decoration. While they might not have been as grand as the helms of Gawain and Yvain, whose combat was so fierce ‘that all the jacinths and emeralds that decorated their helmets were knocked loose and crushed’, or as Arthur’s in the Roman de Brut, painted with a dragon, they do appear to have been at least a pale reflection of them.43 When Henry I was struck by a stone thrown from the besieged town of Laigle in 1118, his ‘bronzed helmet’ saved him from a headache, and although surviving examples of eleventh-century armour are rare, the Wenceslas helm in the

37 38

Ibid. 59. Chrétien de Troyes, Chrestien de Troyes, Yvain (Le chevalier au lion), ed. T. B. W. Reid, Manchester 1952, 160. 39 Chrétien de Troyes, Les Romans de Chrétien de Troyes: I, Erec et Enide, ed. Honoré Champion, Paris 1955, lines 1220–1. 40 Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter, rev. R. H. C. Davis, Oxford 1976, 37. 41 Bayeux Tapestry, scene 15, panel 54; scene 31, panel 120; scene 32, panel 127; scene 33, panel 134; scene 37, panels 160–1. 42 On the development of armour during the eleventh and twelfth centuries see Ian Peirce, ‘The Knight, his Arms and Armour in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in The Ideals and Practices of Medieval Knighthood, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey, Woodbridge 1986, 152–64; idem, ‘The Knight, his Arms and Armour, c. 1150–1250’, ANS 15, 1992, 251–306; D. Nicolle, Arms and Armour of the Crusading Era, 1050–1350: Western Europe and the Crusader States, London 1999. 43 Yvain, 160–1; Wace’s Roman de Brut, 233.



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cathedral treasury in Prague, with its gilded bowl and inscribed crucifixion scene on the nasal, shows the sort of decoration that might be expected.44 The sources suggest that it was not just helmets that were distinguishable. Ralph the Red, a knight killed during the internecine struggles between Hugh of Grandmesnil and Robert of Bellême in 1091, was so called because ‘he was covered in rubies’, presumably referring to decoration on his armour and accoutrements.45 During the defence of Breteuil the Breton Ralph of Gael hurried from gate to gate ‘frequently changing his arms to avoid recognition’, which led a Flemish knight to mistake him for a common soldier and attack him in the usual way as if he were an ordinary warrior. Ralph overwhelmed the Fleming and mortally wounded him.46 Clothing might also mark a man out. Another of the knights killed in the Grandmesnil-Bellême conflict was Theobald, the son of Walter of Breteuil, who earned the soubriquet of ‘the white knight’ ‘because his horse and all his trappings were white’.47 In 1049 Geoffrey Martel, count of Anjou, riding to retake the castle of Domfront, met with Norman scouts. He ‘raged at them with tremendous threats’ and made it known that he would ‘rouse William at Domfront with his trumpet call at first light of dawn on the morrow. He announced in advance what horse he would ride in the battle and described his shield and clothing [vestitum].’ The scouts replied that William would be there and in turn ‘described the horse, clothing, and arms of their lord’.48 Wace tells us that before Hastings Bishop Odo wore a white shirt under his short-sleeved habergeoun and mounted a white horse, ‘and everyone recognized him’.49 The use of horses as a means of identifying a warrior is unsurprising. Not only were they large and obvious, but the variation in colour and conformation easily allowed them to be distinguished one from another, especially to those with an interest in and knowledge of horseflesh.50 What is surprising, given the importance to the military elite of the day, is how little attention they received. Only rarely did a horse feature strongly in either epic or romance, and it never had the supernatural powers often ascribed to the heroes’ swords or shields. For the writer and his audience the importance of the horse lay in its quality, rather than in any form of mystical power. The horse’s most important features were practical. When describing Arthur’s arming before he rode to the relief of besieged Bath, Wace tells us of his sword, named Chaliburne, his armour with the dragon painted on his helmet, his shield, named Pridwen, with the image of the Virgin on the inner face, and his lance, called Ron. His horse had no name, and was merely described as ‘fine … strong, speedy, and fleet of foot’.51 A number of animals were described in the Song of Roland. Only a few were named, and a small number of these were famed for their speed. The fullest description, that of Archbishop Turpin’s horse, tells us that it was

44

Orderic, VI, 204–5. Another example of a surviving helm, this time decorated with a zig-zag border, can be seen in Peirce, ‘Knight, Arms and Armour, c. 1150–1250’, plate 8 (my thanks to Mr Peirce for pointing out this example). 45 Orderic, IV, 232–3. 46 Ibid. VI, 246–9. 47 Ibid. IV, 232–3. 48 Poitiers, 26–7. 49 Wace, Roman de Rou, 272–3. 50 On the conformation and colouring of horses see Ann Hyland, The Medieval Warhorse, Stroud 1994. 51 Wace’s Roman de Brut, 233.

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mettlesome and fleet of foot; its hooves are hollowed out and its legs flat. It is short in the haunches and broad in the crupper, long in the flank and high along its back; its tail is white and its mane yellow, its ears small and its head tawny. There is no beast to match it for pace.52

While all of this information may mean little to us, the details of its colour and conformation would tell an informed audience much about its origins, temperament, and quality. Sometimes the colour has another significance. At the end of the tale of Robert le Diable, a story about a child born of the devil who, after many evil deeds, was reconciled to God, the anti-hero was given a gift of white armour, trappings, and horse by God, marking his transition to Christian purity from his satanic origins.53 The horse’s colour matched the warrior’s equipment, as with Chrétien de Troyes’s hero Cligés, who was given a white horse and shield by the Greek emperor, and as with Theobald ‘the white knight’.54 The other thing we learn about Archbishop Turpin’s horse is where he got it: taken as the spoils of war from Grisaille, king of Denmark, whom he had killed in battle.55 Charlemagne’s mount had been won in combat in the same fashion, taken after he killed Malpalin of Narbonne.56 This should remind us that horses, along with armour and arms, were part of the spoils of war, the wages of a successful knight. Both romantic fiction and more factual sources recorded the taking of horses by knights as part of their victories. That the author of the Song of Roland also included the names of those from whom the horses were taken suggests too that the horse became a symbol of their triumph, a trophy of their victory, in a similar fashion to the taking of banners. This view of the horse explains the way they were treated in the source material. Expensive they may be, and worthy of appreciation, but they were also expendable. Knights regularly had horses killed beneath them. At Chaumont in 1098 William Rufus’s force lost more than 700 horses to enemy archers, who were specifically targeting the mounts.57 This must surely have made the horse alone a poor means by which to recognize a warrior. But the means of identification need not have been just the mount. In the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, when Godric fled the field on Byrhtnoth’s horse, it was the trappings and tack, rather than the mount itself, which the poet saw as marking it out as belonging to the thegn; Godric leapt on to the mount, ‘on to the trappings, which was highly improper’.58 One can presume that Ralph the Red and Walter of Breteuil’s son Theobald, discussed above, had tack, armour, and arms that all matched. In the romance Cligés, when Alexander and his companions rode against the sallying rebels at Windsor, they took up their lances which were ‘painted with their colours’. When they changed their colours to confuse the enemy and got into the castle, they exchanged not only shields but also lances.59 These forms of communal display were generally based upon the familia. Wace, in the Roman de Brut, tells us that at Arthur’s court ‘you would never see a knight worth his salt who did not have 52 53 54 55 56 57 58

Song of Roland, II, 92–3. Robert le Diable, ed. E. Löseth, Paris 1901, 80. Cligés, 121–2. Song of Roland, II, 92–3. Ibid. 182–3. Orderic, V, 216–18. ‘The Battle of Maldon’, trans. D. Scragg, in The Battle of Maldon, AD 991, ed. D. Scragg, Oxford 1999, 18–31 at 26–7. My thanks to Ann Williams for pointing out the subtleties of the emphasis. 59 ‘Cligés’, Arthurian Romances, 145.



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his armour, clothing, and equipment all of the same colour. They made their armour all of one colour and their dress to match, and ladies of high repute were likewise clothed in one colour’.60 The use of collective display by military households is regularly seen in the twelfth century. At a tournament in 1167, William Marshal was identified as carrying the shield of his lord.61 In 1176 the thirty nephews of Raymond le Gros attended their uncle as he welcomed William fitz Adelin as justiciar of Ireland, all wearing the same equipment.62 These forms of collective display were at the heart of many of the examples of what Adrian Ailes calls proto-heraldry, where the sources show a more system­ atized and regulated form of shield design but without evidence for being hereditary. Almost all of them show shared rather than individual emblems.63 Wace recorded a singularly strange variant of this kind of communal display in the Roman de Rou. As the two forces faced off at Val-ès-Dunes, the vicomtes of the Bessin and Cotentin on one side and the Bastard and the king of France on the other, a third party rode on to the field, Ralph Taisson of the Cinglais and the 140 knights of his conroi, all of whom had wimples attached to their lances.64 The reason is unclear. Neither the king nor the duke appeared surprised by their appearance. The king merely asked ‘who are the men over there with the wimples? They are all very splendidly equipped: do you know anything about their plans? Be aware that those to whom they commit their loyalties will win the day’.65 There is nothing at all to suggest that carrying a wimple on a lance was odd. Wace cannot even be accused of using the word purely for a rhyme or metre, as it lay in the middle of the line on the two occasions it was used.66 It has been suggested that they might be ladies’ favours, in the tradition of the romances and tournament field, and thereby an indication that Ralph’s men were all eligible bachelors.67 If this were the case, however, why did Wace not make it clear? Another suggestion is that this might be a Scandinavian-derived word for a pennant, a vimple being a narrow banner in both Norse and German.68 The difficulty here is that this is the only occasion where the term is used; elsewhere the word is the French pennon. I cannot see why Wace should suddenly choose to use not only a new word, but one in a foreign tongue. The wimples suggest an informal form of display known as a field-sign. These were simple objects easily obtained and generally adopted just prior to battle, such as sprigs of greenery, or the wearing of clothes in a distinctive manner. They were commonly seen in later periods where troops were not uniformed or wore very similar clothing. They were often seen in the armies of the English Civil War where regiments on both sides could be found wearing identically coloured uniforms. At the battle of Cheriton in 1644, for example, both sides chose to wear a piece of white paper in their hats. They caused much confusion, especially as both armies

60 61

Wace’s Roman de Brut, 265. ‘Sis escuz est de Tankarvile’: History of William Marshal, ed. A. J. Holden, trans. S. Gregory, notes by D. Crouch, 3 vols, Anglo-Norman Text Society Occasional Publications 4–6, 2002–6, I, line 1478. 62 Giraldus Cambrensis, Expugnatio Hibernica: The Conquest of Ireland, trans. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin, Dublin 1978, 168–9. 63 Ailes, ‘Knight, Heraldry and Armour’, 9–13. 64 Roman de Rou, 186–7. 65 Ibid. 66 ‘set vint chevaliers out od sei / tant en aveit en son conrei / tuit aloent lances levees / e en totes guimples fermees. / “Guilliame,” dist li reis, “qui sunt / cil qui as guimples la s’estunt?” ’: Roman de Rou, 186. 67 My thanks to Laura Ashe for this suggestion. 68 My thanks to Sally Harvey and Max Lieberman for this derivation.

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had also chosen the same battle cry of ‘God with us’.69 In the eighteenth century the Austrian army, which had troops from a number of different nations, wore sprigs of oak-leaves in their headgear, which eventually became part of the regular uniform. More recently, one is reminded of the large inverted letter V painted prominently on the vehicles of coalition forces in the First Gulf War, serving the same purpose. One might wonder how 140 wimples might be gathered ad hoc, at least without incommoding enough nuns or fair maidens as to make it into the local chronicles. Ralph Taisson was unsure of his loyalties, having sworn on the relics at Bayeux to strike William wherever he found him, but at the same time being reminded that William was his rightful lord and deserving of his support in battle. Perhaps he used a distinctive badge to differentiate his men from both main antagonists, as a sign of neutrality.70 If that were the case, though, might we not expect Wace to make it clear? It is possible that Wace referred to field-signs elsewhere. As the Normans prepared for battle at Hastings we are told that ‘The knights had … shields around their necks and lances in their hands; they had all constructed cognizances, so that one Norman would recognize another, no mistakes would be made, no Norman would kill another Norman, and no Norman strike another’.71 Wace seems to be differentiating between the shields hanging from the knights’ necks and the ‘cognizances’ that all had ‘made’ – he uses the verb ‘faire’ – and suggests that the latter allowed the Normans to know each other. At Val-ès-Dunes Wace tells us that during the battle ‘There was no rich man or baron who did not have his banner beside him, either a banner or some other standard in order to control his retinue, cognizances, and tokens variously painted on shields.’72 Again the shield seems to be separate from the cognizance. In all three examples the army was made up of a number of contingents, rather than being all Norman or all French. It would be of greater importance in such a force to provide an emblem that all could recognize as identifying a friend. We might also consider Orderic Vitalis’s use of the term cognizance, in the Latin form cognitio, when he tells us that Peter of Maule and many of the French fugitives at Brémule threw away their cognizances ‘to avoid recognition’; the other notable benefit of field-signs was that they were as quick and easy to remove as they were to find.73 In trying to separate the cognizance from the shield I am not suggesting that shield patterns had no role in the identification of the warrior. They were the obvious medium, and, like the banner, had been so for many centuries. Shield patterns were used to distinguish units within the Roman army, and the hoplites of each Greek polis had distinctive emblems on their hoplons, such as the lambda symbol of the Spartans. When Geoffrey Martel described his equipment to William’s envoys before Domfront, his shield was one those items by which he expected to be recognized. Just because the image on the shield does not adhere to the later tenets of heraldry does not mean that it could not be used to identify an individual. Ailes himself gives us the example of William IX of Aquitaine, who died in the proto-heraldic year 1126, yet adorned his shield with the image of his mistress ‘so that he might bear

69 70 71

Laurence Spring, The Battle of Cheriton, 1644, Bristol 1997, 16. Roman de Rou, 186–7. ‘chevaliers orent … escuz as cols, es meins lor lances, e tuit orent fait conoissances, que Normant alter coneüst, qu’entrepresture n’i eüst, que Normant Normant n’oceïst ne Normant altre ne ferist’: Roman de Rou, 262–3. 72 Ibid. 186. 73 Orderic, VI, 242–3.



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her into battle as she bore him in bed’.74 That particular image must have stuck in someone’s mind, otherwise it would not have been recorded in the chronicles, and served to make the duke stand out from the crowd. Adrian Ailes is right when he says that the forms of recognition used by the warriors of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries were not heraldic. There is no evidence that the banners, shields, and field-signs were hereditary, although it is perfectly conceivable that some of them might become so in the fullness of time. One of the oldest recognized badges is the broom plant, or planta genista, that provided the dynastic title for the Angevin kings of England and continued to be used by those sharing the Plantagenet name into the fifteenth century.75 The derivation of the Plantagenet badge is unknown, although one origin myth suggests that Count Geoffrey was wont to wear a sprig of broom in his hat when out hunting. If this is the case it could be that the dynasty’s sobriquet came from a simple fieldsign that took on permanence. Medieval writers could recognize such an origin. A number of heraldic treatises record that the origin of the Coucy arms, barry vair and gules, stemmed from an incident in the First Crusade when, ambushed without their surcoats by the Saracens, Thomas de Marle (the ancestor of the family) tore his red furred cloak into pieces for his companions to wear as a devise.76 Ailes is wrong to suggest that shields were not used for identification in the preheraldic period simply because contemporary sources do not describe their icono­ graphy or attempt to depict them accurately. (The similarities between the shield designs on the Bayeux Tapestry and the architectural details of the shields it depicts suggests to me a common decorative plan rather than a serious attempt to depict actual Norman shields.) Nor should a lack of evidence for shield designs being hereditary negate them as a means of identification. The apparent lack of interest in the martial display of the pre-heraldic warrior by contemporary commentators – compared to the almost consuming passion for heraldic display of thirteenthcentury sources – was a result of changes in the function of martial display during the course of the twelfth century. The identification of the individual warrior on the battlefield was never about telling friend from foe. It would be impractical for a warrior to be familiar with the multitude of individual emblems present in an army, let alone to recall them in the chaos of battle. Collective emblems such as Ralph Taisson’s wimples, the protoheraldic display of a lord’s emblems by the members of his familia, or the livery badges of the fifteenth century were a much more effective method. Individual display, for the vast majority of warriors, was about being seen on the battlefield. Renown could only be won at the point of a sword or the tip of a lance, and the finest way to win it was by deeds performed on the battlefield. As Matthew Strickland writes, In a society where honour and reputation might be as important as material wealth or status – witness the rise of William Marshal – the fear of shame and reproach, mirrored by a desire for honour and glory, acted as a powerful stimulus not only to stand firm in war but to outmatch one’s fellow warriors in deeds of valour.77

74 75

Ailes, ‘Knight, Heraldry and Armour’, 17. Boutell’s Heraldry, rev. C. W. Scott-Giles and J. P. Brooke-Little, London 1966, 162. The broom-cod is almost as prominent a badge as the white hart on the Wilton Diptych showing Richard II kneeling before the Virgin and angels, all of whom wear the badge around their necks. 76 Maurice Keen, Chivalry, London 1984, 131. 77 Matthew Strickland, War and Chivalry, Cambridge 1996, 331.

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Deeds of valour not only had to be done but had to be seen to be done. When medieval commentators tried to account for the origins of heraldry it was this function that lay at its heart. A fourteenth-century work on heraldry told how the first heraldic designs appeared at the siege of Troy where ‘the Trojans of royal blood adopted distinctive colours so that they might be recognized from the walls, and their deeds and prowess in combat noticed’.78 The commentator did not suggest that these emblems were hereditary, nor that they adhered to any regulation. For their intended purpose this was not necessary. Through the twelfth century the status of knights changed.79 From being little more than warrior retainers seeking to support their lord in battle in return for his patronage, the milites increasingly came to see themselves as a distinctive and exclusive class. They also became holders of land and office and the fathers of dynasties. The establishment of knightly families meant that the warrior on the battlefield no longer represented himself alone but his family and ancestors. Men came to be seen as coming from martial stock. Orderic Vitalis said of William son of Giroie that ‘while he fought in the battles of the world, [he] had been a knight of great renown, formidable to his enemies and faithful to his friends. His sons and brothers and many nephews were redoubtable warriors, who struck terror into the hearts of their enemies far and near’.80 As George Duby wrote, medieval knights were ‘predestined through their ancestors’ blood and … gifted with a special “virtue” ’.81 The hereditary nature of heraldic display followed from this. If the knight could now consider himself as a member of a noble and martial bloodline, it was only natural that he reflect that status by using the symbols borne by his father, or by alluding to his family or patron through adopting slight alterations to their symbols. It was no longer enough that the individual be recognized on the battlefield; his bloodline had to be identifiable too. A further development for heraldry, and one which was to lead to its central position within so much of medieval culture and society, was that these men – warriors now with land and position – needed to identify themselves off the battlefield as well as on it. Martial display spread into the civilian sphere, adorning seals, as Ailes points out, but also architecture, personal items, and tombs. Society as a whole was exposed to martial display in a way it never was in the eleventh century, the chroniclers and writers in their abbeys and courts perhaps more so than others. They were able to describe the devices in detail not so much because devices had become hereditary as because they were there in front of them. Monastic and courtly writers described heraldry in detail because it connected the valorous deeds of warriors to the buildings in which they themselves lived. Matthew Paris drew the heraldic arms that warriors had worn performing great deeds and which were emblazoned on their donations to religious houses. The identification of the warrior on the eleventh-century battlefield was as important as in the twelfth century and beyond, and for many of the same reasons. Commanders had to be able to show their men that they were alive and in control, and warriors’ deeds of valour had to be recognized if they were to maintain their status and reputation. The transition to heraldic display did not come about through military change, whether new equipment or new tactics, but through a social and 78 79

Medieval Heraldry: Some Fourteenth-Century Works, trans. Evan J. Jones, Cardiff 1943, 6–9. See D. Crouch, The Image of Aristocracy in Britain, 1000–1300, London 1992; D. Crouch, The Birth of Nobility: Constructing Aristocracy in England and France, 900–1300, Harlow 2005. 80 Orderic, II, 14–15. 81 George Duby, The Legend of Bouvines, trans. C. Tihanyi, Cambridge 1990, 15.



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cultural shift that brought a greater depth to the function of martial display and a greater breadth to its application. Distinguishing friend from foe did not become any easier, as the battle of Barnet showed in 1471, when troops belonging to the earl of Warwick mistakenly attacked their allies under the earl of Oxford because the latter’s emblem of a star with streamers was so similar to the sun with streamers badge of their mutual enemy King Edward IV.82 The identification of the individual knight became of supreme importance, not just to the warrior on the field, but also to those who were to read of his deeds and thus to the men who were writing of them.

82

Alison Weir, Lancaster and York: The Wars of the Roses, London 1995, 397–8.

ST NICHOLAS THE PILGRIM AND THE CITY OF TRANI BETWEEN GREEKS AND NORMANS, c. 1090–c. 1140 Paul Oldfield In the first half of the twelfth century the Apulian coastal city of Trani was a key port and urban centre of its region, and one that was rapidly growing. The city had previously passed gradually from Byzantine to Norman rule during the period from the 1040s to the 1070s. By 1079 it was formally part of the Norman Robert Guiscard’s duchy of Apulia. Nevertheless, from at least the 1080s until 1139 the city was, to all intents and purposes, politically independent; from 1085 until 1127 Guiscard’s successors as dukes of Apulia had no real control along the Apulian coast, while from 1127 to 1139 the city, like all others on the mainland, was engulfed in civil war. The conflict had been sparked first by Roger II of Sicily’s (successful) claim to the duchy of Apulia and was prolonged and embittered from 1130 by Roger’s aim to go a step further and incorporate all of southern Italy into a unified kingdom, which he had finally achieved by 1139. In the process Trani slipped in and out of Roger’s control until its definitive submission in 1139. However, our understanding of urban life within the city of Trani during this absorbing period from the 1090s to the 1140s is limited. There are only the briefest of references to the city in the narrative works of Falco of Benevento and Alexander of Telese, both of which tend to give snapshots of the city at moments of crisis and unrest. This can be balanced with some useful charter evidence – though only approximately twenty have survived from the city between 1085 and 1142. From these it is possible to make some interesting inferences on power, urban government, social relationships, and faith. But often the picture given is frustratingly limited.



I would like to thank Ian Moxon for offering his own translations of parts of the texts used here, along with his advice. Feedback received both at the University of Leeds Medieval History Seminar, and at the Battle Conference, has also proved valuable.  R. Colapietra, ‘Profilo storico-urbanistico di Trani dalle origini alla fine dell’ottocento’, Archivio Storico Pugliese, 33, 1980, 9–15.  See generally G. A. Loud, The Age of Robert Guiscard: Southern Italy and the Norman Conquest, Harlow 2000.  For Trani’s place in the political events of this period see P. Oldfield, ‘Urban Government in Southern Italy, c. 1085–c. 1127’, EHR 122, 2007, 579–608.  Alexandri Telesini Abbatis Ystoria Rogerii Regis Sicilie Calabrie atque Apulie, ed. L. De Nava, FSI 112, Rome 1991, 47 (bk II.49); Falcone di Benevento, Chronicon Beneventanum, ed. E. D’Angelo, Florence 1998, 188, 196, 198, 228, 230; see also Annalista Saxo, ed. L. C. Bethman, MGH 6, Hanover 1844, 773.  Le carte che si conservano nello archivio dello capitolo metropolitano della città di Trani (dal IX secolo fino all’anno 1266), ed. A. Prologo, Barletta 1877, nos. 22–6, 28–40 [henceforth Trani]; Per­gamene di Barletta del reale archivio di Napoli (1075–1309), ed. R. Filangieri di Candida, X, Bari 1927, no. 3; I Documenti storici di Corato (1046–1327), ed. G. Beltrani, Codice Diplomatico Barese 9, Bari 1923, no. 18; E. Jamison, ‘The Norman Administration of Apulia and Capua, more especially under Roger II and William I, 1127–1166’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 6, 1913 [reprinted as a separate volume, Aalen 1987], cal. doc. no. 5.



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Figure 1  Southern Italy Perhaps one way to broaden our understanding is to combine the narrative and charter material with some highly interesting and underused hagiographical sources that broadly relate to the city from 1094 to 1142, and which collectively cover the vita, miracle-working, and later translation of the city’s saint, Nicholas the Pilgrim. It will be useful at the outset to recount what little the sources reveal about the life of this Nicholas, and it appears it was a rather eventful and pain-ridden one. Of Greek origin, born in the 1070s to poor rural parents in the province, it seems, of Boeotia, following a divine intervention at around the age of eight, he was inspired to chant continuously the Kyrie eleison (‘Lord have mercy’). His mother, considering Nicholas’s actions to be somewhat unbalanced, began to beat him, and when the boy had reached the age of twelve, and was still chanting, she threw him out. Thus Nicholas’s wandering began: on a mountain he repelled a bear with the sign of the cross and, living only on wild plants, continued to chant with hands and eyes raised to the heavens. Eventually his mother, having some sort of change of heart, caught Nicholas; but having concluded he was possessed by a demon, she enlisted the help of the monks of the local monastery to exorcize him. A further round of beatings followed until the monks, having grown exasperated at their perceived lack of success, ejected Nicholas from their monastery. Nicholas for his part remained outside the doors of the monastery singing the Kyrie eleison, and as a result the  

Vita Nicolai Peregrini et relatio Adelferii, in Acta Sanctorum, June, I, Paris 1867 [henceforth Vita]. This monastery seems to be the famous Hosios Loukas situated near the present-day settlement of Distomo.

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monks threw him into a high tower, placing a great stone over the door. The monks’ attempts to rid themselves of the chanting boy, deemed to be insane, repeatedly came to nothing: a clap of thunder removed the stone from the tower door allowing Nicholas’s escape, he was put in chains which turned into spiders’ webs and unravelled, he was thrown outside the monastery walls and miraculously raised back over them, and finally he was bound and thrown into the sea, only to be saved by a dolphin. The monks who had thrown Nicholas overboard were subsequently caught up in a divinely inspired tempest, from which, with evident irony, they were saved by following Nicholas’s instruction to chant the Kyrie eleison. After this Nicholas continued his nomadic, eremetical lifestyle, dwelling in the mountains and carving wooden crosses. He passed through several villages meeting people who were keen to join him and others who were keen to flog him. There is little sense of the time­ scale of events, but the implication is that this phase of Nicholas’s life was one of years rather than months. It was at one point in this phase that we have our first reference to the city of Trani: while dreaming in a cave, Nicholas saw the images of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Mary, and John the Baptist, who told him to go to Trani and bestow glory on it. After further wanderings and adventures Nicholas, by now having attracted a following, eventually left his homeland and crossed the Ionian Sea, with divine help, to reach Otranto in Apulia. Once in Apulia, Nicholas experienced brief and eventful stays in both Otranto and then Taranto; he worked miracles and attracted attention. Yet he continued to be subject to almost routine incarceration and floggings, on occasion from local bishops. Eventually the young wanderer made his way to Trani where, after around two weeks, passing through the streets barefoot, carrying a cross, singing the Kyrie eleison, and clearly suffering from the physical tribulations he had endured, he died on 2 June 1094, at the age of only nineteen. Nicholas’s impact on Trani’s inhabitants was clearly profound, to such an extent that his canonization, which appears to have been promoted by local pressure, seems to have been recognized by Pope Urban II a mere four years later. There is some confusion over the exact process in which the canonization was confirmed, but it seems that Urban II referred the ultimate decision back to the archbishop of Trani, Bisantius I (c. 1071–c. 1100).10 The papacy only really developed a formalized procedure of canonization in the twelfth century, and Nicholas’s case falls within that formative period in which the Roman Church began to attempt to provide a more coherent supervision of locally initiated canonizations.11 Within a few years of Nicholas’s death, not only was a new church begun to house his relics, but an account of his life, deeds, and miracle-working was recorded for Archbishop Bisantius by a man, named Adelferius, who called himself the prelate’s famulus (servant). The written documents which Bisantius handed to Urban II in his attempt to obtain Nicholas’s canonization are very likely to be Adelferius’s writings. A second work with much more detail on Nicholas’s early life in his homeland was compiled at an unknown date, based on the recordings of a Greek monk named Bartholomew, who was a companion of Nicholas and followed him across the sea to Apulia.12 A third account was written by the deacon Amandus shortly after the  10 11 12

Vita, 236: 21; 237: 27. Ibid. 243: 53; Trani, no. 25. E. W. Kemp, Canonization and Authority in the Western Church, London 1948, 68, 164–5. The nineteenth-century editors of this text suggested that Archbishop Bisantius III, knowing Bartholomew was still alive, commissioned a work based on his recordings to fill the earlier, more exiguous account of Adelferius. This would mean that it was written between c. 1138 and 1157. Bisantius



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saint’s translation by Bisantius III, archbishop of Trani, in 1142 to the newly refurbished cathedral.13 Amandus’s work focused more on Nicholas’s activities within the city of Trani and the miracles which he performed there after his death. The limitations of such hagiographical works are obvious and well known, and certainly apply to the material under consideration here.14 As the hagiographer aimed to exalt his saintly subject, fact and accuracy become clouded by legend and myth. This is particularly the case in the more literary vitae, though less so in the translationes which tend to incorporate more in the way of historical detail. In addition, hagiographers were predominantly clerics, with all that this implies for the type of perspective that we may expect to encounter in their works. But on the other hand hagiographical works can be valuable especially for understanding faith, social behaviour, and underlying mentalities. The type of saint, the mir­acles that were performed, who or what they were performed on as well as where, the processes behind the movement of a saint’s body, and above all the incidental in the hagiographical text – that which is not part of the stock of tools used by most hagiographers to demonstrate their subject’s membership within a universal saintly community – all can offer the most probing insights. Moreover, the clerical authors of these texts were not nearly as detached from the wider world as one might imagine; the divisions between the lives of the cleric and the layperson were in reality extremely blurred, and it would be rather erroneous to suggest that both groups had entrenched and divergent mentalities. The perspectives of clerical authors were clearly structured by their ecclesiastical office and by their own agenda, but the plentiful evidence of the popular appeal of saints among the lay population suggests that some in both parties shared a real community of interests. It is plausible to propose that a hagiographical text echoed its readers’ (or listeners’) beliefs and ideals, especially when accounts of translations in particular could form part of the liturgy and thus be presented to a wide audience. Indeed Amandus claimed that Archbishop Bisantius III of Trani had ordered him to insert in his account the gist of the letter in which Pope Urban II had recognized Nicholas’s sanctity so that it could ‘be presented to the notice of everyone’.15 The popular appeal of saints is evident in other cities in southern Italy. Without it cults could not develop. One thinks of the risks undertaken by the largely lay contingent of sailors who brought the relics of the other and more famous St Nicholas from Myra to Bari in 1087, and the conflicts that erupted within the urban commun­ity thereafter.16 It is also implied when lay rulers invoked their local saint’s protection – as Prince Grimoald of Bari (c. 1118–1132) did in his charters, when III was called electus in 1144 (Trani, no. 41) and must have obtained that position shortly before his role in the translation of 1142. His predecessor Ubaldus was last mentioned in 1138, and Bisantius was himself succeeded in 1157. Nevertheless, there does not appear to be any firm textual evidence to back up the suggested date, though it is entirely possible that Bartholomew postdates Adelferius. 13 Amandus later became bishop of Bisceglie, a suffragan see of Trani: D. Matthew, The Norman Kingdom of Sicily, Cambridge 1992, 103–4; Italia Pontificia, ed. W. Holtzmann, Berlin 1963, IX, 311–12 nos. 1–10; some confusion exists over whether this Bisantius was the second or third archbishop of Trani of that name. Evidence on the archbishops of Trani in the first half of the twelfth century is rather scant, and it seems that there may have been a Bisantius II in 1120 (Trani, no. 28). 14 See the excellent studies by D. Weinstein and R. M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom, 1000–1700, Chicago 1982, and P. J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages, Princeton NJ 1978. 15 The account tells us that ‘to prevent forgetfulness doing harm to holy history, the letter of the pope was placed in the armarium of the church of Trani’, from where presumably Amandus made the abbreviated copy: Vita, 243: 52. 16 La traslazione di San Nicola: le fonti, trans. P. Corsi, Bari 1988.

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saints appeared on coinage and in local charters of customs, and when the presence of their relics could bind a city in unison.17 As people who had walked in the world, experienced, and often suffered it, saints enjoyed a powerful position as intercessors between the present world and the one to follow. Moreover, their appeal was not particular to any group, but resonated with people of all social ranks and ages and both genders.18 In short, the hagiographical text can serve as a useful point of entry into the social realities and mentalities of both the clerical and lay worlds. Two further points may be made more specifically on the sources for St Nicholas the Pilgrim. First of all, it appears that Adelferius’s account and much of Amandus’s were written relatively soon after the main core of the events they described, and that all three works contained a strong element of eye-witness and contemporary recordings; something which became increasingly integral to all canonization pro­cesses.19 Amandus, for example, recorded St Nicholas’s saving of a ship returning from Syria on board which the author had himself sailed.20 He also noted another ship rescued by the saint and mentioned that the event was believable ‘from the fact that many people tell the story’.21 Another incident he heard ‘from the mouth’ of the ship’s helmsman, and he also said that he saw a waxen ship hung in the church where St Nicholas lay, offered as thanks for the saint’s protection.22 For some of the miracles that he did not witness personally, Amandus assured the reader that he ‘ascertained [them] by the true method. For these miracles which the present narrative preserves, I drew with greedy heart from the mouth of the lord Russo, venerable priest, who is the guardian of that holy body [of St Nicholas] and is primicerius of our church’.23 Setting aside their own interests and values which impacted on their recordings, both Amandus and Russo were very close to the events they described, and through this their accounts are all the more interesting. Secondly, many hagiographical works, especially concerning translations, include uncertain material used to justify the stealing of the relics and must be used with caution. This is certainly true of the accounts of the theft of St Nicholas from Myra to Bari, and there are other similar cases from southern Italy.24 In the case of St Nicholas the Pilgrim, however, there was not quite the same need to justify possession of the relics, as Nicholas died in Trani and his later translation took place within the city. Both points enhance the value of the sources at our disposal. It should not be surprising that the sources on St Nicholas repeatedly told of the saint’s popular appeal among the people of Trani. This is what all good hagio­ graphers must convey to their audience. But interestingly Adelferius suggested that Nicholas’s support was initially less than impressive, being composed of a host of children, who were coaxed along by Nicholas’s distribution of apples. Meanwhile, the majority of the Tranenses, in other words the adult population, judged Nicholas to be insane.25 Considering Nicholas’s later popularity, especially after his death, the

17 Le pergamene di S. Nicola di Bari: periodo normanno (1075–1194), ed. F. Nitti di Vito, Codice Diplomatico Barese, V, Bari 1902, nos. 69, 71; P. Oldfield, ‘Citizenship and Community in Southern Italy c. 1100–c. 1220’, Papers of the British School at Rome, 74, 2006, 325–6. 18 A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, Oxford 1978, 383–404. 19 B. Ward, Miracles and the Medieval Mind, London 1982, 184–91. 20 Vita, 244: 58. 21 Ibid. 244: 57. 22 Ibid. 245: 66; 244: 57. 23 Ibid. 245: 62. 24 For example at Troia: A. Poncelet, ‘La Translation des SS. Éleuthère, Pontien et Anastase’, Analecta Bollandiana, 29, 1910, 409–26. 25 Vita, 239: 32.



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idea of initial scepticism in Trani (not to mention the earlier attitude of Nicholas’s mother and the Greek monks) could have been introduced by the author to fit a traditional model in which the hero had to overcome opposition. The children moreover may represent the innocence and constancy of true faith. But it is possible that this situation could have occurred, and the portrayal of cynicism would have carried little power if it was not even remotely plausible in such circumstances. Indeed Susan Reynolds has emphasized the need to accept the existence of a tangible current of scepticism in the medieval mind.26 The appearance of a Greek teenage stray in the city, chanting and parading a cross through the streets, was indeed likely to attract attention: intrigue and excitement from the young, stimulated by the free fruit, and derision from large parts of the adult community. But there is continued evidence of scepticism even in Amandus’s account from the mid-twelfth century, by which time Nicholas was more generally popular. A grateful skipper hung, in the church where St Nicholas lay, a wax model of his ship which the saint had saved; Amandus considered this suitable proof of the veracity of the event ‘lest anyone with spiteful mind should speak against God, who works through his saints towards the fulfilment of the world’.27 The more widespread positive acclamation displayed by the inhabitants emerged, in Adelferius’s version at least, after Nicholas had met Archbishop Bisantius I.28 It seems that Bisantius had got wind of the commotion caused by the newcomer’s presence and wanted to interrogate him in order to discern his pious credentials. Following an interview it appears that Bisantius was satisfied by the youngster’s answers and behaviour, and the implication (from Adelferius’s ordering of his work) is that this ‘official’ approval may have paved the way for popular recognition of Nicholas. Of course our hagiographer had to portray Bisantius, whom he called a ‘distinguished archbishop in no small way endowed with the diligence of scholarship’, as being able to recognize a holy man when he saw one – especially when this holy man would soon become the city’s patron saint.29 This should rightly make us cautious, and as the example of the Waldensians later in the twelfth century showed, bishops were often distrustful of lay preachers, especially uneducated ones. But this event should not necessarily be dismissed out of hand. It is certainly plaus­ible that the city’s prelate would have been eager to monitor the new arrival and the rumpus he was causing, and if Bisantius did in fact give his approval, and some churchmen were sympathetic to lay preachers, this would have been a powerful message to the Tranesi. Regardless of the archbishop’s role, opinions apparently changed rapidly. By the time Nicholas lay dying in the city, all the inhabitants, and especially the women, had gathered at the house in which he lay. The news of Nicholas’s death quickly fanned through Trani and apparently ‘the entire city eagerly flocked together’ for his funeral and his burial in the church of S. Maria.30 The level of positive response needs to be taken with a definite pinch of salt. But there is some other evidence to support it, which can also be placed alongside the evidence for the popularity of saints in other cities that was discussed earlier. It is known from an inscription found at Trani cathedral, built to house Nicholas’s

26

S. Reynolds, ‘Social Mentalities and the Case of Medieval Scepticism’, TRHS 5th series 41, 1991, 21–41. 27 Vita, 244: 57; G. A. Loud, ‘Monastic Miracles in Southern Italy, c. 1040–1140’, Studies in Church History, 41, 2005, 114–15, uncovers more evidence of sceptical attitudes. 28 Vita, 239: 35. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 240: 38.

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body, that the building was constructed by the ‘gens pia tranensis’ – testament to religious devotion among the community.31 It may not be entirely insignificant also that when Urban II communicated his decision about the potential canonization of Nicholas c. 1098, he addressed it to the clergy, nobles, and people (plebs) of Trani.32 In 1138 a wealthy inhabitant of the city set out his will in which donations were to be made to a range of recipients including the ‘fabric of the holy mother of God, and of blessed Nicholas the pilgrim, of our city’.33 Later in the twelfth century the famous bronze doors of the cathedral were crafted by the local sculptor Barisanus of Trani, who expressed his personal devotion by depicting himself in one of the door panels kneeling before St Nicholas the Pilgrim.34 The range of people who, according to the sources, were healed by the holy relics or saved by saintly intervention might also be used in support of St Nicholas’s wide appeal at Trani. While this type of material formed a common hagiographical tool to emphasize the sanctity and prestige of a local saint, this certainly does not mean that these people were not real. The inferential evidence in many of the cases suggests this, and even if the individuals did not exist, they still yield further interesting information on Trani. Those who were claimed to have received the help of St Nicholas included people from the entire social spectrum. One case saw a slave called Peter possessed by a demon while fishing and subsequently liberated from his afflicted state by a dawn appearance of the saint. Afterwards Peter was freed from slavery, devoted himself to the service of St Nicholas, and became a monk. Indeed, there is charter evidence to corroborate the existence of urban slavery in twelfth-century Apulia, above all at Bari but also at Trani.35 Interestingly Peter took up the monastic habit not in Trani but at the monastery of S. Benedetto in Salerno, and Amandus said that ‘many of us’ saw Peter living a religious life in Salerno, which is revealing for the links between the two cities.36 At the other end of the social scale a rich nobleman from France (Gallorum quidam dives et nobilis), who had fallen blind on a journey to Syria, had his eyesight restored after a visit to St Nicholas’s shrine, and as thanks promised to build a church in honour of St Nicholas the Pilgrim and to endow it richly.37 Adelferius noted that an adolescens called Petracca, born from noble stock (nobili genere ortus) was also healed by St Nicholas.38 Natives of Trani were of course among those healed.39 But some came from further afield, as the reference to the nobleman from France makes clear. Adelferius and Amandus listed people from settlements within roughly a 20 km. radius of Trani: a man called Desigius from Bisceglie, a boy from the same location, a woman named Maria from Terlizzi, and a girl from Ruvo. Others came from further away still: from Salpi and Ascoli Satriano, both in northern Apulia, from Mottola near Taranto, from Potenza in the Basilicata, and from Calabria. In addition to the man from France, a certain Andrea from Flanders was also a recipient of St Nicholas’s healing powers at

31

E. Bertaux, L’Art dans l’Italie méridonale: de la fin de l’Empire Romain à la conquête de Charles d’Anjou, 3 vols, Paris 1903, I, 372. 32 Trani, no. 25. 33 Ibid. no. 36; in 1163 a woman made a will, among the recipients of which was the ‘fabric of St Nicholas the pilgrim’: ibid. no. 54. 34 D. A. Walsh, ‘The Iconography of the Bronze Doors of Barisanus of Trani’, Gesta, 21, 1982, 96–7. 35 Trani, nos. 36, 86; S. M. Stuard, ‘Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery’, P&P 129, 1995, 3–28; C. Verlinden, L’Esclavage dans l’Europe médiévale, Ghent 1977. 36 Vita, 243: 55. 37 Ibid. 245: 64. 38 Ibid. 241: 41. 39 Ibid. 240: 40, 41, 45; 245: 65.



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Trani. These cases suggest communication and interconnections between Trani and a number of other settlements.40 Contact between Trani and its Apulian neighbours was regular, and the pull of this saint would have been a powerful one to inhabitants of smaller settlements like Bisceglie and Ruvo. The prestige and fame brought to Trani as a result of St Nicholas the Pilgrim’s presence is a recurrent theme within the sources. Moreover, the cult’s development could only have reinforced a sense of civic consciousness. Adelferius specifically linked the pilgrimage of Andrea from Flanders with the increasing renown of St Nicholas’s name through the whole of Italy (whatever he meant by this term), and presumably beyond. Elsewhere the same author said that ‘the city of Trani, brightened by his [Nicholas’s] rays, will always shine’.41 Towards the end of his account Adelferius picked up the same premise again and rejoiced that, thanks to Nicholas’s splendour, Trani ‘among the cities of Apulia will glitter with light as if an eternal torch’.42 The translation of the saint’s body to a new church in 1142 saw the gathering of a range of ecclesiastics, including the archbishop of Brindisi, the bishops of Ostuni, Ariano, Rapolla, and Andria, and a number of abbots. Apparently also on this occasion ‘almost the entirety of Apulia was roused up’; ‘each urbs, vicus, and municipium sent their people to do honour to the holy man, for there was such an assembly of people that the space of the city could hardly contain them’.43 It was clearly hoped, and believed, that the saint’s presence in the city would not only protect its inhabitants, but raise the city’s status within Apulia, if not even wider still. The man from Calabria, for example, described as an incola, had made the journey to Trani after hearing of the saint’s ‘innumerable virtues’.44 In Amandus’s account one of the ships saved by St Nicholas was said to be full of people heading for his shrine, but from where we are not told. Inferential evidence in this account suggests that the ship did exist: it was called the lion’s ship because of the mark on it, and the waxen model given by the captain still hung in the church.45 Clearly, the attraction of visitors seeking Nicholas’s healing powers was import­ant for the dissemination of the cult and the raising of Trani’s reputation, particularly when some apparently came from as far as France and Flanders. An important aspect here also seems to have been the city’s connection to the Holy Land; both it and the Crusades recur in the sources relating to St Nicholas. Although south Italians were not notably active in the Crusading movement, beyond Bohemond’s role in the First Crusade, Trani and other coastal cities in Apulia established themselves as important transit ports for pilgrims and goods moving to and from the Holy Land.46 In the 1160s the Jewish traveller Benjamin of Tudela, from Spain, passed through southern Italy and commented that at Trani ‘all the pilgrims gather to go to Jerusalem’.47 In 1196 the inhabitants of Trani were exempted from customs taxes in the kingdom of Cyprus, an island of strategic importance to the Crusader States.48 On a broad level the Holy Land and the Crusading movement clearly loomed large in Tranesi life. The passing pilgrim trade undoubtedly brought more people to St 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid. 241: 42–5; 245: 63–5. Ibid. 240: 37. Ibid. 242: 47. Ibid. 244: 59, 60. Ibid. 241: 42. Ibid. 244: 57. G. A. Loud, ‘Norman Italy and the Holy Land’, in The Horns of Hattin, ed. B. Z. Kedar, Jerusalem 1992, 53–4; Trani, no. 49 refers to a deacon from Trani who in 1169 was about to go to Jerusalem. 47 The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela, trans. M. N. Adler, London 1907, 9. 48 Regesta Regni Hierosolymitani (1097–1291), ed. R. Röhricht, Innsbruck 1893, I, no. 729.

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Figure 2  The cathedral at Trani Nicholas the Pilgrim’s shrine. The blind man from France, who was healed in Trani by St Nicholas, had lost his eyesight while travelling to Syria. After Andrea of Flanders was healed at Trani he proceeded to Jerusalem at the urging of the archbishop of Trani, presumably to offer thanks at the leading Christian shrine for his recovery.49 As already noted, Amandus himself was on board one ship that was saved from wreck by St Nicholas, and this ship, which was laden with pilgrims, was returning from Syria presumably to put in at an Apulian port. Later, Nicholas saved another ship, carrying pilgrims back from Syria, from a fearsome storm and helped it eventually to safety at Syracuse in Sicily.50 The inclusion of these accounts of near shipwreck strongly suggests that both vessels, or someone on board them, had some association with Trani. Indeed, Amandus himself had been on one, while in the second case he claimed to have heard the miracle ‘from the mouth’ of the helmsman. The connection of pilgrims being saved by St Nicholas the Pilgrim is clearly one that was not meant to be missed. It was surely tailored towards the rising pilgrim traffic, intended to draw more of them through Trani’s port. The spectacular location of the cathedral on the port side must have acted as a beacon which passing pilgrims simply could not miss (Fig. 2). Amandus had evidently visited the Holy Land and used language (writing after 1142) wrapped up in the Crusading climate of the time. He wrote of soldiers of Christ (milites Christi) and gave that label at one point to St Nicholas himself.51 The hagiographical sources for St Nicholas attest to the early presence in southern Italy of the elite rank of milites Christi on earth, the Knights Templar. Some Templar knights just outside Trani were among the witnesses of the spectacle 49

This story comes from Adelferius’s account, which suggests that Andrea set out for Jerusalem before it was captured by the Crusading army in 1099. 50 Vita, 244: 58; 245: 66. 51 Ibid. 244: 57, 59.



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of ‘two columns of clouds raised up to heaven’ from the roof of the church when Nicholas’s body was translated in 1142.52 This is certainly among the first references to the presence of the Templars in southern Italy. The Order’s activities grew notably in the coastal ports of Apulia by the later twelfth century, especially at Barletta and Molfetta, close to Trani.53 The focus on the Holy Land uncovers another persistent theme of the sources: the importance of sea travel to the people and the city of Trani. Southern Italy is a land inextricably tied to the sea, and one with a key location in the middle of the Mediterranean. Movement by sea was of crucial importance as a means of communication and trade (and also conquest). This was also the case on a local level between the coastal cities of southern Italy, especially in Apulia. Indeed it was at Trani that the famous maritime law code, claimed to be the oldest surviving example of its type in Western Europe, was apparently written, perhaps in 1063 (though some uncertainty surrounds the document).54 Travel by sea could be a risky and frightening experience. Amandus’s graphic descriptions of the buffeting of ships in storms, the whitening of faces, the desperate prayers, become all the more compelling when we realize that he had himself been a passenger. The power behind St Nicholas’s protection on the waves lay in the sea’s failure to discriminate between rank or person, or indeed faith. All were at risk, even those of the highest status. Narrative works have dukes, kings, Christians and Muslims, and a whole range of people suffering shipwreck in the waters of southern Italy.55 The dangers inherent at sea are highlighted by the arduous efforts made by medieval lawyers to deal with the thorny and complex issue of jettison when shipwreck threatened.56 It is surely no coincidence then that one of St Nicholas’s main areas of miracle-working was to save seafarers: it was clearly a pressing concern for the Tranesi. It is interesting that it is primarily in Amandus’s account, written after 1142, that Nicholas began to save seafarers, a shift in emphasis which may reflect the greater pilgrim traffic that had developed since Adelferius wrote. Indeed the passengers of each of Amandus’s vessels saved by Nicholas were pilgrims.57 Finally, the two basic features that are known about Nicholas himself are also useful for enhancing an understanding of the prevailing climate within Trani as the eleventh century moved into the twelfth. First, there is certainly a great deal of significance in Trani’s choice of Nicholas, a Greek, as its patron saint. Trani had strong cultural, religious, and historical ties to Byzantium. Indeed, in 1053 it was the bishop of Trani who received, and then disseminated throughout southern Italy, a haughty letter, the origins of which can ultimately be traced back to Michael 52 53

Ibid. 245: 62. H. Houben, ‘Templari e Teutonici nel Mezzogiorno normanno-svevo’, in Il Mezzogiorno normannosvevo e le Crociate: atti delle quattordicesime giornate normanno-sveve Bari, 17–20 ottobre 2000, Bari 2002, 258–9. 54 Ordinamenta et Consuetudo maris edita per consules civitatis Trani, ed. and trans. T. Twiss, in The Black Book of the Admiralty, Monumenta Juridica 55, London 1876, appendix, part IV, 521–43. 55 For example in Guillaume de Pouille, La Geste de Robert Guiscard, ed. and trans. M. Mathieu, Palermo 1961, bk V, pp. 256–8, lines 391–403; The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter, London 1969, 192; The History of the Tyrants of Sicily by ‘Hugo Falcandus’, 1154–1169, trans. G. A. Loud and T. Wiedemann, Manchester 1998, 213–14; The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. Broadhurst, London 1952, 336. 56 O. R. Constable, ‘The Problem of Jettison in Medieval Mediterranean Maritime Law’, JMH 20, 1994, 207–20. 57 Exceptions to this are found in Bartholomew’s account, which relates Nicholas’s assistance in saving the monks who had attempted to drown him, and his rescuing of a ship outside Otranto (both occurring before Nicholas’s death): Vita, 232: 6; 235: 18.

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Cerularius, the anti-Latin patriarch of Constantinople.58 The letter denounced the Roman Church and its use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist, and contributed to the growing tension between the Eastern and Western halves of Christianity that exploded rather spectacularly in 1054. The archbishops of Trani also carried the grandiose Greek title synkellus, an honorary ecclesiastical rank in the Constantinopolitan patriarchate. The links with Byzantium were not necessarily broken after the city fell under Norman domination in the 1070s, for after the death of Robert Guiscard, duke of Apulia, his successors lost much of their control over the Apulian coastal cities. From 1085 to the late 1130s Trani seems to have been largely selfgoverning, and perhaps for at least the early part of that period maintained links with Constantinople. Some charters from the city during this period recognized the rule of the Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus.59 The Tranesi were seemingly asserting their independence from the dukes of Apulia through the ploy of acknowledging a distant ruler who did not have the means to control their city. But it would have been just as easy not to have recognized any superior, and it is certainly significant that the distant ruler chosen was the Byzantine emperor. In the late 1090s Adelferius said that he wrote in the time of the ‘most glorious’ Urban II and also of Alexius ‘the most excellent’ emperor, and described the latter as the ‘Catholicaeque fidei cultor’ (‘cultivator of orthodox faith’). Adelferius also used the Byzantine title of synkellus when addressing his account to Archbishop Bisantius I.60 It does seem though that from the late 1090s the city was moving more firmly into the orbit of the Roman Church. Urban II’s high profile in southern Italy was surely significant in this respect, as was the appeal to the pope to canonize Nicholas.61 By the early decades of the twelfth century there were only isolated cases of personal names in Trani that still displayed overt Byzantine connections.62 Interestingly, in 1121 a man almost certainly of Greek background donated to the monastery at Tremiti a church he owned outside Trani, dedicated to St Basil, suggesting that there were still some Greeks in the city, but perhaps also highlighting the process of acculturation with a Latin monastery the recipient of the donation.63 In a charter of 1138 Archbishop Ubaldus of Trani could still be called imperialis synkellus, but Amandus, writing after 1142 and under the rule of Roger II of Sicily, did not employ the word when referring to Archbishop Bisantius III.64 Nor did Amandus, unlike Adelferius in the 1090s, mention the reign of Alexius Comnenus when he covered Nicholas’s canonization, or any other Byzantine emperor thereafter. Instead his work concluded, rather sensibly given the new political landscape of southern Italy, with the note that Nicholas’s translation was carried out in 1142 when the ‘magnificent’ King Roger of Sicily was ruling.65 In the 1090s the Greekness of Trani’s patron saint may have tapped into a significant part of the city’s cultural and political identity in a transitional period. By the 1140s, even if there was a residue of atavistic flickerings smouldering in the city, it is likely that Nicholas’s Greek origin no longer carried 58 59 60 61

D. Nicol, ‘Byzantium and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century’, JEH 13, 1962, 1–20. e.g. Trani, nos. 23–4, 26–7, 29–30. Vita, 238: 30; 239: 31. H. Houben, ‘Urbano II e i Normanni’, in his Mezzogiorno normanno-svevo: monasteri e castelli, ebrei e musulmani, Naples 1996, 115–43. 62 In a charter of 1131, for example, Alexius the son of Grifo the imperial protonobilissimus is mentioned: Trani, no. 33. 63 Codice diplomatico del monastero benedettino di S. Maria di Tremiti, 1005–1237, ed. A. Petrucci, 3 vols, FSI 98, Rome 1960, III, 269–77, no. 95. 64 Trani, no. 36; Vita, 242: 49. 65 Vita, 246: 68.



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the same meaning. Indeed, in the 1150s the city was notably reluctant to aid an attempted Byzantine reconquest of the mainland.66 Secondly, Nicholas was a layman of lowly status, born to a family of rural workers, and who adopted an eremetical life similar to the apostolic model. It is well known that the central Middle Ages saw the beginning of a shift in the types of people who received canonization. Saints had typically been powerful figures, monarchs and leading ecclesiastics, but by this later era individuals of more humble origins were joining their ranks.67 The eleventh century had witnessed a surge in the appeal of the sanctity of poverty, in particular of the ideal of voluntary and apostolic poverty. In Nicholas, the choice of the Tranesi was on the pulse, tapping into the latest currents. Their saint was in many ways much more modern and contemporary than the other, more renowned Nicholas lying further south at Bari, and who as the fourth-century bishop of Myra, represented the more traditional saintly model. This eventually brings in the underlying question of local rivalry, and the co­incidence of the two major Apulian coastal ports each acquiring its own St Nicholas within roughly a decade of each other. In an excellent article analyzing the individuals who participated in the translation of St Nicholas from Myra to Bari, ­Francesco Babudri noted the age-old competition that existed between Trani and Bari.68 This rivalry worked on many levels. At its roots was both cities’ desire for primacy within Apulia by being raised to archiepiscopal rank through an attempt to associate with, and take on, the ancient claims of the see of Canosa.69 By the late eleventh century the prelates of both cities were calling themselves archbishop. The archbishop of Bari claimed that the bishop of Trani was his suffragan, and to this end we find a number of forgeries, and interpolations, particularly of papal documents, in the archives at Bari.70 By extension this also brought in the question of economic and political primacy. The benefits and prestige that a saint could draw to a city were clear. The translation of St Nicholas of Myra raised Bari in one fell swoop to the elite rank of pilgrimage centres, and the eyes of all Europe (and a great deal of wealth) were attracted to the port city. There also appears to have developed a contrast in the late eleventh century between Bari, decidedly ‘Gregorian’ and for the Roman Church, and Trani, still at this point traditionally inclined towards Byzantium and Eastern Christianity.71 The depth of their rivalry is revealed in Babudri’s analysis of the different surviving lists of the names of the individuals who took part in the translation of St Nicholas from Myra to Bari. It is clear that one important account of the translation, made by the Barese monk Niceforus shortly after the event, incorporates some interesting later interpolations in one of the surviving versions. In this version, the so-called Beneventan codex of Niceforus, the list of sixty-two sailors who went to Myra included eight named individuals, not found in the other surviving versions, whose names are each followed by the word ‘tran-

66

Deeds of John and Manuel Comnenus by John Cinnamus, trans. C. M. Brand, New York 1976, 108–10 (bk IV.3–4). 67 Weinstein and Bell, Saints and Society, 246–7. 68 F. Babudri, ‘Sinossi critica dei traslatori Nicolaiani di Bari’, Archivio Storico Pugliese, 3, 1950, 3–94. 69 Ibid. 37–59. 70 A. Pratesi, ‘Alcune diocesi di Puglia nell’età di Roberto il Guiscardo: Trani, Bari e Canosa tra Greci e Normanni’, in Roberto Guiscardo e il suo tempo: atti delle prime giornate normanno-sveve, Bari, 28–29 maggio 1973, Bari, 1991, 225–42. 71 Babudri, ‘Sinossi critica’, 59; for analysis of Bari’s ‘pro-Gregorian’ stance see F. Nitti di Vito, La Ripresa gregoriana di Bari (1087–1105); e i suoi riflessi nel mondo contemperaneo politico e religioso, Trani 1942.

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ensis’. It seems that the insertion of these people from Trani was a fictitious attempt to dilute the firmly Barese character of the famous translation. But to complicate matters, as the name of the codex suggests, the interpolation appears to have been made at Benevento, and possibly as early as 1090. It was also from Benevento in the year 1090 that an account was produced of the story of the tribulations of a lame French pilgrim who had gone to Bari to be healed by its St Nicholas. In it we are told that the Bari found by the pilgrim was an unwelcoming den of thieves, full of wild people; so much so that St Nicholas ordered the pilgrim to leave for Benevento, where the saint himself had chosen to relocate.72 The Beneventans also had ancient pretensions to ecclesiastical primacy in southern Italy, and the premise of the work is obvious. The inclusion of participants from Trani in the list of sailors on the expedition to Myra seems to have been another part of the Beneventan plan to downplay Bari’s prestige and its intimate connection with St Nicholas of Myra. What is particularly interesting from our point of view is that the rivalry between Bari and Trani must have been sharp enough and sufficiently well known for someone in distant Benevento to realize the utility of concocting a contingent of Tranesi on the 1087 expedition. The underlying competition between the two leading Apulian cities should never be far from our minds when considering the development of the cult of St Nicholas the Pilgrim at Trani. In relation to this it would be intriguing to know the significance of one particular episode in Bartholomew the monk’s account. Just outside the city of Otranto, at a place called Sugiana, before Nicholas the Pilgrim had arrived at Trani, he stopped at a church dedicated to none other than St Nicholas of Myra. There he preached to onlookers inside that ‘this place [the church/Sugiana?] will be made famous until the end of the world’.73 Then Nicholas performed a range of miracles. Was this event meant to symbolize a coming together of the two holy men, a mutual co-operation? Or was it to mean that the miracles that Nicholas the Pilgrim was subsequently to perform would be responsible for that place’s fame, superseding its dedicatee St Nicholas of Myra? Whatever our interpretation of any rivalry, the cult of St Nicholas the Pilgrim should not be seen solely in that context; many people in the Middle Ages sought a connection with God and his protection, both of which a saint could provide. Intense spiritual and emotional needs always remained the prime drivers of the cult of St Nicholas the Pilgrim. Hagiographical sources are littered with problems for the historian, and this is the case for those relating to St Nicholas the Pilgrim. But if we can remain aware of these and dig a little deeper these sources can indeed be valuable and fill in some gaps. The hagiographical works on St Nicholas reveal much about Trani in what is otherwise a hazy period. They demonstrate the power of devotion and the popular appeal of a saint among the community, but one tinged with scepticism. People from a wide social range were healed, many of whom came from the surrounding territories of the city, but some from much further afield. These stories of healing show Trani’s interaction with its neighbouring and more distant worlds, and as a consequence we can understand the belief that a saint could bring not only protection but prestige to a city. The sources also make clear the city’s connection to the Holy Land and the importance of the sea. They show the strength of Trani’s Byzantine heritage and how this weakened during the first half of the twelfth century. In the canonization of a poor wandering preacher we also find a city open to the 72

S. Borgia, Memorie istoriche della pontificia città di Benevento dal secolo VIII al secolo XVIII, 3 vols, Rome 1763–9, II, 362–488. 73 Vita, 235: 20.



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latest currents of spiritual worship and we sense throughout an undertone of rivalry with the city of Bari. But this is far from exhausting the sources’ value. Small and insightful references abound: the use of the term citizen (civis) might have interesting implications.74 Adelferius mentions Nicholas walking around the city walls – useful evidence for reconstructing the city’s urban landscape.75 One of the captains reporting St Nicholas’s saving of his ship noted how the young saint was ‘dressed in the Greek way’, drawing attention to distinctions in fashion.76 Finally, there is an important allusion by Amandus to the civil war that ravaged Apulia in the 1130s, when he notes that St Nicholas’s translation was postponed ‘until the troubled state of Apulia had been put to rest’.77 Indeed the brief narrative sources confirm Trani’s involvement in this period of disturbance, and the redrafting of the city’s charter of privileges in 1139 made provision for the restoration of people captured and property lost in the conflict.78 In many ways the most apposite way to conclude, and to highlight the depth of meaning that St Nicholas the Pilgrim carried within Trani, is simply to repeat part of Amandus’s own conclusion to his work. He beseeched the saint: Strengthen the condition of our minds, bring help to the wretched; may you be present to those who call upon you, guide sailors, direct pilgrims O pilgrim; protect the city of Trani, defend from all harmful attack the Archbishop Bisantius who is utterly devoted to your worship, protect the clergy and people of Trani, guard me your most humble servant who has trusted in your help; and raise up everybody by your example and imitation.79

74 75 76 77 78 79

Ibid. 235: 19; 241: 45; 245: 62; Oldfield, ‘Citizenship and Community’, 323–38. Vita, 239: 35. Ibid. 245: 66. Ibid. 244: 59. Trani, no. 39; above, note 5 for the narrative sources. Vita, 245–6: 67.

THE ‘RESURGENCE’ OF POWYS IN THE LATE ELEVENTH AND EARLY TWELFTH CENTURIES David Stephenson The early medieval kingdom of Powys, which had by tradition extended over much of central and eastern Wales, had effectively ceased to exist in the course of the ninth century. Parts of the kingdom had fallen to English incursions, while much of the remainder appears to have been absorbed into Gwynedd. For some two hundred years Powys appears to have existed as a region rather than as a polity. Mid-twelfth-century sources, however, reveal a very different situation. A vigorous, though more restricted, realm of Powys had re-emerged, ruled by a dynasty that traced its origins to the formidable and talented Bleddyn ap Cynfyn who had died in 1075. According to the poet Gwalchmai, Bleddyn’s grandson Madog ap Maredudd had ruled a kingdom that extended from the summit of Pumlumon to the gates of Chester, and from Bangor (on Dee) to the border of Meirionnydd. His realm was very similarly described in the later Dream of Rhonabwy. The twelfth-century Latin Life of Gruff­udd ap Cynan refers to a king of Powys in the late 1070s and to princes of Powys in the early years of the twelfth century, while Meilir Brydydd’s elegy for Gruffudd ap Cynan (1137) refers to ‘kings of Powys’ at the battle of Mynydd Carn in 1081. It is noteworthy that all of these designations are retrospective. In this resurgence of a kingdom of Powys it seems at first sight that the late eleventh and very early twelfth centuries were crucial. This has been seen as a period when the power of the rulers of Powys was felt throughout Wales. Many commentators have pictured a Powysian ascendancy in Wales at the beginning of the twelfth century, followed by a long period of decline. J. E. Lloyd referred to ‘the supremacy of Powys’, while Sir Rees Davies talked of ‘the greater Powys which seemed to be emerging in the early years of the twelfth century’, and Kari Maund wrote of ‘the rise of Powys’ in the same period. But there is much in these accounts of the reemergence of Powys that gives ground for some disquiet and that touches upon the wider question of the nature of Welsh polities in the later eleventh and early twelfth centuries. 

The confident depiction of the limits of early Powys in J. E. Lloyd, The History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols with single pagination, London 1939 [henceforth Lloyd, History], I, 242 can no longer be accepted. See for a more recent view Wendy Davies, Wales in the Early Middle Ages, Leicester 1982, 94, 99–102. I should like to thank Dr Rhian Andrews for her generosity in placing her notes on poetic references at my disposal, and for her kindness in reading and commenting on a draft of this paper.  Gwaith Meilir Brydydd a’i Ddisgynyddion, ed. J. E. Caerwyn Williams, Caerdydd 1994 [henceforth GMB], 7.73–6.  Breudwyt Ronabwy, ed. Melville Richards, Caerdydd 1949, 1.  Vita Griffini filii Conani, ed. Paul Russell, Cardiff 2005 [henceforth Vita Griffini], 60 (at 10.2) and 80 (at 27.5). For Meilir’s Brenhinoedd Powys see GMB 3.106 and the note at 92.  Lloyd, History, II, 422.  R. R. Davies, The Age of Conquest: Wales 1063–1415, 2nd edn, Oxford 2000, 43.  Kari Maund, The Welsh Kings, Stroud 2000, 142.



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Any fresh assessment of the formation of the twelfth-century Powysian polity must start by examining anew the principal sources for the period. English chron­ icles are of some help, as is the work of the Welsh court poets. Contemporary or nearly contemporary Welsh historical writing is, however, of paramount importance. This falls into three categories: Latin annalistic chronicles (Annales Cambriae), Welsh chronicles (the Brutiau), and a biography of the northern ruler Gruffudd ap Cynan. In the case of the Brutiau the view of Thomas Jones that we are dealing with three translations into Welsh (Peniarth MS 20, the Red Book of Hergest, and Brenhinedd y Saesson) from three distinct but related Latin texts now appears untenable in the light of the important work being carried out by Professor David Dumville. Again, it has generally been accepted that these texts were ultimately derived from a lost Latin archetype, compiled at Strata Florida, probably in the mid or late 1280s, though doubt has recently been cast on the existence of such an archetype. In the case of the Annales Cambriae family we are dealing, for the late eleventh and early twelfth century, with two principal texts both emanating from St David’s – the socalled B- and C-texts – whose evolution was worked out by Kathleen Hughes.10 So much is tolerably clear, but significant problems remain. What, for example, was the nature of the materials from which the Latin antecedents of the Brutiau were compiled? And what was the relationship between, on the one hand, the Brutiau and the putative lost Latin archetype and, on the other, the Latin texts of the Annales Cambriae family? In addition, important questions have been raised regarding the periods at which the text or texts that underlie Brut y Tywysogion were compiled. In an important paper in the Haskins Society Journal for 1999 Kari Maund strove to re-evaluate the political significance in the early twelfth century of Owain ap Cadwgan, a grandson of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn.11 At the core of Maund’s analysis lies an assessment of the relative worth of the three main narrative sources for the history of Wales in this period. She is clearly and rightly sceptical about the value, as a record of events, of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. This last text, the Latin original of which has been recently rediscovered and reconstituted by Paul Russell, was clearly composed to glorify Gruffudd ap Cynan,12 even if the original version is rather less obviously an exercise in Venedotian dynastic propaganda than was the later Welsh translation. The Latin original was written later than the period, from the 1070s to 1137, that it describes. We may perhaps guess that it was a product of the 1140s.13 The evidence of the Life is therefore not contemporary, and, except in its treatment of the region around St David’s, is not focused on events outside Gwynedd. On occasions it manifestly involves significant distortion.14 In the case of Annales Cambriae, both the B- and C-texts for this period were identified by Kathleen Hughes as St David’s compilations. Their entries for the later eleventh and early  Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Peniarth MS. 20 Version, trans. Thomas Jones, Cardiff 1952, p. xxxvii; Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ‘The Kings of the English’, A.D. 682–954: Texts P, R, S in Parallel, ed. and trans. D. N. Dumville, Aberdeen 2005; Brenhinoedd y Saeson, ‘The Kings of the English’, A.D. 955–1097: Texts P, R, S in Parallel, ed. and trans. D. N. Dumville, Aberdeen 2007.  See Julian Harrison’s chapter on ‘Cistercian Chronicling in the British Isles’, in The Chronicle of Melrose Abbey: A Stratigraphic Edition, ed. Dauvit Broun and Julian Harrison, Woodbridge 2007, I, 27 n. 66. But cf. ibid. 25. 10 Kathleen Hughes, ‘The Welsh Latin Chronicles: Annales Cambriae and Related Texts’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 59, 1973, 233–58, and in a separate print. 11 Kari Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan: A Rebel Revisited’, HSJ 13, 2004 for 1999, 65–74. 12 Vita Griffini, 43–7. 13 Ibid. 46–7, where a date of 1137 × 1148 is suggested. I propose to discuss the date of composition of this text elsewhere. 14 See for example the treatment of the battle of Mynydd Carn in 1081, Vita Griffini, 68–70.

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twelfth centuries are relatively terse. Nevertheless Dr Maund believes that there is ‘a case … for the adoption of this text [i.e. Annales Cambriae] in interpreting events in Powys in this period.’15 Maund thus discounts in significant measure the much fuller treatment of the activities of the dynasty of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn that is found in the Brutiau. For her, ‘[T]he question of how, when and why this particularly full section of the Brutiau came into being … is yet to be examined in detail.’16 One point is, however, clear: Maund believes that the evidence of the Brutiau needs to be treated with the same sort of caution that is necessary in the case of the Life of Gruffudd ap Cynan. She goes further and suggests a possible provenance and dating for the section of the Brutiau covering the first two decades or so of the twelfth century: we should look to the sphere of influence of another Powysian Owain, Owain Cyfeiliog ap Gruffudd ap Maredudd, whose father Gruffudd features with Owain (ap Cadwgan)’s brother Einion as a successful Powysian general in 1116, establishing the dynasty’s right to Meirionydd, Penllyn and Cyfeiliog. Owain Cyfeiliog was a poet and a literary patron who lived in an age dominated by two forceful members of the Second Dynasty of Gwynedd, Owain Gwynedd and Rhys ap Gruffudd, both of whom sought hegemony over western mid-Wales. The surviving narrative in the Brutiau for 1101–21, with its interest in that area, and its references to places in and around Cyfeiliog, may represent a tradition of Powysian ambition competing with that of Gwynedd and Deheubarth, and, like HGK [Historia Gruffud vab Kenan], composed in the later twelfth century to support the claims of a kinsman of its hero …’17

This assessment of the origin and purpose of the early twelfth-century sections of the Brutiau clearly has important implications for any assessment of Welsh political development in that period. Careful analysis of the texts, in order to test this hypo­ thesis, is therefore essential. For over two decades from 1100 onwards the text of the Brutiau is characterized by elements, distinct in both style and content, which appear to mark it out as quite different from other sections of the Welsh chronicles. In the first place the text displays an unusually full awareness of events in Powys. The narrative is dominated by the exploits of the descendants of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn. It is not simply at this point a Powysian text – there is, for instance, a great deal of information contained in it about events in, say, Ceredigion. It seems fairly clear that behind the Brutiau in the sections dealing with the late eleventh and the early and mid-twelfth century lies a source connected with Llanbadarn Fawr. The deaths, for example, of a family associated with the church there, Bishop Sulien and his descendants, are scrupulously recorded between 1091 and 1163.18 Incorporated into each obituary notice is a summary of aspects of the career of the dead man. Again, episodes relating to the church of Llanbadarn Fawr or its vicinity appear prominently in the narrative.19 The information relating to Powys in the first two decades of the twelfth century does not, however, simply represent the view from Llanbadarn Fawr. Let us take just one example. In the entry for 1113 we hear in disturbing detail how Madog ap Rhirid ap Bleddyn was seized by Maredudd ap Bleddyn and handed over to Owain

15 16 17 18

Maund, Welsh Kings, 146 Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan’, 69. Ibid. Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. and trans. Thomas Jones, Cardiff 1955, 32 (Sulien), 38 (Rhigyfarch ap Sulien), 110 (Daniel ap Sulien), 116 (Ieuan [ap Sulien]), 144 (Cedifor ap Daniel, Henri ab Arthen [ap Sulien]). References to the Brutiau will generally be to the Red Book text alone except where there is significant variation in the Peniarth 20 text. 19 Ibid. 60, 72, 92–4.



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ap Cadwgan ap Bleddyn who ‘took him gladly and blinded him’.20 Maredudd and Owain then divided between them his, Madog’s, portion of Powys: ‘[t]hat was Caereinion and Traean Deuddwr and Aberriw’.21 This detailed description of Madog’s former territories suggests a high level of local knowledge of an area close to the eastern margins of Powys. A second distinct characteristic of the chronicle at this point is the fullness of its treatment of events. Thus, the Welsh text in Thomas Jones’s edition of the Red Book version, running between 652 and 1282, extends to 134 pages. The first thirty years of the twelfth century occupy no less than thirty-six pages – that is over a quarter of the entire text. No other section of the Brut is so detailed and so extensive. Thirdly, the compiler of the material behind this section of the text shows a very lively interest in genealogy. On at least six occasions genealogical information involves a significant digression in the narrative. For example in the entry for 1109 the chronicle records how Owain ap Cadwgan went to Nest, the daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr and wife of Gerald the steward, ‘to visit her as a kinswoman. And kinsfolk they were: for Cadwgan ap Bleddyn and Gwladus, daughter of Rhiwallon, Nest’s mother, were first cousins and Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, sons of Cynfyn were brothers by Angharad, daughter of King Maredudd’.22 The point that the chronicler is making in this final comment relies on the fact that Maredudd, the great-greatgrandfather of Owain ap Cadwgan, was the son of Owain ap Hywel Dda, the greatgreat-great-grandfather of Nest. Genealogical interest of this type does to some extent recur in the Brutiau, but only after a gap of several decades and then it is not sustained.23 In other words the interest in genealogy seems to reflect the outlook of the authors of materials that lay behind the putative Latin archetype rather than the interests of the compiler of the archetype itself. A fourth characteristic of the Brutiau at this stage is the frequent occurrence of brief reports of the actions of the English king (Henry I), either at the start of the entry for a year or at some significant point therein. For example, under 1110 the entry begins as follows: ‘the following year King Henry remembered the imprisonment of Iorwerth ap Bleddyn’. Similarly, under 1117 the second sentence of a very brief entry tells us that ‘King Henry stayed in Normandy because there was war between him and the king of France’. More than ten entries are characterized by such reports.24 Again the chronicler is interested in what we may call the mechanisms of diplomacy. Between 1102 and 1121 there are twenty-three references to messengers or envoys (cenhadau).25 For the whole of the text before 1102 there are no such references, and in the 160 years that follow 1121 a total of only fourteen.26 In the course of the first twenty-five years or so of the twelfth century we also hear much

20 21 22

Ibid. 76. Ibid. Ibid. 54. Other examples are to be found at 82 (s.a. 1115), 86–8 (s.a. 1116), 100.1–8, 12–15 (s.a. 1116), 110 (s.a. 1125). See also possibly 64 (s.a. 1110). This list is confined to those entries in which the genealogical information involves a digression or a significant break in the flow of the narrative. 23 See ibid. 154 (s.a. 1171), 164 (s.a. 1175). 24 Ibid. 40.33–4; 48.24–7; 50.24–5; 64.11–12; 76.10–11; 78.1–2; 82.7–8; 100.32–4; 102.29–104.1; 104.20–1; 110.9–11. 25 Ibid. 42.24, 27; 44.1; 46.4; 58.12; 62.2, 24; 64.12 (and ?29); 74.9, 24; 78.28; 80.6, 8, 17, 25, 29; 82.28; 84.7; 92.22; 96.3; 102.4; 106.24. 26 Ibid. 136.22; 152.17; 158.12; 160.23; 192.19; 194.34; 210.26; 212.27; 214.28; 238.16; 260.25, 28, 32; 264.7.

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else about alliances, truces, agreements, etc.27 Perhaps significantly the chronicler appears disapproving of those whose impetuosity constitutes a destabilizing element in political relations. On several occasions he criticizes such persons as ynfydion or hotheads, twice hinting at his own advancing years when he labels them as ‘young’ hotheads.28 This terminology has attracted the attention of a number of historians. Sir Rees Davis noted that ynfydion was a dismissive term, specifically applied to followers of Gruffudd ap Rhys of Deheubarth and that it reveals ‘the hopelessness’ of his enterprise in trying to reconstitute a major kingdom in the south.29 But we might note that the word is also applied to men from Ceredigion who joined forces with Owain ap Cadwgan in 1110.30 There was nothing hopeless about Owain’s career, though much of it was reprehensible. The Welsh chronicler’s use of the word ynfydion has also been studied by Robert Babcock,31 who argues that it was applied to men who had abandoned traditional obligations and socio-political ties to follow new leaders in a period when the Norman presence in Wales was having a disruptive effect on the traditional social and political order. This is distinctly possible but it certainly does not exhaust the potential significance of the term as used by the chronicler. One element of that significance was hinted at by Sir John Lloyd. Reviewing Lloyd’s treatment of Gruffudd ap Rhys, Babcock commented that ‘he [Lloyd] did not deal with the scornful description of Gruffudd’s followers in the chronicle’.32 But Lloyd did just that in his British Academy lecture, where he commented that the chronicler at this point is a friend of the status quo. The wild Southerners who gathered round Gruffydd ap Rhys, sole offshoot of the ancient stock of Deheubarth, are ‘young fools’, who may be moved by a genuine desire to restore the kingdom which had collapsed on the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr, but may also be thinking of little save plunder …33

It should be noted that there are only two other uses of ynfydion in the Brutiau outside the first two decades of the twelfth century. The first occurs under 1136 when Flemings and Normans fled after a battle and were drowned in a river like ynfydion –presumably because they had rushed incautiously into the waters. A second occurs in the entry for 1217 where, at the battle of Lincoln, the French and their allies were put to flight and forced to hide ‘like madmen in the first place they could find’.34 We should note that the use of the word in the entries for 1136 and 1217 is slightly different from its use to describe earlier events in the first decades of the twelfth century: the later examples seem to refer to men who are panic-stricken rather than hot-headed. Once again, therefore, the use of the word seems to reflect the material on which the Latin archetype was based rather than the inventiveness of the compiler of the archetype itself. 27

Ibid. 44 (a truce), 46 (a peace), 62 (a truce, and a peace), 64 (a peace, the giving of hostages, etc.), 72 (a pact), 76 (the giving of hostages, a truce), 80 (a pact), 104 (a request for a pact), 106 (a truce), 108 (a peace and a pact). 28 For the ‘hotheads’ ibid. 68.25; 90.7; for ‘young hotheads’, 86.17; 88.27. See also the chron­icler’s distaste for those who acted ‘like a band of thoughtless inhabitants without a ruler over them’, 92.30–1. 29 Davies, Age of Conquest, 43. 30 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 68.25. 31 Robert S. Babcock, ‘Imbeciles and Normans: The Ynfydion of Gruffudd ap Rhys Reconsidered’, HSJ 4, 1993 for 1992, 1–10. 32 Ibid. 7. 33 J. E. Lloyd, ‘The Welsh Chronicles’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 14, 1928, 369–91, and in a separate print, 1–25 at 17–18. 34 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 114, 212.



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Unsurprisingly, it is fairly clear that the chronicler working in the early decades of the twelfth century was a cleric of some sort. He is of a moralizing turn of mind, reacting with horror to the plundering of Llanbadarn Fawr and Llanddewi Brefi,35 quoting Solomon,36 and reminding us ‘that the will of man availeth nought unless God aids it’.37 His attitude to ecclesiastical governance is illuminated at one point when, in the course of describing the death of the bishop of St David’s in 1115, he comments that ‘after him there came a man from Normandy, who was called Bernard, who was raised to be bishop in Menevia by King Henry against the will and in despite of all the clergy of the Britons’.38 It is possible that we are now in a position to attempt an identification of the man responsible for chronicling this first period of the twelfth century. He was connected with Llanbadarn Fawr. As Lloyd commented,39 his description of events at Aberystwyth in 1116 suggests that he was an eye-witness, or, we might add, had derived his account from an eye-witness. He was almost certainly connected with the family of Bishop Sulien, men who loom so large among the obituaries of the Brut in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. Lloyd’s approach was endorsed by James Conway Davies in the characteristically lengthy introductions to his Episcopal Acts Relating to Welsh Dioceses. Discussing the Brut in the opening decades of the twelfth century, he commented that ‘it would be pleasant to be able to prove that this record was written by a representative of the family of Sulien’.40 Sir John Lloyd thought that the style and content of the chronicle manifested a unity covering the years 1100 to 1121.41 This view is substantially sound but perhaps needs to be modified in terms of its terminus ante quem. We should note that the entry for 1125 contains one of the genealogical digressions discussed earlier. We are told that ‘Cadwallon ap Gruffudd ap Cynan slew his three uncles, namely, Goronwy and Rhiddid and Meilyr, sons of Owain ab Edwin: for Angharad, daughter of Owain ab Edwin, was the wife of Gruffudd ap Cynan, and she was mother of Cadwallon and Owain and Cadwaladr and many daughters.’42 Further, the entry for 1126 contains the last of the terse references to the activ­ ities of Henry I that characterize entries for the period 1102 onwards: ‘the following year King Henry returned from Normandy, after peace had been made between him and those with whom he had previously had strife.’43 We should also recall the chronicler’s interest in diplomacy, his familiarity with Powys, his awareness of events in Ceredigion, his maturity and dislike of young hotheads, and his apparent animus against Bishop Bernard in 1115. It is thus of considerable interest that the chronicle entry for 1127 tells us that at the close of that year died Daniel, son of Sulien bishop of Menevia, the man who was arbitrator between Gwynedd and Powys in the strife that was between them. And there was no one who could find fault or dishonour in him, for he was peaceful and beloved by all. And he was archdeacon of Powys.44 35 36 37 38 39 40

Ibid. 60. Ibid. 90. Ibid. 86; cf. 90. Ibid. 82. Lloyd, ‘Welsh Chronicles’, 17. Episcopal Acts and Cognate Documents Relating to Welsh Dioceses, 1066–1272, ed. James Conway Davies, 2 vols, Cardiff 1946–8, II, 503. 41 Lloyd, ‘Welsh Chronicles’, 17–18; cf. Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan’, 72. 42 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 110. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

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Here then is a man who died perhaps a year after the stylistic unity of the text of the Brutiau that begins c. 1100 comes to an end. He was a man whose family connections were in Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion, and whose son Cedifor, who died in 1163, became archdeacon of Ceredigion.45 But Daniel himself held ecclesiastical office in Powys. He was certainly of mature years, for his father had died in 1091; he was involved in diplomacy – he was an arbitrator; he may well have despaired of belligerent young hotheads, for not only was he a diplomat, he was peaceful as well. As for Bishop Bernard, we may care to recall the tradition that Daniel himself had been proposed as bishop by the clergy of St David’s in 1115, but that Henry I had insisted on the appointment of Bernard.46 It might still be argued that the identification of Daniel ap Sulien as the compiler, or the principal source, of the text underlying the Brutiau for 1100–26 rests on little more than a series of coincidences. The establishment of a stylistic and thematic unity of the text in that period still leaves open the possibility that the material relating to the dynasty of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn was added to a text, perhaps repres­ ented by Annales Cambriae, at a later date in the twelfth century, as suggested by Dr Maund.47 But this seems highly unlikely. In the first place, if the text had been constructed in order to support the claims of Owain Cyfeiliog it would surely have included more material relating to his father, Gruffudd ap Maredudd, who is mentioned only in passing and who receives no eulogy on his death in 1128.48 Again, the emphasis on the exploits of the dynasty in west Wales in the early twelfth century is not particularly appropriate to the age of Owain Cyfeiliog, whose activ­ ities focused more on the eastern rather than the western margins of Powys.49 A further and very significant element in the text of the Brutiau that suggests an original compilation more or less contemporary with the events described is that of nomenclature. In the entries for 1100–26 there are some sixteen references to the Welsh as Brytaniaid (reflecting an original Britones).50 There are only two references for this period to the Welsh as Cymry (reflecting, perhaps, an original Walenses).51 Huw Pryce has observed that after about 1136 the Brutiau usually designate the Welsh as Cymry.52 This shift is in fact particularly marked for the period from the mid 1160s53 – perhaps reflecting the point at which Llanbadarn Fawr ceased to be the main centre of chronicling activity. If the section of the Brutiau dealing with the careers of Cadwgan ap Bleddyn, Owain ap Cadwgan, and Maredudd ap Bleddyn had been composed in the later twelfth century we should perhaps expect it to reflect the then current usage and to refer to Cymry rather than to Brytaniaid. 45

The foundation of all serious study of this family is J. E. Lloyd, ‘Bishop Sulien and his Family’, National Library of Wales Journal, 2, 1941–2, 1–6. The entry by J. E. Lloyd, revised by Nancy Edwards, in ODNB, s.n. Sulien contains a guide to subsequent writing on the subject. 46 See Episcopal Acts, 503, with discussion by Lloyd, History, II, 459–61. 47 Maund, ‘Owain ap Cadwgan’, 74. 48 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 101, 109, 110. 49 See the important article by Gruffydd Aled Williams, ‘Welsh Raiding in the Twelfth-Century Shropshire/Cheshire March: The Case of Owain Cyfeiliog’, Studia Celtica, 40, 2006, 89–115. 50 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 42.9, 20; 44.1, 4, 15, 17, 19, 24; 48.14; 72.2; 78.10; 82.24; 86.29; 94.13, 24; 96.27. 51 Ibid. 90 (1116); Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, 40 (1124). It is not of course impossible that these instances may represent later editing. 52 Huw Pryce, ‘British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales’, EHR 116, 2001, 775–801 at 782–3. 53 In Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, for example, the Welsh are generally Brytaniaid for some thirty years after 1135: 112 (1136), 114 (1136), 122 (1146), 124 (1146), 144 (1165); they are Cymry in 1159, 1164, and 1165: ibid. 140, 144–6; on the other hand Wales is Cymru in 1137 and 1158: ibid. 116, 136.



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In the light of the above analysis we may suggest that the text underlying the 1100–26 section of the Brut was compiled more or less contemporaneously with the episodes of which it treats. We may further suggest that its compiler may well have been an eye-witness to, or even personally involved in, some of these episodes. If this was so then the credibility of the Brut for this period should be regarded as substantial, and it appears as a much more significant source than the sparser St David’s texts of Annales Cambriae. We can thus turn with renewed confidence to what the Brutiau tell us about the so-called ‘Powysian’ dynasty of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. But, pace commentators from J. E. Lloyd onwards, that dynasty is for most of the period under review scarcely to be regarded as specifically Powysian, though it was of course subsequently treated as such in much later genealogical compilations.54 The interests and activities of the principal members of the dynasty in the late eleventh and early twelfth century in fact extended far beyond Powys, and it is far from certain that that territory was always treated as the dynastic heartland. Those principal members of the dynasty may well have acknowledged a Powysian ancestry, but such an awareness is unlikely to have constrained their outlook or dictated their actions: lordships and realms were carved out on a far more pragmatic basis. Practical politics in Wales during this period was emphatically the art of the possible. Perhaps the first point to make is that it is quite clear that Powys itself was in turmoil for much of the period. Well might Henry I’s representative in Shrewsbury base his plans for dealing with the problems of mid-Wales on the fact that ‘he knew the ways of the people of that land, that they were all of them slaying one another’.55 By way of illustration, it is possible to reconstruct in outline the tenurial history of Caereinion, among the most central commotes of Powys, for the period from 1099 to 1116. In 1113 Madog ap Rhirid was blinded by Owain ap Cadwgan. His lands, Caereinion, Traean Deuddwr, and Aberriw, were shared between Owain ap Cadwgan and Maredudd ap Bleddyn. Maredudd must initially have taken ­Caereinion, because when Owain was killed in 1116 we are told that his brothers shared his lands, except for Caereinion, which Owain had taken from Maredudd. Caereinion was now presumably repossessed by Maredudd. In 1111 Madog ap Rhirid had been given Caereinion, Traean Deuddwr, and Aberriw by Richard of Beaumais, Henry I’s represen­tative at Shrewsbury; this was the land that had once been held by Madog and his brother Ithel. They had seized part of Powys – clearly the area described above – after the fall of Cadwgan ap Bleddyn and Owain ap Cadwgan in 1109. Cadwgan had probably been nominal overlord of this part of Powys but had installed his son Owain as the immediate ruler. In 1110 Madog and Ithel were displaced by Iorwerth ap Bleddyn, recently released from prison by Henry I and installed in Powys. In 1111 Caereinion was the scene of Iorwerth’s death at the hands of Madog – who was therefore still active in Caereinion even though nominally deprived of lordship there. In the aftermath of Iorwerth’s killing, Henry I gave his lands (presumably including Caereinion) to Cadwgan ap Bleddyn, who was in turn killed by Madog near Welshpool. Madog was then confirmed in Caereinion, Traean Deuddwr, and Aberriw, as noted above. Before 1109 Cadwgan ap Bleddyn had been given (= confirmed in?) his lands by Iorwerth ap Bleddyn, following Iorwerth’s establishment as lord of much of Powys by Henry I in 1102. The lands ‘given’ by Iorwerth to Cadwgan were presumably the ‘portion of Powys’ that Cadwgan had held between 1099 and 54

See P. C. Bartrum, ‘Rhandiroedd Powys’, National Library of Wales Journal, 18, 1973, 231–7 at 232, and idem, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, Cardiff 1966, 102, 104. 55 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 74.

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1102. At some point after 1102 Cadwgan clearly made Ceredigion his main base and installed his son Owain as ruler of his portion of Powys, including Caereinion as outlined above. From 1099 until 1116 the sequence of occupation of Caereinion thus appears to be

Cadwgan ap Bleddyn Iorwerth ap Bleddyn? Cadwgan ap Bleddyn? Owain ap Cadwgan Madog and Ithel sons of Rhirid Iorwerth ap Bleddyn Cadwgan ap Bleddyn Madog ap Rhirid Maredudd ap Bleddyn Owain ap Cadwgan Maredudd ap Bleddyn.56

Thus, in some seventeen years lordship over Caereinion changed hands at least eight, and possibly ten, times, among six members of the dynasty. Around half of the changes of possession involved violence. The commote was in addition clearly used as a place of refuge by members of the dynasty who were in conflict with whichever of their kinsmen claimed lordship over it:57 nominal possession should not be confused with control. Such instability is not, perhaps, necessarily incompatible with a view of Powys as the power-base of a dynasty that dominated Welsh political affairs for some half a century – but it prompts caution. That caution intensifies when we examine the extent of the territories held by leading members of the dynasty, and the way in which their realms were described by the chroniclers whose work forms the basis of the Brutiau. Let us first take the case of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn himself. On his father’s side he may well have been a scion of a prominent family from Powys – but he was also, through his mother, a half-brother to Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, ruler of much of Wales in the middle decades of the eleventh century.58 Gruffudd was described in the Brut as ‘head and shield and defender of the Britons’ or, more simply, as ‘king of the Britons’.59 After Gruffudd’s death much of his realm passed to his half-brothers Bleddyn and Rhiwallon, sons of Cynfyn. In 1069 Bleddyn and Rhiwallon were confronted by the sons of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, with Bleddyn emerging as the only survivor in the ensuing battle.60 The fact that the battle took place in Mechain, in eastern Powys, may perhaps indicate that Mechain was the heartland of Bleddyn and Rhiwallon. On the other hand they may have been active in that region by virtue of their apparent alliance with the rebellious thegn Eadric against the Normans.61 It is at least clear that Bleddyn was not regarded as principally a Powysian ruler: after the battle he is recorded in the Brut as holding Gwynedd and Powys, while Maredudd ab Owain held Deheubarth. Bleddyn himself certainly had an interest in the south, and probably aspired to rule it, thus reconstituting his half-brother’s realm. In 1075 he was killed in the south ‘by

56

The sequence can be established by reference to, in order, ibid. 76, 98, 74, 62, 56, 64, 72–4, 46,

38. 57 58 59 60 61

Ibid. 64–6, 72. K. L. Maund, Ireland, Wales and England in the Eleventh Century, Woodbridge 1991, 68–76. Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 26. Ibid. Maund, Ireland, Wales and England, 140; Lloyd, History, II, 374.



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the treachery of the evil-spirited chiefs and nobles of Ystrad Tywi’. The chronicle then records that Bleddyn was ‘the man who, after Gruffudd, his brother, eminently held the whole kingdom of the Britons.’62 Here was a fateful legacy of Bleddyn to at least the first generation of his descendants: they might aspire to a British realm. His sons Madog, Cadwgan, and Rhirid make their first appearance in the Brutiau in 1088, expelling Rhys ap Tewdwr of Deheubarth from his kingdom.63 Rhys ap Tewdwr was seen in some circles as a successor to Bleddyn ap Cynfyn as the paramount ruler in Wales: when he was killed in 1093 the Welsh chronicler recorded that ‘then fell the kingdom of the Britons’.64 It seems possible, however, that the finality of that event was not appreciated by the family of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn. Another of Bleddyn’s sons, Iorwerth, appears for a brief time as the foremost member of the dynasty in the first few years of the twelfth century. He was treated as such by Henry I who sought to detach him from the side of the rebellious Robert de Bellême in 1102, by promising him ‘the portion it was his due to have of the land of the Britons … That was Powys and Ceredigion and half of Dyfed … and Ystrad Tywi and Gower and Cydweli.’ Iorwerth’s realm, that is, was one that covered mid- and much of south and west Wales. The phraseology of the Brut suggests that the dynasty was still pictured as having a potential hegemony within the land of the Britons: the realm was still envisaged in national rather than local terms. Iorwerth’s territory as promised to him by Henry I was not a greater Powys but a substantial part of a ‘British’ kingdom. Iorwerth ap Bleddyn’s prominence was, however, short-lived. Henry I appears to have regretted his promises to Iorwerth, or perhaps had never intended to fulfil them, and in 1103 he brought him down. Iorwerth was imprisoned by the king until 1110, when he was released and established in Powys. There in the following year he was killed by his nephew Madog ap Rhirid.65 The lands to which Iorwerth was restored in 1110 were far more limited than those that Henry I had promised him in 1102, most of which had passed by the later date into the hands of others. Ceredigion, for example, was held by one of Iorwerth’s brothers, Cadwgan. Cadwgan ap Bleddyn’s career is particularly instructive. He is found in 1088 raiding into Dyfed. Once more, in 1093 he ravaged Dyfed, and in 1096 sent his war-band on a similar mission. But his interests extended not only to the south-west of Wales but the north as well, for in 1094 he is recorded as defeating a Norman invasion of Gwynedd at the unknown location of Coedysbys.66 It is possible that Gruffudd ap Cynan (who of course claimed kingship in Gwynedd) was in captivity in Chester at this time, or was at least absent from Wales, and that Cadwgan was asserting himself as the successor to his father’s supremacy in the north.67 When 62 63 64 65 66 67

Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 26–8. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 44, 48, 64, 72–4. Ibid. 30–6. Vita Griffini, s.19.5 gives a period of imprisonment after 1081 of twelve years but at s.22.1 gives sixteen years. The judicious discussion by Paul Russell, ibid. 149, is important. He points out that according to s.23.1 Gruffudd went to Godred Crovan of Man when he was released and that the latter is generally held to have died in 1095, and notes that ‘if so the sixteen-year period must be inaccurate, but that does not make the twelve period [sic] correct.’ One possible way of resolving this problem may be to assume that Gruffudd was imprisoned for twelve years but did not return to Gwynedd in any other capacity but that of a fugitive until sixteen years after the start of his imprisonment. It is surely of significance that Cadwgan ap Bleddyn is the only Welsh ruler to be named in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in connection with the Welsh resistance to William II in the 1090s. In the entry for 1097 Cadwgan is singled out as the finest of the Welsh leaders: ASC, trans. Swanton, 233.

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Gruffudd ap Cynan reappears in the Brut’s narrative in 1098, it is as a companion of Cadwgan: Norman pressure compelled both men to retreat to Anglesey, whence they departed for Ireland. It is only with Cadwgan’s return from Ireland in 1099 that the Brut connects him for the first time with Powys, recording that while Gruffudd ap Cynan took Gwynedd, Cadwgan acquired Ceredigion and a portion of Powys.68 It is quite likely that Gruffudd ap Cynan was able to displace Cadwgan from Gwynedd at this point. Gruffudd had far better contacts in Ireland than did Cadwgan and was presumably able to return to Wales with a much stronger force than that which could be mustered by his fellow refugee. Thereafter Ceredigion seems to have been Cadwgan’s main territory. In 1102 Iorwerth ap Bleddyn confirmed Cadwgan in possession of Ceredigion and a part of Powys. Cadwgan seems subsequently to have installed his son Owain in the Powysian territory, while basing himself in Ceredigion.69 Owain’s celebrated abduction of Nest from her husband Gerald of Windsor in 1109 took place after he had attended a feast arranged by his father in Ceredigion. Immediately after the abduction Cadwgan was absent from Ceredigion, having gone to Powys to deal with the men of that land who had rejected Owain’s lordship.70 It is the only time that Cadwgan is recorded in the Brutiau as being active within Powys in the period 1088–1110. When, at Henry I’s instigation, Welsh lords from Arwystli, Meirionnydd, and parts of Powys invaded Cadwgan’s lands after the episode of the abduction, it is clear that it was Ceredigion that they attacked.71 Cadwgan and Owain evaded the incoming forces but Cadwgan’s stud was seized. It was located near Llan­ badarn Fawr in northern Ceredigion. The Powysian lands of Cadwgan and Owain were seized by Madog and Ithel, sons of Rhirid ap Bleddyn. Cadwgan subsequently regained Ceredigion from Henry I for a fine of £100, but soon lost that territory and was detained in England when it became clear that he could not control the depredations of his son. Henry I then granted Ceredigion to Gilbert fitz Richard, apparently leaving Cadwgan landless. Finally, in 1111, after the killing of his brother Iorwerth, Cadwgan was invested with Powys by Henry – and shortly afterwards was slain by his nephew Madog ap Rhirid.72 The above summary of Cadwgan’s career shows that he had nominal possession of the bulk of Powys only in the last year of his life. We are thus forced to reject the assertions of Dr Maund that ‘throughout his lifetime Cadwgan retained his hold on Powys’73 and ‘despite the activities of Madog and the release of Iorwerth Cadwgan remained securely king of Powys throughout all these events’.74 Dr Maund presents an attractive picture of a politically dominant king of Powys – but it is one that cannot, I suggest, be substantiated, resting as it does overwhelmingly not on the detailed narrative of the Brut but on what she labels ‘the earlier account in Annales

68 69 70 71

Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 36–8. Ibid. 46, 54–6. Ibid. 54–6. The population of the lands attacked by the forces assembled by Henry I fled variously to Meirionnydd, Arwystli, Maelienydd, Ystrad Tywi, and, the majority, to Dyfed (ibid. 58). This dispersal strongly suggests that Ceredigion was the target, as do references to the depredations of the invaders in the areas of Llanbadarn Fawr and Llanddewi Brefi (ibid. 60). Additionally, some of the genealogical material in Achau Brenhinoedd a Thywysogion Cymru, in Bartrum, Early Welsh Genealogical Tracts, 104 (no. 11) suggests that at this period Maelienydd may have extended westwards to include areas such as ­Gwerthrynion, thus bringing it much closer to Ceredigion. 72 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 60, 62, 70, 74. 73 Maund, Welsh Kings, 149. 74 Ibid.



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Cambriae’75 – which in any case can hardly be said to provide compelling evidence for Cadwgan’s consistent control of Powys. If Cadwgan ap Bleddyn appears principally as a ruler of Ceredigion with ambitions that extended beyond that territory, his notorious son Owain presents us with rather a different picture. He was at times in the early years of the twelfth century in possession of a portion of Powys under the overlordship of his father; but he also appears in Gwynedd and Ireland as a fugitive, and in Cyfeiliog, Meirionnydd, Ceredigion, and Dyfed as, effectively, a brigand. He was apparently required by Henry I to accompany him on an expedition from England to Normandy. His turbulent life came to an end in 1116 near Carmarthen. He had been sent there by Henry to deal with the troublesome Gruffudd ap Rhys ap Tewdwr, but was recognized and killed by a group of Flemings under the command of the vengeful Gerald of Windsor.76 Sir John Lloyd judged that Owain’s death ‘may be regarded as closing the period of the supremacy of Powys’.77 But while his career certainly reflects the restlessness and the often lethal vitality of his family, it is hardly representative of the predominance in Wales of a Powysian polity. Indeed, the more closely the alleged supremacy of Powys in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries is scrutinized, the more elusive it becomes. We should call to mind the comment of Rees Davies that ‘it is misleading to bind kings and princes too closely by territorial designations (rarely accorded to them in contemporary sources) or to bestow on the political geography of native Wales a measure of ­ definition which it only began to acquire, with much else, as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries progressed’.78 And yet a Powysian resurgence is not a complete myth. By the closing years of Madog ap Maredudd (d. 1160), as we have seen, a reasonably well defined realm of Powys had emerged as a significant element in the pattern of Welsh politics. The accession of Madog goes unrecorded in the Brutiau. But the death in 1132 of his father Maredudd ap Bleddyn does not. Alone among the sons of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn Maredudd is accorded a eulogy in the Welsh chronicle, and the identity of his realm is clearly specified. He was ‘the splendour and security of all Powys and its defence’.79 In terms of modern historiography Maredudd ap Bleddyn is an underrated figure.80 Like his contemporary, Gruffudd ap Cynan, he was a survivor, and the 75 76 77 78 79 80

Ibid. 148. Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 62–70, 90, 98. Lloyd, History, II, 422. Davies, Age of Conquest, 62. Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 112. Lloyd, History, II, 464–5 marks him out as the most notable figure in his family after the death of Owain ap Cadwgan, though Lloyd’s somewhat Gwynedd-centred account rather obscures the very real advances made in Maredudd’s later years in stabilizing the realm of Powys. For example, if Meirionnydd had become established in some measure as a part of Gwynedd by, perhaps, the mid-1130s, Mawddwy, Cyfeiliog, and Penllyn were equally becoming more firmly associated with Powys. It is interesting, for example, that Cyfeiliog was treated as distinct from Powys in the anonymous Mawl Hywel ap Goronwy, composed perhaps in the last years of the eleventh century: GMB 1.17. Maredudd makes no appearance in R. R. Davies, ‘Henry I and Wales’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore, London 1985, 133–48. Davies, Age of Conquest, mentions him only once (at 42) in the context of his and his nephews’ promise of 10,000 cattle to Henry I in 1121, which is described as ‘a price of submission’. It might be argued that it was the price of recognition, and we have no evidence that the tribute was ever paid in full. Maund, Welsh Kings, 157–9, provides a more balanced account though her comment that the [failed] Venedotian onslaught on Powys in 1124 was the beginning of the end for ‘the hegemony of Powys’ is problematic. It is argued in the present paper that the hegemony of Powys is an illusion: in contrast the importance in Welsh affairs of a distinctively Powysian polity was just beginning.

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ability simply to survive was a crucial asset in medieval Welsh politics. His death in 1132, apparently of natural causes, contrasts with those of his brothers Madog and Rhirid, killed in 1088, and Iorwerth and Cadwgan, both killed in 1111.81 He passed on a clear dominance within a defined Powys to his son Madog. Yet a lively memory of a fragmented territory of Powys may have endured. Maredudd was recorded in Annales Cambriae as dux Powysorum,82 while Madog ap Maredudd employed the title rex Powyssensium,83 and in one of the notices of his death in Annales Cambriae he is Powysorum princeps.84 This may suggest the existence of a concept of rule over a Powysian people, drawn from diverse lordships, rather than control of a single Powys polity. Like any survivor Maredudd knew when to be aggressive and when to make his peace with a potentially superior adversary. It was en route to ravaging the lands of Llywarch ap Trahaearn in 1113 that his war-band, passing through the lands of Madog ap Rhirid, captured the latter, whom Maredudd held captive before handing him over to Owain ap Cadwgan, who blinded him.85 It was Maredudd who refused in 1124 to allow his nephew Maredudd ap Cadwgan the share of Powys and Meirionnydd that he had been bequeathed by Einion ap Cadwgan. Maredudd then resisted the ensuing opportunistic invasion by the sons of Gruffudd ap Cynan and subsequently joined some of his nephews in yet another attack on the lands of Llywarch ap Trahaearn, who had helped the northern lords. Maredudd also revealed his ruthlessness when he handed over his great-nephew Llywelyn ab Owain ap Cadwgan to Payn fitz John for imprisonment in Bridgnorth castle in 1128. Two years later it seems that Maredudd went a little further, for the Welsh chronicle records that ‘Llywelyn ab Owain was deprived of his eyes and his testicles by Maredudd ap Bleddyn’.86 But it was this same Maredudd who, when he heard of Henry I’s imminent invasion of mid- and north Wales in 1114 ‘went to seek friendship of the king’ and subsequently acted on the king’s behalf as the intermediary between Henry and Owain ap Cadwgan. Four years later Maredudd and some of his nephews intervened in Rhos and Rhufoniog in order to protect a client lord, Hywel ab Ithel, against the sons of Owain ab Edwin. After a bitter battle Maredudd and his nephews’ forces triumphed. But their protégé Hywel ab Ithel died of his wounds a few weeks later. A more headstrong leader might have been tempted to annex the lands that had been ruled by Hywel, but the Brut records a different outcome: ‘and then Maredudd and the sons of Cadwgan returned home without daring to take possession of the land, because of the French, even though they had obtained the victory’.87 Maredudd had 81 For Iorwerth and Cadwgan see above; for the deaths of Madog and Rhirid see Brut, Pen. 20, trans. Jones, 18. Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 30, which implies that Cadwgan shared the fate of Madog and Rhirid in 1088, is misleading at this point. 82 Annales Cambriae, ed. J. Williams ab Ithel, RS, 1860, 39. 83 The Acts of Welsh Rulers, 1120–1283, ed. Huw Pryce, Cardiff 2005, no. 480. 84 Annales Cambriae, 48: the reference is to the B-text. The C-text has princeps Powisiae. 85 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 76. It is quite likely that Llywarch ap Trahaearn ruled an Arwystli that at this period still included the (later) lordship of Cedewain. See for initial comments David Stephenson, ‘The Most Powerful Persons in the Land: Patterns of Power in Arwystli in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries’, Montgomeryshire Collections, 93, 2005, 17–36 at 19 and 29. The episode suggests that at this point Maredudd’s portion of Powys lay beyond Caereinion, to the north and north-east, perhaps in the region of Mochnant and Mechain. In 1116 his son Gruffudd seized Cyfeiliog, Mawddwy, and part of Penllyn from Uchdryd ab Edwin, a territory which would have been adjacent to Mochnant: Brut, Red Book, ed Jones, 100. 86 Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 108, 110, 112. 87 Ibid. 78, 102.



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been a prisoner of Henry I from 1102 to 110788 and clearly had no wish to return to such a status or to suffer an even worse fate. And so when Henry resolved on a major attack on Powys in 1121 Maredudd appears to have organized sufficient resistance to give the king pause for thought, and then to have bought off the attack by a promise of a tribute of 10,000 cattle.89 The 1121 episode is instructive. Powys appears to have been the sole target of Henry’s invasion. It was in Powys that the activities of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn’s dynasty were now focused. And the promised tribute suggests a capacity for governance and control, though we have almost no sight of the mechanisms that were employed therein. Maredudd, it would seem, was bringing his turbulent family under control. Death and mutilation played a part in the process: we have noted the fate of Llywelyn ab Owain ap Cadwgan, and in 1125 the Brut tells us that ­‘Gruffudd ap Maredudd ap Bleddyn slew Ithel ap Rhirid ap Bleddyn, his first cousin, in the presence of Maredudd his father.’90 In the same year Maredudd ap Cadwgan, frustrated in his attempt to succeed his brother Einion, came into conflict with another brother, Morgan, and was killed by him. Morgan in turn was forced to depart to the Holy Land by way of expiation. It is unlikely that he resolved on the journey spontaneously. While returning in 1128 he died in Cyprus. One text of the Brut explicitly notes that Morgan was returning at the end of the year. If that is so, he may have been encouraged to return by news of the death earlier in the year of Gruffudd ap Maredudd ap Bleddyn, who was possibly emerging as the most feared member of Maredudd’s family.91 Another brother, Madog ap Cadwgan, is not mentioned by name after 1121. It is possible that some members of the dynasty may have been persuaded to opt for more peaceful lives: thus by the 1140s Dolffyn ap Rhiwallon ap Madog, great-grandson of Cadwgan ap Bleddyn, appears as the abbot of Llandinam.92 By the second half of the century Maredudd’s place in the history of the dynasty was secure: he could be mentioned by Gwalchmai with the same assurance that characterized references to Bleddyn ap Cynfyn as a forebear of Madog ap Maredudd.93 If by the 1130s Bleddyn ap Cynfyn’s dynasty no longer appeared as rulers or overlords in Gwynedd, in Meirionnydd, in the Perfeddwlad, or in ­ Ceredigion, they did rule over an extensive and an increasingly distinctive Powys­ian realm.94 This then was the resurgence of Powys: the emergence, perhaps in the third decade of the twelfth century, of a polity characterized by a significant degree of territorial, governmental, and dynastic cohesion, and here, perhaps, was one of its principal architects. And this was the inheritance of Madog ap Maredudd.

88 89 90 91 92

Ibid. 47, 53. Ibid. 104–8. Ibid. 108. Ibid. 110. Acts of Welsh Rulers, no. 480. See Peter C. Bartrum, Welsh Genealogies, AD 300–1400, 8 vols, Cardiff 1974, I, s.n. Bleddyn ap Cynfyn 54. It is possible that Dolffyn was great-grandson of Bleddyn rather than Cadwgan ap Bleddyn: idem, ‘Pedigrees of the Welsh Tribal Patriarchs’, National Library of Wales Journal, 13, 1963, 118, 138. 93 Thus in GMB 6.9 Madog is mygrfab Maredudd, and at 7.65 he is haelfab Maredudd; cf. 7.79, ŵyr Bleddynt, and 7.97, where Llywelyn ap Madog is gorwyr Bleddynt. 94 This point is examined further in David Stephenson, ‘Madog ap Maredudd: Rex Powissensium’, Welsh History Review, forthcoming.

INTERPRETER FAMILIES AND ANGLO-WELSH RELATIONS IN THE SHROPSHIRE-POWYS MARCHES IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY Frederick Suppe Biographies of medieval English rulers tend to describe Anglo-Welsh relations in terms of a king’s Welsh policy – that is, composing a ‘top-down’ narrative analysis focusing on an English ruler and the contemporary Welsh ones. However, close examination of the careers and fortunes of two families of March interpreters who held lands near the geographical nexus where the Welsh polities of Gwynedd and Powys were juxtaposed with the English counties of Cheshire and Shropshire will supply a more nuanced description of border events during the twelfth century and the reasons for those events. The first of these families is the six-generation lineage of Rhys Sais and Roger of Powys, as displayed in Figure 1. It is striking that the first piece of written evidence about Roger, a charter from the cartulary of Haughmond abbey issued by William fitz Alan on 25 July 1155, shows him to be a significant figure in Shropshire already by that time. In July 1155 William had recently returned to Shropshire accom­ panying King Henry II while the latter besieged Cleobury, Wigmore, and Bridgnorth castles to gain control of them from Hugh Mortimer. In the aftermath of these successful sieges William fitz Alan regained control over his lands in Shropshire when the king officially regranted them to him. William’s feudal tenants in Shropshire then renewed their homage to him. The charter just mentioned, by which William granted the advowson of Wroxeter to Haughmond abbey, which the fitz Alans had founded earlier in the twelfth century, was part of the pattern of William re-establishing his family’s position in the county. Roger of Powys appeared as the first witness listed on this charter, ahead of men like John Lestrange of Knockin and Hugh de Lacy of Colemere. This suggests that Roger was a man of considerable local importance, with ties both to the fitz Alan family and to Henry II. However, such prominence did not simply emerge full-blown in 1155. The careers of Roger’s immediate ancestors help to explain how Roger – a Welshman, despite his name – came to enjoy such importance as Henry II began his reign. The adjectival soubriquet of Roger’s great-grandfather, Rhys Sais, indicated that he had English ties or affinities. The scholarly consensus is that the Rhys listed by Domesday Book as holding Erbistock in 1066 was Rhys Sais. Erbistock was a vill enclosed within a loop on the western or ‘Welsh’ side of the river Dee at the point where the borders of Maelor Gymraeg, Maelor Saesneg, and Shropshire all intersect. Rhys Sais was probably an interpreter or intermediary between Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, who came to rule nearly all of Wales before his death in 1063, and Earl  

The Cartulary of Haughmond Abbey, ed. Una Rees, Cardiff 1985, p. 244. W. L. Warren, Henry II, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1973, 60–1; R. W. Eyton, The Court, Household and Itinerary of King Henry II, London 1878, 9–11.  Ctl. Haughmond, ed. Rees, 5.



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Ælfgar of Mercia. Rhys Sais’s sons are mentioned, though not by their individual names, in Brut y Tywysogyon in 1081, and the fifteenth-century poet Gutun Owain mentions Rhys by name, which suggests that memory of his exploits persisted in the oral lore of the region for centuries. The son of Rhys Sais, Tudur, was probably the Tudur whom Domesday Book lists as holding a Welsh district from Roger de Montgomery, the earl of Shrewsbury, in 1086 in return for an annual payment of £4 5s. The editors of the Phillimore edition of Domesday for Shropshire concluded that this was indeed Tudur ap Rhys Sais and that his territory was Nanheudwy. This Welsh commote lies just south of the river Dee as the river flows eastward out of northern Wales before turning to the north at Erbistock (Fig. 2). Nanheudwy is therefore also adjacent to the extreme north-west corner of Shropshire. The amount of Tudur’s annual payment and the fact that he had a direct relationship with the earl of Shrewsbury suggest that he was an ­ important regional figure, although the precise details of their relationship are not clear. It may have been some sort of feudal relationship, or perhaps something looser – at least from Tudur’s perspective. What is clear, however, is that he was the second generation in this Welsh lineage to have a close connection with an English political figure. The only documentary evidence which relates directly to Tudur’s son Goronwy consists of the later medieval Welsh genealogies which are the basis for Bartrum’s compilation of Welsh Genealogies, AD 300–1400. However, Goronwy’s choice of names for his sons – Roger and Jonas – is truly remarkable for a Welshman early in the twelfth century, and onomastic analysis leads to some interesting hypo­ theses. Based on the chronological context of the known activities of members of this lineage, it is reasonable to believe that Goronwy was born sometime during the reign of William Rufus or early during the reign of Henry I. Therefore his sons Roger and Jonas were probably born during the latter part of Henry I’s reign – between roughly 1120 and 1135. In her recent statistical study of medieval Welsh naming patterns Heather Jones posited two categories of names for this purpose: Welsh and ‘foreign’ or nonWelsh. Roger and Jonas are manifestly not part of the traditional Welsh Namengut. However, it seems appropriate here to subdivide the category of non-Welsh when considering these two male names. Cecily Clark employed the terms ‘Germanic’ and ‘Christian’ for analysis of the name-stocks of medieval England and France, though she noted that this dichotomy was not sufficient for names from Celtic lands. The former term included names from Continental Germany, from Scandinavia, and from Anglo-Saxon England. ‘Christian’ comprehended names of Christian saints and names of characters from the bible. Of course, for the eleventh- and twelfthcentury inhabitants of England there was an important ethnic difference between the French or Norman names born by so many of William the Conqueror’s followers and the Anglo-Saxon names which had been prevalent in England for centuries



Frederick Suppe, ‘Who Was Rhys Sais? Some Comments on Anglo-Welsh Relations before 1066’, HSJ 7, 1995, 63–73 and sources cited there.  GDB 253b1, lines 10–9 up (Salop. 4.1/13).  Heather Jones, ‘Comparing Historic Name Communities in Wales: Some Approaches and Considerations’, in Studies on the Personal Name in Later Medieval England and Wales, ed. Dave Postles and Joel Rosenthal, Kalamazoo MI 2006, 211–76.  Cecily Clark, ‘English Personal Names ca. 650–1300: Some Prosopographical Bearings’, in Studies, ed. Postles and Rosenthal, 7–28.

Tudur (fl. 1079–86)



Emma (fl. 1151–1212)

King Henry II (d. 1189)

ROGER OF POWYS (fl. 1155–86)

‘Wrennoc’ [Goronwy?] (fl. 1201–12)

‘Wenneon’ [Gwenwynwyn]

Maredudd Goronwy Roger Estwick (d. 1187)

Key: Names in bold = known latimers (interpreters)



Gwenwhyfar  = Meurig (d. 1200)



Dafydd = (fl. 1157–1203)

Thomas (fl. 1194)

Gwion (fl. 1194–1206)

Jonas (fl. 1159–75)

Owain Gwynedd Geoffrey of Anjou Goronwy (d. 1170)

Rhys Sais (d. 1070)



Figure 1  The lineage and connections of Roger of Powys

Owain

=

Angharad

Hywel Sais (d. 1204)

The Lord Rhys of Deheubarth (d. 1197)



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before 1066. Hugh Thomas has examined this onomastic dichotomy, among many other ethnic defining factors. Roger clearly falls under the ‘Norman’ sub-category of the ‘non-Welsh’ category when we consider this name from a Welsh perspective. Roger was one of the most popular Norman names in post-1066 England, although its popularity diminished a bit after 1300. The name also began to appear in the Welsh population during this period. In the indexes to his compilations of Welsh genealogies P. C. Bartrum listed six examples of Welshmen named Roger who lived between 985 and 1215 and thirteen more who lived between 1215 and 1350. Goronwy’s son Roger of Powys is the earliest of all of these examples, so this was a truly innovative name for Goronwy to have selected for his first son during the first third of the twelfth century. The name certainly seems to have been important for this family, for Roger of Powys recycled it for one of his own sons, Roger Estwick.10 Goronwy may have named his son to commemorate Earl Roger de Montgomery, his father’s overlord. However, six other Rogers are also named in the Shropshire portion of Domesday Book,11 so this name clearly was a popular one among the Anglo-Norman aristocracy of postConquest Shropshire. Jonas was an even more unusual name for an early twelfth-century Welshman – perhaps almost a quixotic one. Jonas is the late Latin form of the biblical name Jonah and would thus qualify as a Christian or biblical name under Cecily Clark’s nomenclature. The name is derived from the Hebrew word for ‘dove’ and would have brought the story of the prophet Jonah and the whale to the minds of medieval people. The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names describes it as occurring occasionally in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and actually cites the reference to Goronwy’s son Jonas in the Pipe Roll for 1165 as one of its examples.12 Jonas was considerably rarer as a name among medieval Welshmen than was Roger; Bartrum’s index lists only two examples occurring between 985 and 1215 and none after then. Jonas ap Goronwy ap Tudur was the first of these two examples chronologically. The other example, Jonas ap Hwfa ab Ithel Felyn, seems less reliable on chronological grounds because, according to the ‘generation numbers’ which Bartrum used to assign persons to parts of centuries, this Jonas would have lived c. 1200, while his reported father Hwfa would have lived c. 1100. However, the family of Jonas ap Hwfa does seem associated with place-names in Iâl, which would locate this name in the same general region of the Marches as Jonas ap Goronwy.13 Another example of this name connected with Wales is Jonas, a canon at St David’s cathedral in the mid-twelfth century. Gerald of Wales used his name as an eponym for the faction of the canons which supported Gerald in his efforts to become bishop of the diocese.14 A final example from Shropshire is Jona, the chaplain or priest of  

Hugh Thomas, The English and the Normans, Oxford 2003, esp. 97–9. Virginia Davis, ‘The Popularity of Late Medieval Personal Names as Reflected in English Ordination Lists, 1350–1540’, in Studies, ed. Postles and Rosenthal, 103–14 at 110. 10 Peter C. Bartrum, Welsh Genealogies, AD 300–1400, 8 vols, Cardiff 1974 (microfiche 1980 incorp­ orates corrections; further additions and corrections, Aberystwyth 1988–2002), V, Index p. 172; IV, p. 877 (Tudor Trefor 8). 11 Domesday Book, ed. John Morris, 25: Shropshire, ed. Frank and Caroline Thorn, Chichester 1986, ‘Index of Persons’ at end. 12 E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, 3rd edn, Oxford 1977, 179; Leslie Dunkling and William Gosling, The Facts on File Dictionary of First Names, New York and Bicester 1983, 143. 13 Bartrum, Welsh Genealogies, V, Index p. 136; III, p. 635 (Llywelyn Eurdorchog 8). 14 J. E. Lloyd, A History of Wales from the Earliest Times to the Edwardian Conquest, 2 vols, London 1911, II, 625, 629; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, I, 164, 179, 325, 327; III, 214.

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Figure 2  The northern and central Welsh Marches

Knockin, who flourished c. 1182–1218 and was witness to a Lestrange charter in 1195.15 The important questions about these two names are: Why did Goronwy give these distinctly non-Welsh names to his sons? And what broader significance may we assign to his name-bestowing action? Before addressing the first question directly, let us consider the political environments during the first decades of the twelfth century in all five of the relevant polities: the kingdom of England, Shropshire, Powys, Gwynedd, and Cheshire. In England Henry I succeeded his brother William 15

Ctl. Haughmond, ed. Rees, 129, 133, 139, 172, 253.



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Rufus as king in 1100, but the rivalry between Henry and his older brother Duke Robert of Normandy was not finally resolved until the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106. Henry launched two successful military campaigns into Wales in 1114 and 1121. Both of these led to negotiated peace with the leaders of Powys and Gwynedd.16 In Shropshire William the Conqueror had established the political pattern of a dominant earl for the whole county and a sheriff with extensive landholdings around the castle of Oswestry who reported directly to the earl. This pattern persisted through the careers of Earl Roger de Montgomery (who died in 1094), his son Hugh (who was killed in 1098), and another son Robert de Bellême (who led a rebellion against the authority of Henry I until his defeat and exile in 1102). The sheriffs of Shropshire before 1102 were: Warin the Bald, who died in 1085; Rainald de Bailleul, who married Warin’s widow, constructed the first castle at Oswestry, and began to organize a military system of muntatores – mounted soldiers – to defend the castlery; and Warin’s son Hugh, who assumed the post in 1102 but died soon thereafter.17 After exiling Robert de Bellême and his brothers from England in 1102, Henry I decided to end the pattern of powerful earls for Shropshire and replaced them with an appointed curial justiciar or viceroy to oversee protection of the central Marches and manage Anglo-Welsh relations for the region. The first of these was Richard de Belmeis, who had been a steward for the Montgomery family and who was appointed as bishop of London in 1108. Richard continued in this position until the mid-1120s, when poor health forced him to resign.18 He was replaced in 1127 by Payn fitz John, one of Henry I’s ‘new men’ who married into the Lacy family, thus gained lands in Herefordshire, and became sheriff for that county. Payn held his position until he was killed fighting the Welsh in 1137.19 The office of sheriff seems to have persisted in Shropshire under Henry I’s new regime there. A Breton lord named Alan fitz Flaald, another of Henry’s new men, married the daughter of sheriff Warin, and apparently assumed both the lands centred on Oswestry which had previously been associated with the Shropshire shrievalty and that office as well. This probably happened during the first decade of the century and Alan held this position until his death in 1114. Edmund King believes that Alan’s son, William fitz Alan, was probably born c. 1105 and would therefore have been too young to act as sheriff immediately after his father’s death, so it is uncertain whether William fitz Alan was sheriff during Henry I’s reign. However, William married a niece of Earl Robert of Gloucester and this link brought him into the orbit of the party opposing King Stephen soon after he assumed the throne. Shortly after the death of Payn fitz John, William claimed the shrievalty of Shropshire and held Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth castles against the king, until Stephen captured them in 1138. The charter mentioned above was associated with William’s return to Shropshire with King Henry II in 1155 at the beginning of his reign and marked William’s resumption of his Shropshire lands and the shrievalty of that county.20

16

R. R. Davies, ‘Henry I and Wales’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. Henry Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore, London 1985, 133–47; Judith Green, Henry I, Cambridge 2006, 42–95, 132–3, 173–4. 17 R. W. Eyton, Antiquities of Shropshire, 12 vols, London 1854–60, VII, 205–11. 18 J. F. A. Mason, ‘Richard de Belmeis’, in ODNB. 19 J. F. A. Mason, ‘Pain fitz John’, in ODNB. 20 Edmund King, ‘William fitz Alan’, in ODNB; D. C. Cox, ‘County Government in the Early Middle Ages’, in VCH Shropshire, III, ed. G. C. Baugh, London 1979, 1–32; J. H. Round, Studies in Peerage

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For the first part of Henry’s reign the politics of Powys were a frequently lethal turmoil between three sons of Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, Cadwgan, Iorwerth, and Maredudd, as they competed for control over Powys and central Wales. All three had been allies of Robert de Bellême in his 1102 rebellion, until William Pantulf detached Iorwerth from the rebellion. Cadwgan was king of Powys until his death in 1111, his son Owain ap Cadwgan was king until he died in 1116, and Maredudd ap Bleddyn was thereafter the dominant political figure in Powys until his death in 1132. Maredudd was succeeded by his son Madog, who took advantage of the English civil war during Stephen’s reign to strengthen Powys. For example, in 1149 Madog captured the Shropshire district of Oswestry and held it until Henry II and William fitz Alan returned to the county in 1155.21 Henry I granted a core of Gwynedd – the districts of Llŷn, Eifionydd, Ardudwy, and Arllechwedd – to Gruffudd ap Cynan in 1100, and Gruffudd gradually increased his territory and power. Although Henry I’s campaigns in 1114 and 1121 led to negotiated peaces between the two rulers, Gruffudd and his sons continued to strive against Cheshire and Powys. In 1132, for example, Gruffudd’s son Cadwallon was killed in Nanheudwy by a force from Powys. When Gruffudd died in 1137, his son Owain Gwynedd took control over Gwynedd.22 Earl Hugh I of Chester was an important supporter of Henry I at the very beginning of his reign, but Hugh died in July 1101 leaving an under-age heir, and there was no strong earl in Cheshire for the next fifteen or twenty years.23 Earl Richard I finally came of age in 1115 but died in the wreck of the White Ship in 1120. His cousin and successor, Earl Ranulf I, had been one of Henry I’s commanders at the battle of Tinchebrai in 1106 and was a strong supporter of the king while he was earl between 1120 and 1129. The next earl, Ranulf II, married a daughter of Earl Robert of Gloucester – a connection which predisposed him to co-operate with those opposing King Stephen.24 David Crouch has viewed Ranulf II’s political behaviour as fundamentally motivated by his own self-interest and that of his family.25 Let us now revert to the matter of Goronwy’s names for his sons. I have ­estimated that Roger of Powys and his brother Jonas were probably born sometime between 1120 and 1135. During this period Goronwy found himself geographically caught amidst several powerful regional political forces. Henry I had ensured that Shropshire was under effective local control and his 1121 campaign brought peace to the central section of the Marches. Maredudd ap Bleddyn of Powys was peaceful towards England, but there was still internal contention among the members of his dynasty, and Powys was expansionist towards Gwynedd and Cheshire. Gruffudd ap Cynan of Gwynedd and his sons were striving to expand their territory at the expense of Cheshire. What strategy could Goronwy ap Tudur ap Rhys Sais use to navigate his way through these complex political waters? His choice of the very Norman and distinctly non-Welsh name Roger for his first son strongly suggests that he continued the English links which his father and grandfather had maintained. Roger of Powys was and Family History, London 1901, 129; Judith Green, The Aristocracy of Norman England, Cambridge 1997, 280; Green, Henry I, 138; David Crouch, The Reign of King Stephen, Harlow 2000, 78. 21 Kari Maund, The Welsh Kings, Stroud 2000, 85–104. 22 C. P. Lewis, ‘Gruffudd ap Cynan and the Normans’, in Gruffudd ap Cynan: A Collaborative Bio­graphy, ed. K. L. Maund, Woodbridge 1996, 61–77. 23 Green, Aristocracy, 74. 24 I. J. Sanders, English Baronies, Oxford 1960, 32–3; Edmund King, ‘Ranulf (I)’, in ODNB; Graeme White, ‘Ranulf (II)’, in ODNB. 25 Crouch, Stephen, 225–9.



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probably the first Welshman to bear this name (or at least he was among the first), so this act of child-naming was a bold cultural signal by his father. The name Jonas for Roger’s brother is much more difficult to parse in cultural terms. The name appears to have been more rarely used than Roger and is biblical in its origin. There is no clear evidence for any medieval Welsh person who bore the name before Jonas ap Goronwy, but there are sketchy hints that the name may have been part of the Welsh cultural milieu. The name Ionas appears in a geneal­ogy of the Breton saint Winnoc as that of an early Breton ruler c. 500.26 Iona, which may be a variant form, occurs in two examples, neither of which relates to a histor­ically verifiable person. The Welsh tale ‘How Culhwch won Olwen’, which is usually encountered as one of the Mabinogion collection, simply mentions a ‘Iona, king of France’ amidst a long list of notable warriors.27 And in the so-called ‘Cornish List’ of the sons of St Brychan found in the Vita Sancti Nectani, Iona also occurs as the name for one of these sons.28 For now it would seem safest to regard Jonas as an obscure or marginal name, which may have had a broadly Celtic resonance in a Welsh onomastic context or may have been part of the biblical set of names coming to Britain in the twelfth century. I have described Goronwy’s choice of Roger for his first son’s name as part of a political or cultural strategy. It is possible that Goronwy may have married an Anglo-Norman woman. It may be an exaggeration to term Anglo-Welsh marriages commonplace by the 1120s,29 but during this same period there is an example of such a marriage which occurred on the central Marches. Cadwgan ap Bleddyn, one of the three brothers of the dynasty of Powys who had supported Robert de Bellême in 1102, married the daughter of Picot de Say, a baron who held the district of Clun in south-western Shropshire from the Montgomery earls of the county. According to the Brut y Tywysogyon, which relates the details of all of Cadwgan’s marital relationships and children, this marriage produced a son with the Anglo-Norman name Henry and another called Gruffudd, a Welsh name. Cadwgan also had relationships with four other women – all Welsh – which produced sons with clearly Welsh names.30 My research into the phenomenon of medieval Anglo-Welsh intermarriages has disclosed a general pattern valid until the end of the fourteenth century, that the names of children produced by Anglo-Welsh marriages were usually chosen from the Namengut of the husband’s ethnic heritage. However, I have noticed a few exceptions to this general pattern, especially when the wife brought very important political connections or economic resources to the relationship. The example just mentioned would illustrate this, as Cadwgan named one of his sons Henry. Cadwgan ap Bleddyn was permitted by Richard de Belmeis and Henry I to reside for a while on his wife’s Shropshire lands in 1109 when he needed to escape from the political situation in Wales.31 The real example of Cadwgan ap Bleddyn’s marriage may be compared with a hypothetical one between Goronwy ap Tudur and an Anglo-Norman woman. In each case one son, possibly the eldest resulting from the relationship, had a clearly Anglo-Norman name. And while the Brut y Tywysogyon mentions the

26 27 28 29 30

P. C. Bartrum, A Welsh Classical Dictionary, Aberystwyth 1993, 389–90, 571 s.n. Riwal. The Mabinogion, trans. Jeffrey Gantz, Harmondsworth 1976, 141. Bartrum, Classical Dictionary, 63–7, s.n. Brychan. David Carpenter, The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284, Oxford 2003, 116. Brut y Tywysogyon, or, The Chronicle of the Princes, Red Book of Hergest Version, ed. Thomas Jones, Cardiff 1955, 98–101. 31 Ibid. 63.

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names of Cadwgan’s Welsh wives or consorts and the names of their children in great detail, it omits the name of his Anglo-Norman wife, although it does mention her father’s name and position. Thus far I have found no documentary evidence identifying Goronwy’s wife, but the omission of the name of Cadwgan’s wife suggests that such information was regarded at the time as relatively unimportant. And of course Goronwy’s political aims associated with this hypothetical AngloWelsh marriage may not have developed in the way that he had hoped, which could account for the lack of information extant today about his spouse. This is a specu­ lative hypothesis offered to explain the situation and to provoke further research on this subject. If we accept the premise that Roger was likely born sometime between 1120 and 1135, then he would have been between twenty and thirty-five years old in 1155 when he was a witness to William fitz Alan’s charter. What was Roger doing during his young adulthood while the civil war of Stephen’s reign was troubling England? Several disparate strands of evidence can lead to a hypothesis about this. The first is the Romance of Fouke Fitz Waryn, a fourteenth-century text in French which is based upon an earlier work probably composed somewhere in Shropshire during the 1260s. The fundamental purpose of this romance is to glorify the exploits of the fitz Warin family, which had held Whittington castle in north-western Shropshire near Oswestry since 1204, but the work is notorious for its factual confusions, not least of these being conflating the careers of the first two Fulks. This romance presents the idea that Roger of Powys and Jonas co-operated with Iorwerth Goch (another Anglo-Welsh intermediary discussed more fully below) in attacking the castle of Whittington.32 I agree with David Stephenson and other scholars who have evaluated the romance as a historical source, that it incorporates confused memories and distorted folk-tales from the Shropshire Marches,33 but I think that there may be an element of truth in this depiction of these three men. It is true that all three are listed regularly in the pipe roll records for the mid- and late 1160s as carrying out a variety of tasks connected with garrisoning and provisioning castles and troops on the Shropshire border, which could be one source for a later oral tradition about their co-operation. However, this does not account for the idea of their attacking Whittington. The next piece of evidence is the fact that in 1149 Madog ap Maredudd of Powys captured Oswestry and controlled it until Henry II’s arrival in Shropshire in 1155, when Madog apparently peacefully surrendered custody of the district to William fitz Alan. Oswestry had belonged to the fitz Alan family since the first decade of the century, and immediately after the death of Payn fitz John in 1137 William fitz Alan had assumed and asserted his position as sheriff of Shropshire. The next year William declared for the Empress’s side in the civil war and fortified the Shropshire castles of Shrewsbury and Bridgnorth against King Stephen. The king successfully besieged both castles during the summer of 1138, driving William fitz Alan out of the county. William spent much of the civil war on his wife’s estate at Keevil in Wiltshire, but he also appears in Bristol and other places under control of the Empress’s party.34 Most scholars who have described Madog’s 1149 capture 32

Glyn Burgess, Two Medieval Outlaws: Eustace the Monk and Fouke Fitz Waryn, Cambridge 1997, 146–9. 33 Rhian M. Andrews and David Stephenson, ‘Draig Argoed: Iorwerth Goch ap Maredudd, c. 1110–71’, Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies, 52, Winter 2006, 65–91 at 67; Janet Meisel, Barons of the Welsh Frontier, Lincoln NE 1980, appendix I, ‘Romance as History’, 132–8. 34 King, ‘William fitz Alan’.



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of Oswestry have done so in terms of an Anglo-Welsh political dichotomy, with this capture representing a Welsh territorial expansion as Madog took advantage of an English political vacuum to add part of Shropshire to Powys. But suppose we analyse this event in the context of the English civil war, during which there were two contending political factions or affinities, plus many barons trying to exploit the changing political and military developments to their own individual advantages. And in Wales there were several polities whose leaders interacted with the English factions to further their own political interests. The final piece of evidence to solve this puzzle is the demonstration that there was an Angevin affinity among several of the March barons centred on the earl of Chester. After the death of Earl Robert of Gloucester in 1147, Earl Ranulf II of Chester became one of the military leaders of the Angevin side during the final years of fighting. In 1149 Ranulf was present at Carlisle when King David of Scotland knighted the sixteen-year-old Henry (later to become Henry II) and probably did homage to him then.35 William fitz Alan’s second wife was a niece of Robert of Gloucester, a major leader of the Angevin side, and during the late 1140s William witnessed several of Earl Ranulf’s charters. And in 1149, the same year when Madog ap Maredudd of Powys took Oswestry, he allied with Earl Ranulf to attack the expansive Owain Gwynedd.36 It seems plausible to interpret Madog’s seizure of Oswestry as a move which brought this region of Shropshire under control of someone affiliated with the Angevin party. Of course, it also expanded Madog’s territory, but many English barons including Ranulf of Chester were also playing this sort of game of private aggrandizement during the civil war. Iorwerth Goch was the younger brother of Madog ap Maredudd and is repres­ ented in the opening frame-tale portion of the Welsh tale the Dream of Rhonabwy as having turned down Madog’s offer to be penteulu (commander of his bodyguard) and then raiding the Anglo-Welsh borderlands. A scenario in which Roger of Powys and Jonas co-operated with Madog’s brother Iorwerth to seize Oswestry and northwestern Shropshire more generally on behalf of Madog, Earl Ranulf, William fitz Alan, and the Angevin affinity would incorporate these various bits of evidence and would also help to explain Madog’s peaceful withdrawal from Oswestry in 1155. The pipe roll for 1156–7 includes a payment to Madog of £8 10s. and two separate payments of £4 0s. 3d. and 40s. to Iorwerth Goch.37 It seems possible to view these as compensation to these men for their loss of position in Oswestry. Between 1157 and 1164 Henry II gave to Roger of Powys custody of the royal castle of St Briavels in the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire at the southern end of the Marches. The king later forgave Roger from ever having to account for the profits from this luc­rative post, so this could also have been a way of compensating him if he had been involved in Madog’s seizure and control of Oswestry between 1149 and 1155.38 During the 1160s both Roger of Powys and his brother Jonas displayed a pattern of consistent service to the Crown. During this period the two brothers had custody of the castles at Whittington, Chirk, and Overton – the latter directly across the river Dee from Erbistock, which Rhys Sais had held four generations earlier. They were paid wages for troops of soldiers and compensation for delivering substan35 36 37 38

White, ‘Ranulf (II)’. King, ‘William fitz Alan’. PR 3 Henry II, 89. Frederick C. Suppe, ‘Roger of Powys, Henry II’s Anglo-Welsh Middleman, and his Lineage’, Welsh History Review, 21 (1), June 2002, 1–23 at 6–7, 16.

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tial amounts of wheat and barley to the castles. In 1166 and 1167 Roger was paid sizeable sums for war-horses. It seems likely that Henry II chose the route from Oswestry over the Berwyn Mountains for his disastrous invasion into Wales in 1165 based on advice from Roger and Jonas. The route chosen and the strategy for attacking the castle at Corwen in the upper valley of the river Dee had much to recommend them and would have succeeded, had it not been for the bad luck of the unseasonable rains of that summer.39 The pattern of royal service by Roger and Jonas continued until their deaths. Beginning in 1172 the two brothers jointly received £14 annually from the Shropshire manor of Wrockwardine. After Jonas died in 1174 or 1175, the full £14 payment continued to Roger until his death in 1186 or 1187. Roger was loyal to Henry II during the 1173 revolt against the king by his disaffected sons; during that year he was paid 102s. as wages for the king’s servientes at the royal castle at Haughley in Suffolk when it was besieged by the king’s enemies. During the last years of his life Roger was evidently an important figure in Shropshire. In 1175 he issued a charter which confirmed the 1155 charter which William fitz Alan (I) had issued on his return to Shropshire. William fitz Alan (I) had died in 1160, leaving a very young son, William fitz Alan (II). When the latter came of age in 1175, it was for his benefit the Roger confirmed that he had personally seen and heard William fitz Alan (I) make the original grant in 1155 on the day when he had accepted the homage of his Shropshire vassals. Roger concluded this confirmation with his own seal.40 Marriages by two of Roger’s sons show that his family also maintained strong connections throughout Wales. Owain Gwynedd was the powerful ruler of Gwynedd until his death in 1170. Owain’s son Dafydd married Emma, the beautiful half-sister of Henry II, in 1174.41 Roger of Powys’s son Meurig married Gwenwhyfar, the daughter of Dafydd and Emma.42 This marriage thus gave Roger’s lineage connections with the ruling dynasties of Gwynedd and of England itself. A second such marriage involved southern Wales. The dominant ruler in Wales during the final third of the twelfth century was the Lord Rhys ap Gruffudd of Deheubarth, who was a political ally of Henry II and who sent a son called Hywel Sais to spend twelve years at Henry’s court. Roger’s son Owain married Hywel Sais’s daughter Angharad.43 Through this marriage Roger’s family developed connections with the ruling lineage of Deheubarth, as well as access to whatever knowledge Hywel Sais had gained during his time at the English royal court. Note that both of these marriages built on relationships established by the marriages of the parents a generation earlier. The careers of Roger’s descendants continued his family’s pattern of service to the English government. After Roger’s death in 1187 his son Meurig received £10 annually from Wrockwardine and the payments continued until his own death in 1201.44 In 1194 Meurig was paid 108s. as wages for leading a troop of six mounted servientes and sixty footmen for eight days on their way to Normandy.45 Two years later he received 2 marks for conducting some royal negotium46 – possibly in connec39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid. 7–14. Ibid. 15. Warren, Henry II, 167 note; Eyton, Itinerary, 182. Bartrum, Welsh Genealogies, IV, p. 876 (Tudor Trefor 7). Ibid. I, p. 87 (Bleddyn ap Maenyrch 3). PR 33 Henry II, 63–4; 2 John, 170. PR 6 Richard I, 141. PR 7 Richard I, 244.



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tion with Hubert Walter’s expedition against Gwenwynwyn of Powys in that year. In 1196 Meurig was custodian of a castle in Denbigh and was paid 40s. for horses which he had lost at the castle. In that year Gwion, the son of Roger of Powys’s brother Jonas, also received 20s. for helping to guard this castle.47 Another of Roger’s sons, Thomas, was reported in 1194 as holding lands in a place called ‘Widiton’ directly from the king in return for the service of providing a knight for conducting the Welsh of Powys to the court of the king. This place was probably Withington, a Shropshire manor in Wrockwardine hundred.48 Roger’s lineage continued its service to the Crown well into the thirteenth century,49 but let us now shift attention to the second interpreter family, that of Iorwerth Goch, which is displayed on Figure 3. His epithet means ‘red’ and probably refers to red hair. His son Madog also had the same epithet, which may possibly suggest persistence of an inherited trait within the family. David Stephenson has estimated that Iorwerth Goch was probably born sometime soon after 111050 – a reasonable conjecture, given that Iorwerth died sometime between 1171 and 1177. Iorwerth’s father, Maredudd ap Bleddyn, was ruler of Powys until he died in 1132. Between 1132 and 1160 Iorwerth’s older half-brother Madog ap Maredudd governed Powys. As mentioned above, the Dream of Rhonabwy suggests that Madog ap Maredudd offered the position of penteulu to Iorwerth – an offer which the latter refused. Stephenson has suggested that another brother of Madog’s, named Hywel ap Maredudd, probably served as Madog’s penteulu before Hwyel’s death in 1142. If there is any historical truth to the Dream of Rhonabwy story, this suggestion would place Madog’s offer to Iorwerth sometime later in the 1140s.51 A theory of how Iorwerth may have been involved with Roger of Powys and Jonas in the takeover of Oswestry in 1149 was presented above, so let us proceed to his career after Henry II became king. Documentation for Iorwerth’s pattern of services and connection to Henry II began in 1157 with a pipe roll payment to him of £4 3s.52 This amount is a bit less than half the payment to Madog ap Maredudd that same year and suggests that Iorwerth may have had some substantial interest in Oswestry as well. In the aftermath of the 1157 campaign by Madog and King Henry against Owain Gwynedd, Iorwerth destroyed Owain’s recently constructed castle in Iâl,53 which had threatened both Powys and Cheshire. J. E. Lloyd believed that it was at this time that Henry granted to Iorwerth a cluster of four manors around Sutton in east-central Shropshire (Sutton, Ellerdine, Brockton, and Rowton – all part of the former lands of Gerard de Tournai) in return for services as an interpreter.54 The sketchy evidence makes this a plausible hypothesis. King Henry was in Shropshire in 1155 and knew Roger of Powys, who was witness to a fitz Alan charter then. Roger was a long-time associate of Iorwerth, so it seems possible that Iorwerth could have met the king then. Iorwerth had connections with both the English government and the ruling dynasty of Powys, so he could have served as a military commander in 1157 and as an intermediary between Madog and King Henry. And an inquest in 1212 reported

47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

PR 8 Richard I, 42. PR 6 Richard I, 143; Suppe, ‘Roger of Powys’, 19 n. 80. Suppe, ‘Roger of Powys’, 17–23. Andrews and Stephenson, ‘Draig Argoed’, 67. Ibid. 66–7. PR 3 Henry II, 89. Brut, Red Book, ed. Jones, 136–7. Eyton, Antiquities, II, 114.

=

Cristin

Roger de Manley

Gruffudd Maelor (d. 1191)

Key: Names underlined = the five rival heirs of Powys in 1160 Names in bold = hereditary interpreter lords of Sutton Maddock



Thomas

Isabel

Guy Lestrange (d. 1179)

Hywel (fl. 1231)

Gruffudd of = Matilda Sutton (d. 1221)

Gruffudd Fychan (fl. 1231)

Owain Hywel Madog Goch Iorwerth Brogyntyn (d. 1194) Fychan (fl. 1160–1215)

Henry de Audley

Owain Fychan (d. 1187)

Gwenwynwyn James [daughter] = Madog of Sutton (d. 1212) (fl. 1221–62)



Owain Llywelyn Cyfeiliog (d. 1160) (d. 1197)

Madog, prince of Powys Iorwerth Goch = Maud 1132–60 (fl. 1157–77)

Maredudd (d. 1132)

Hunydd =

Gruffudd

Bleddyn (d. 1075)



Figure 3  The dynasty of Powys and the lineage of Iorwerth Goch



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that Iorwerth’s son Gruffudd held these four manors by the gift of King Henry in return for the service of being interpreter between the English and the Welsh.55 The political circumstances of Iorwerth’s life changed drastically after Madog ap Maredudd died in 1160. Over the next decade five members of this lineage (the underlined names on Fig. 3) competed for control of Powys, eventually splitting it in two. Two of Iorwerth’s rivals, Owain Cyfeiliog and Owain Fychan, co-operated to destroy the royal castle at Carreghofa. When Henry II led his campaign into northern Wales in 1165, Iorwerth and Owain Cyfeiliog seem to have been among the leaders of Powys who opposed the king.56 However, Iorwerth’s loyalty soon reverted to the king, for the pipe roll for 1165–6 shows that the Crown paid £14 6s. 8d. for fifteen horses from Iorwerth Goch’s stud.57 This important stud of war-horses had been established at the very beginning of the century by Robert de Bellême and it seems likely that the dynasty of Powys gained control of it soon thereafter. Gerald of Wales remarked on this handsome Powys breed in his Itinerarium Kambriae.58 During the last half of the 1160s pipe roll payments show Iorwerth functioning in military ways similar to those of Roger of Powys and Jonas and sometimes co-­operating with them. He was paid very substantial sums for his constabularia at Chirk castle and for provisioning castles. While his English connections were flourishing, however, Iorwerth lost ground in Wales, for in 1166 his nephews Owain Cyfeiliog and Owain Fychan jointly evicted him from his lands in Mochnant, just across the border from the northern third of Shropshire, and split the territory between themselves.59 Two Welsh pedigrees crafted early in the sixteenth century report that Ior­werth Goch married Maud, the daughter of Roger de Manley of Cheshire.60 It seems likely that this marriage occurred late in the 1140s or sometime during the 1150s. One reason for this is that Iorwerth was dead by 1177, when his son Madog came personally to do homage to the English king. If Madog were approximately twenty years old in 1177, then he would have been born sometime around 1157. Manley is located in Cheshire and there are two events which could have provided a context for Iorwerth to have met some of the earl of Chester’s tenants, including Roger de Manley, and subsequently have arranged his marriage. In 1149 Madog ap Maredudd allied himself with Earl Ranulf II to attack Gwynedd. In 1157 Cheshire was the base for Henry’s Welsh campaign and Eustace fitz John, constable to Earl Hugh II, was killed in battle,61 suggesting that many Cheshire feudal tenants may have been involved. It is disappointing not to have more evidence about the Manley family in the twelfth century and Iorwerth’s connection to them. In 1086 Domesday Book described Manley as half a hide of land, rendering one mark of silver annually, and held directly by the earl of Chester with no tenant there.62 The two Welsh genealogical manuscripts which report the marriage of Iorwerth and Maud de Manley, Peniarth 127 and Peniarth 129, were written by Syr Thomas ab Ieuan ap Deicws 55 56 57 58

Book of Fees, I, 146–7. Maund, Welsh Kings, 102–3. PR 12 Henry II, 59. Charles Gladitz, Horse Breeding in the Medieval World, Dublin 1997, 162–3; Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, VI, 143. 59 R. R. Davies, Conquest, Coexistence, and Change: Wales, 1063–1415, Oxford 1987, 58–72. 60 Bartrum, Welsh Genealogies, I, p. 28 (Bleddyn ap Cynfyn 1); Paul Barbier, The Age of Owain Gwynedd, London 1908, 102 n. 1. 61 Lloyd, History, II, 44; Paul Dalton, ‘Eustace Fitz John and the Politics of Anglo-Norman England: The Rise and Survival of a Twelfth-Century Royal Servant’, Speculum, 71, 1996, 358–83 at 380. 62 GDB 263b1 Menlie (Ches. 1/6).

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sometime between 1500 and 1523. While these sources are considerably later than the twelfth century, both Bartrum and Siddons have described Thomas as critical of his sources.63 There is positive evidence of a minor landed family at Manley by the mid-thirteenth century, when a Roger de Manley and his son Henry gave a small assart there to the abbey of St Werburgh at Chester.64 At least three generations of this family made grants to the abbey, suggesting that they had been established there for some time. By c. 1400 the Manley family was rising in prominence in Cheshire society, with estates worth between £20 and £40 annually.65 The fundamental question about the Manley family is whether they were established in Cheshire by the mid-twelfth century in time for Iorwerth to have been able to marry Maud de Manley. The earls of Chester were actively trying to attract new settlers to their demesne lands in the county as early as the 1120s, and this process of colonization and assarting continued through the late thirteenth century and on into the fourteenth.66 It is therefore possible that the Roger de Manley whom the early sixteenth-century Welsh pedigrees report as Maud’s father could have been established there by the mid-twelfth century, although this is not provable. However, there is independent evidence for the names of several of Iorwerth’s sons as listed in these pedigrees, lending them some credibility. Thus, it seems plausible that sometime during the early twelfth century the earls of Chester settled a tenant family on the small manor of Manley and that Roger de Manley, perhaps the first such tenant, would have welcomed the chance to marry a daughter to Iorwerth because of the latter’s connection with the ruling family of Powys and his association with the king of England and the sheriffs of Shropshire. Iorwerth was dead by 117767 and sometime before his death he granted some lands in Aber Ceiriog just inside Powys to Haughmond abbey, which had been founded by the fitz Alans.68 Just as Roger of Powys had been a witness to an important fitz Alan charter to the abbey in 1155, Iorwerth’s grant continued the pattern of Iorwerth and Roger being part of the fitz Alan affinity and acting in ways that were culturally English. However, other characteristics of Iorwerth’s life mark him as culturally Welsh. After his death the Welsh poet Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr commemorated Iorwerth’s career in a Welsh-language marwnad or elegy.69 And Iorwerth and his English wife gave Welsh names to their sons: Iorwerth Fychan, Hywel, Madog Goch, and Gruffudd. This fact, together with Iorwerth’s service as an Anglo-Welsh interpreter, suggests that his family spoke Welsh. Thus Iorwerth’s marriage to Maud de Manley may be seen as an aspect of his shift in geographical focus from Powys to England. While political turmoil in Powys ended the possibility of a purely Welsh career for him, his English connections opened up new social and political oppor­ 63

Peter C. Bartrum, ‘Notes on the Welsh Genealogical Manuscripts’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1968, 63–98 at 79–80; Michael Powell Siddons, The Development of Welsh Heraldry, 3 vols, Aberystwyth 1991–3, I, 31. 64 The Chartulary or Register of the Abbey of St. Werburgh, Chester, ed. James Tait, 2 vols, Chetham Society, new series 79 and 82, 1920–3, II, 390–3. 65 Michael J. Bennett, Community, Class, and Careerism: Cheshire and Lancashire Society in the Age of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Cambridge 1983, 22, 24, 34, 84, 198; Philip Morgan, War and Society in Medieval Cheshire, 1277–1403, Manchester 1987, 207, 213. 66 Morgan, War and Society, 80–1. 67 Francis Jones, ‘The Dynasty of Powys’, Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion, 1958, 23–32 at 26; The Acts of Welsh Rulers, 1120–1283, ed. Huw Pryce and Charles Insley, Cardiff 2005, 681. 68 Ctl. Haughmond, ed. Rees, 19. 69 Gwaith Cynddelw Brydydd Mawr, ed. Nerys Ann Jones and Ann Parry Owen, Cardiff 1991, 143–54.



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tunities. The fact that Iorwerth appears as a subsidiary but significant character in two works of literature, the Welsh language Dream of Rhonabwy and the Norman French Romance of Fouke Fitz Waryn, attests to his contemporary fame and influence on both sides of the border and to the longevity of his reputation. After Iorwerth died, his son Madog Goch did homage to Henry II and succeeded him as lord of Sutton. When Madog died in 1194, he was succeeded by his younger brother Gruffudd, whom local jurors reported as continuing the service as a latimer (interpreter).70 Gruffudd also married an Englishwoman: Matilda, the daughter of Guy Lestrange.71 The Lestrange family came to England early in the twelfth century as part of Henry I’s cadre of ‘new men’. By 1158 three Lestrange brothers were enfeoffed as feudal tenants of the king in Shropshire and the family was associated with both the fitz Alan family and the royal Angevin cause. One of the three brothers, Guy Lestrange, served as sheriff of Shropshire 1160–4 (while William fitz Alan II was a minor) and again 1171–9, and the family held the border castle of Knockin, just south of Oswestry castle.72 The marriage of Gruffudd ap Iorwerth Goch to Matilda Lestrange thus gave him and his family close connections with a powerful local Shropshire family – one which it would be very helpful to know when there might be need for delicate border negotiations. The two families repeatedly witnessed one another’s charters. Gruffudd died in 1221 and his son Madog succeeded him as lord of Sutton and border intermediary. A jury supplying information for the hundred rolls in 1254 stated that Madog performed the service of leading the king into Wales during time of war.73 Madog continued his family’s pattern of English wives by marrying an unnamed sister of James de Audley.74 James’s father, Henry de Audley, had served as undersheriff for Shropshire and Staffordshire 1218–20 and then as sheriff for Shropshire between 1228 and 1232. A generation later James de Audley held that same office himself 1261–3 and again in 1270.75 During the mid-thirteenth century both Henry de Audley and his son James served as frequent negotiators with the Welsh.76 Madog’s connections with these important Shropshire officials and with the ruling lineage of Powys, his familiarity with the local terrain, and his presumed knowledge of the Welsh language would have allowed him to be a very functional intermediary during this period. It is easy to construe the medieval Anglo-Welsh border situation as an ethnic dichotomy. Linguistically that characterization is valid, for the two languages are quite dissimilar and mutually unintelligible. The juxtaposition of the two linguis­ tically distinct cultures created the need for cross-cultural communication and negotiation, and therefore for interpreters. However, the interpreters were much more than mere translators of words from one language to the other. Because of the recurring phenomenon of Anglo-Welsh intermarriage, these March interpreters

70 71 72

Book of Fees, I, 147. Eyton, Antiquities, II, 110–18. Hamon Lestrange, Lestrange Records, London 1916, 36–7; K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Domesday Descendants: A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066–1166, II: Pipe Rolls to Cartae Baronum, Woodbridge 2002, 842–3. 73 Rotuli Hundredorum, ed. W. Illingworth and J. Caley, 2 vols, London 1818, II, 57. 74 Bartrum, Welsh Genealogies, I, p. 64 (Bleddyn ap Cynfyn 37). 75 John Brickdale Blakeway, Sheriffs of Shropshire, Shrewsbury 1831, 4–7. 76 Henry in 1236 and 1237 and James in 1258, 1259, 1260, 1262, and 1263: Close Rolls 1234–47, 369, 453, 554–5; 1256–9, 320, 466; 1259–61, 309; 1261–4, 128, 294; Cal. Pat. 1247–58, 642, 660; 1258–66, 221.

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were personally related to – or personally acquainted with – many of the principal local political figures with whom they would be facilitating negotiations. This article has presented as case studies two multi-generational Welsh lineages: that of Roger of Powys, and that of Iorwerth Goch. While the latter family was at least originally descended from a Welsh princely ruling family, the former was at the social level of tenants or clients of such princely families.77 In each case these Welsh figures were being squeezed and marginalized politically by the gradual centralizing tendencies of the major Welsh polities and by the factionalism rampant in many of the Welsh ruling dynasties. In each case a Welsh aristocratic family with lands along the Anglo-Welsh border sought the opportunity for political and economic advancement by developing bi-cultural connections. Neither family were altruists, but they were generally consistently loyal to the connections which they had formed with the Angevin English royal family and with major Shropshire families like the fitz Alans and others who were part of the fitz Alan affinity, such as the Lestranges. In the past many scholars have published books and articles replete with genealogical tables showing only male persons. However, medieval men did not procreate by parthenogenesis, so the genealogical charts should show wives. The families of prospective husbands chose wives very carefully, as likewise did the families of prospective wives consider potential husbands. Modern scholars should not consider each marriage only as an isolated event. The pedigree of Roger of Powys shows a strategy of a marriage in one generation building upon relations established by marriages in a preceding generation. Families clearly had marital strategies, or at least persistent patterns. I have speculated that Roger’s father Goronwy may have married an Englishwoman. It is likewise possible that Roger himself also had an English spouse. It is definitely clear that the lineage of Iorwerth Goch created such marriages for at least three subsequent generations. A geneticist may wonder if the Welsh identity was not considerably diluted by the repeated infusions of English wifely blood, but the persistence of Welsh personal names used by these interpreter families demonstrates maintenance of at least some form of Welsh ethnic identity. A number of other March families also show a pattern of recurring Anglo-Welsh marriages over several generations. The Lestranges mentioned above are but one example. I would argue that during the twelfth century a significant bi-cultural class of noble families developed as a sort of social lubricant to facilitate the relationships between the Welsh and the English. Thus, the medieval Welsh Marches were not really a linear border, but rather a bi-cultural region.

77

I thank Chris Lewis for his observation concerning this point.

A TASTE FOR THE ANTIQUE? HENRY OF BLOIS AND THE ARTS Jeffrey West Having surveyed a considerable body of material relating to the life and achievements of Henry of Blois, Lena Voss turned her attention in the closing pages of her biography to the personality and character of her subject. While accepting that Henry’s was an unusual and multi-faceted life, Voss expressed the view that the written record was so full of gaps and contradictions that to get anything like a rounded picture of him it was necessary to assemble the pieces like the tesserae of a mosaic. Henry is not alone in this, and whether or not we agree with Knowles that he was neither a Lanfranc nor a Grosseteste, he was one of the most notable and, for a time, one of the most powerful bishops to have held office in England during the twelfth century. Henry was, as Knowles had it, a ‘personality to be reckoned with’, and the author of the Gesta Stephani, though partial, may have spoken for others when he said that Henry was ‘reckoned to surpass all the great men in England in judgment and wisdom, and to be their superior in virtue and wealth’. Not all of his contemporaries were so charitable, however, and if some of Henry’s schemes and actions appear to have been misjudged, his record of achievement leaves no doubt that he was an outstanding administrator, an assiduous diocesan, and a generous benefactor to the communities in his care. As to his personality and character, the value of Gerald of Wales’s account of the most praiseworthy bishops of his day cannot be overstated. In his panegyric on Henry, Gerald mentions that Henry kept a menagerie and built sumptuous palaces, aqueducts, and hydraulic schemes; he speaks of Henry’s benefactions to his cathed­ral church at Winchester, his loan scheme to replace the chalices used in his diocese with chalices of silver, and his stewardship of estates; and says something of his judgments, continence, humility, and the piety of his last days. Valuable though Gerald’s account most certainly is, it can be no substitute for the sort of information that might have been found in the Life written by Abbot Walter of Westminster (1175–91) not long after Henry’s death in 1171, nor does Gerald’s format lend itself



For Prof. Michael Kauffmann and with thanks to Prof. Christopher Brooke and Dr Richard Gem for commenting on an earlier draft of this paper, and with thanks to Prof. Richard Sharpe and Dr Alan Thacker for their comments on points of detail. I also welcome the opportunity to express my thanks to the library staff of the Warburg Institute and the Institute of Historical Research for their unfailing help and patience.  Lena Voss, Heinrich von Blois, Bischof von Winchester (1129–71), Berlin 1932, 132. See also David Knowles, The Monastic Order in England, Cambridge 1950, 285–93; David Knowles, The Episcopal Colleagues of Archbishop Thomas Becket, Cambridge 1951, 33–7; David Knowles, Saints and Scholars: Twenty-Five Medieval Portraits, Cambridge 1963, 51–8.  Knowles, Monastic Order, 292; Knowles, Saints and Scholars, 58.  Knowles, Episcopal Colleagues, 37; Gesta Stephani, pp. xxxviii, 119.  Voss, Heinrich von Blois, 70–121.  Vita Sancti Remigii, c. xxvii, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, VII, 45–9.

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to the sort of personal insight that might reasonably be expected from a collection of Henry’s letters. And yet, despite these gaps, a considerable volume of research has been undertaken on twelfth-century England since Voss published her biography in 1932, and this has included Henry’s patronage of the arts. And it is with Henry’s interest in the arts of Antiquity that this paper is principally concerned. To speak of Henry of Blois and the arts is to anticipate one of the standard references in the historiography of twelfth-century Western art and culture. The story told by John of Salisbury of Bishop Henry buying old statues in Rome has been regularly repeated since 1927, when Charles Homer Haskins first considered it in the context of the ‘Renaissance of the Twelfth Century’. It is, as Hans Liebeschütz remarked, a ‘famous anecdote’, and repetition points to its perceived value as evidence of the appreciation in the twelfth century of antique works of art for their intrinsic aesthetic merit.10 Part of its popularity no doubt stems from the fact that it purports to be an eye-witness account of one famous man by another; notable as much for its content as for the fact that the observer was one of the foremost political commentators of the period. As evidence of a medieval response to Antiquity, John’s account of Henry’s purchase of antique statues – whatever we imagine them to be – offers a parallel in the visual arts to contemporary interests in classical literature.11 Notwithstanding the potential for a shared world of ideas and mythologies, statuary, unlike literature, is ostensibly a public art form, which, in a medieval context, has deeply rooted associations with the idolatry of a heathen past. And yet despite the unwavering condemnation of idolatry in biblical and patristic texts, the Christian interpretation of pagan images offered a means of assimilating the art and artefacts of Antiquity into a Christian culture.12 Thus a cameo depicting Poseidon and Athena became Adam and Eve, a relief of a seated Arimannius, or Jupiter, became St Peter  

Voss, Heinrich von Blois, p. xiii, citing Dugdale, Monasticon, I, 270. For bibliography to 1984, see Bridget Cherry, ‘Bibliography’, in English Romanesque Art, 1066– 1200, London 1984, 393–406. See also G. Zarnecki, ‘Henry of Blois as a Patron of Sculpture’, in Art and Patronage in the English Romanesque, ed. Sarah Macready and F. H. Thompson, London 1986, 159–72; Jeffrey West, ‘Henry of Blois’, in The [Macmillan] Dictionary of Art, ed. Jane Turner, 34 vols, London 1996, XIV, 398; Yoshio Kusaba, ‘Henry of Blois, Winchester, and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, in Winchester Cathedral: Nine Hundred Years, 1093–1993, ed. John Crook, Chichester 1993, 69–79; Nicholas Riall, Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester: A Patron of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Hampshire Papers 5, 1994.  John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis (John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court), ed. and trans. Marjorie Chibnall, London 1956, 78–80; Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century, Cambridge MA 1927, 66–7, 120. John of Salisbury’s text was cited by Fedele as the earliest example of medieval trade in antiquities: Pietro Fedele, ‘Sull commercio delle antichità in Roma nel XII secolo’, Archivio della Reale Società romana di storia patria, 32, 1909, 465–70 at 467–70. 10 Hans Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism in the Life and Writings of John of Salisbury, Studies of the Warburg Institute 17, 1950, 59. For Henry’s purchase of statuary in its broader context, see Cyril Mango, ‘Antique Statuary and the Byzantine Beholder’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, 17, 1963, 55–75 at 70. 11 For which see L. D. Reynolds and N. G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd edn, Oxford 1991, 110–14; Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, Oxford 1982; B. Munk Olsen, L’Étude des auteurs classiques latins aux xie et xiie siècles, 3 vols, Paris 1982–7. 12 e.g. Exod. 20:4; 37: 17; Deut. 12: 3; 27: 15; Sap. 14: 8; 15: 4–5; 16. A comprehensive refutation of idolatry was offered by Tertullian in De idolatria, in Quinti septimi florentis Tertulliani opera, pars I, ed. August Reifferscheid and George Wissowa, Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum 20, Vienna 1890, 30–58 at 30, lines 3–4, where Tertullian refers to idolatry as the principal crime of the human race (‘principale crimen generis humani’); Tertullianus, De Idolatria: Critical Text, Translation and Commentary, ed. J. H. Waszink and J. C. M. Van Winden, Leiden 1987, 23–4, 78–9. For an introduction to interpretatio christiana and its applications see Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, Mainz 1965, 83–4; Norberto Gramaccini, Mirabilia: Das Nachleben antiker Statuen vor der Renaissance, Mainz 1996, 48–73; Johann Eberlein, ‘Interpretatio christiana’, in Der Neue Pauly:



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seated in his cathedra, and a figure of Augustus assumed the form of a legendary provincial hero.13 It is probably in this context that we should understand an addition made to the Reading abbey cartulary in the thirteenth century, which describes a statue of a boy given by Duke William X of Aquitaine to Henry I, and by Henry I to Reading, where it was accepted as a figure of the Christ child and later known as the Child of Grace.14 If Henry of Blois’s purchase of statues had been informed by such a Christian interpretation, John of Salisbury makes no mention of it, nor is it clear what is meant by statuas in terms of object, material, or subject. John tells us that the statues were old. He also says that they were idols (idola).15 As examples of twelfth-century appreciation of antique sculpture, Ernst Kitzinger saw Henry’s purchase of statues and Master Gregory’s entrancement by the ‘exceptional beauty’ of a statue of Venus that he had seen in Rome as telling examples of ‘a proto-humanist esthetic [sic] sensibility’.16 Though we might infer that Henry shared Gregory’s appreciation of the ‘wonderful and intricate skill’ of antique sculptors, we can only speculate on the general reaction had Henry set up his statues in Winchester as Panofsky imagined.17 Apart from a popular assumption that statues were animate – of which William of Malmesbury’s story about another Roman statue of Venus is an illustration18 – an indication of the religiously motivated suspicion of statues can be glimpsed in Guibert of Nogent’s early twelfth-century autobiography. In the second chapter of that work Guibert talks of his mother’s beauty, and with reference to a point raised by Sallust, he goes on to consider whether beauty without morality can be praised.19 His conclusion betrays an inherent conflict between humanism and doctrine: Enzyklopädie der Antike, 16 vols, 1996–2003, XIII–XV: Rezeptions- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte, ed. Manfred Landfester, Stuttgart 2000, XIV, cols 620–33 at 626–8. 13 For the cameo see W. S. Heckscher, ‘Relics of Pagan Antiquity in Medieval Settings’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 1, 1937–8, 204–20 at 218; Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 88 and n. 2; for the relief of Arimannius see Tim Eaton, Plundering the Past: Roman Stonework in Medieval Britain, Stroud 2000, 85, plate 42; David Stocker and Paul Everson, Summoning St Michael: Early Romanesque Towers in Lincolnshire, Oxford 2006, 206, 208–10; for the figure of Augustus as Pépézuc see Jean Adhémar, Influences antiques dans l’art du moyen âge français, Studies of the Warburg Institute 7, 1939, reprinted Paris 1996, 82, fig. 6. 14 Denis L. T. Bethel, ‘The Making of a 12th-Century Relic Collection’, in Popular Belief and Practice, ed. G. J. Cuming and Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 8, Cambridge 1972, 61–72 at 63, n. 2; Reading Abbey Cartularies, ed. B. R. Kemp, 2 vols, Camden 4th series 31–2, 1986–7, I, no. 227. 15 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 79. On Tertullion’s use of idola see Tertullianus, ed. Waszink and Van Winden, 75–7. Isidore of Seville describes an idol as being a ‘likeness (simulacrum) made in the form of a human and consecrated’: Isidori hispalensis episcopi etymologiarum sive originum libri xx, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols, Oxford 1911, I, VIII.xi.13. The correspondence between ‘likeness’ and idol is preserved in the Septuagint and Hebraicum versions of Psalm 96: 7: ‘qui gloriantur in simulacris’ (LXX); ‘qui gloriantur in idolis’ (Hebr.). Isidore’s patristic sources are discussed by K. N. Macfarlane, ‘Isidore of Seville and the Pagan Gods (Origines VIII.11)’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 70, 1980, 3–40. For statua, signa, amd simulacra in Antique and late Antique Latin usage, see Peter Stewart, Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response, Oxford 2003, 20–35, 184–222. 16 Ernst Kitzinger, ‘The Arts as Aspects of a Renaissance: Rome and Italy’, in Renaissance and Renewal, ed. Benson and Constable, 637–70 at 670. For Magister Gregorius’s Narracio de mirabilibus urbis Romae see Master Gregorius, The Marvels of Rome, trans. John Osborne, Toronto 1987, 26, 59. For discussion of the Mirabilia urbis Romae of c. 1140 as a ‘verbal reaction to antique art’ see Dale Kinney, ‘Mirabilia urbis Romae’, in The Classics in the Middle Ages, ed. Aldo S. Bernardo and Saul Levin, Binghampton NY 1990, 207–22 at 208–9. 17 Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences, 72; see also Voss, Heinrich von Blois, 87. 18 Mango, ‘Antique Statuary’, 59; Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, I, 380–5. For statues and magic see Michael Greenhalgh, The Survival of Roman Antiquities in the Middle Ages, London 1989, 208–10; Mango, ‘Antique Statuary’, 59–64. 19 Guibert de Nogent, Histoire de sa vie (1053–1124) (Venerabilis Guiberti de vita sua sive monodiarum

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[W]e praise beauty in an idol which is justly proportioned and although, where faith is concerned, an idol is called ‘nothing’ by the Apostle (1 Cor. 8: 4), and nothing more profane could be imagined, yet it is not unreasonable to commend the true modelling of its members.20

Though Guibert appeals to reason, he recognizes that to admire beauty in an idol is to admire something that is profane. Seen in this light, John’s statement that the bishop of Winchester was ‘buying up idols’ and shipping them home cannot be simply reduced to the words ‘veteres statuas emit’.21 This is not the main point of chapter 40 of John’s History or, at least, it is not the only point that John had to make. As Boase remarked in his survey of English twelfth-century art, ‘the phrase veteres statuas might stand for any representational works of art’.22 Much the same point was made by Edmund Bishop in 1884, when he singled out from a contemporary list of Henry’s gifts to Winchester a pair of small candlesticks in the shape of men, a silver vessel in the form of a man, a cameo, and two rings, all of which, he suggested, might have been among the statuas brought by Henry from Rome.23 As Boase observed, John seems to suggest ‘actual pieces of ancient sculpture’ – presumably figures in bronze or marble – and this has long been the accepted view. As a reflection of the practical consequences of this assumption, Jean Adhémar has Henry loading up an entire ship at Ostia with statues and other spolia taken from the ruins of ancient Rome.24 It is a plausible inference, perhaps, but it should be noted that not only is there no mention of this ‘booty’ in English sources, there is little material evidence of it either. Despite the temptation to see in any fragment of antique statuary found in Winchester proof of Henry’s Roman purchases, we are obliged to accept Walter Oakeshott’s assertion, made in 1959, that there is no evidence linking the head from a ‘miniature’ Roman marble statue discovered in the cloister at Winchester with Henry of Blois.25 As the city of Winchester stands on the site of the Roman oppidum of Venta Belgarum, it could just as easily have been lost or jettisoned there in Antiquity or the early Middle Ages.26 Likewise with libri tres), ed. Georges Bourgin, Paris 1907, 6–5; Self and Society in Medieval France: The Memoirs of Abbot Guibert of Nogent, ed. John F. Benton, Toronto and London 1984, 39. 20 ‘Laudatur itaque in idolo cujuslibet materiei partibus propriis forma conveniens, et licet idolum ab Apostolo, quantum spectat ad fidem, nihil appelletur (1 Cor. 8: 4), nec quippiam profanius habeatur, tamen illa membrorum apta diductio non ab re laudatur’: Guibert de Nogent, ed. Bourgin, 5–6; Self and Society, ed. Benton, 39. 21 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 79. Though the reference to statues is from the Horatian satire quoted by John a few lines later, Horace makes no direct reference to idols. 22 T. S. R. Boase, English Art, 1100–1216, Oxford 1953, 170. 23 Edmund Bishop, ‘Gifts of Henry of Blois, Abbat [sic] of Glastonbury, to Winchester Cathedral’, Downside Review, 1884, reprinted in Edmund Bishop, Liturgica Historica, Oxford 1918, 392–401 at 396 and n. 1, referring to items 24 (‘duo alia [sc. candelabra] argentea minora in effigie hominis conposita’), 31 (‘vas argenteum fusum in modum hominis’), 13 (‘lapidem magnum qui dicitur cathmaieu’), and the last item of no. 12 (‘et duo anuli aurei, unus qui fuit sancti Silvestri et sunt in eo reliquie de capillis apostolorum Petri et Pauli, alius anulus qui fuit cuiusdam magne auctoritatis apostolici’) [item numbers added by Bishop]. The text was also printed (using earlier page numbers) by Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur Kunst in England, Wales und Schottland vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307, 5 vols, Munich 1955–60, II, 668–70, nos. 4764–7. 24 Adhémar, Influences antiques, 97. 25 Walter Oakeshott, Classical Inspiration in Medieval Art, London 1959, 77. 26 Martin Biddle and D. J. Keene, ‘Winchester in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries’, in Winchester in the Early Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday, ed. Martin Biddle, Winchester Studies 1, Oxford 1976, 241–448 at 259. The lack of material evidence of antique statuary



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architectural spolia, which are equally rare in Winchester, even with the potential offered by the remains of Venta. A few fragments of antique marble and veneer recovered from Wolvesey palace are all that there is to show from sites associated with Henry of Blois.27 In the absence of material evidence, John of Salisbury’s Historia Pontificalis emerges as the sole surviving witness to Henry’s purchase of statues in Rome. While there is no reason to doubt that Henry visited the papal court during the critical period, it is possible that local circumstances in Rome and the history of tension between Henry and John’s former employer, Archbishop Theobald, and coloured John’s account of events.28 The story is told in chapter 40 of John’s History and comprises three sections.29 The first continues the historical narrative of the opening chapters relating to the Council of Rheims in 1148. As the purpose of Henry’s visit to the curia was for him to respond to the papal summons issued by Eugenius III and seek absolution, the visit is naturally at the centre of the narrative. By way of background, John provides a sample of the corruption and misdemeanours committed by Henry and his brother King Stephen. The first section ends with a show of papal power in the form of selected quotations from what was evidently a difficult interview. The second section begins with Henry’s realization that ‘he could hope for nothing more than absolution’, and this is followed by his request to the pope for permission to buy statues which he later sends back to Winchester. There then follows a dramatized sketch about Henry and the Romans with John in a cameo role as a grammarian.30 The final section is a brief statement about Henry’s return journey via Santiago de Compostella. As to the number of visits made by Henry to Rome and the date of composition of John’s History, I see no basis on which to challenge either Poole’s conclusion that Henry made two visits during the critical period, or Marjorie Chibnall’s suggestion that John either composed his History, or brought it to completion, during his sojourn with Peter of Celle in Rheims between 1164 and 1167.31 Nor do I see any need to question Chibnall’s observation that John has telescoped events; indeed, in describing Henry’s return journey, John refers to and other Roman spolia from Winchester is illustrated by the entry of only four items in the catalogue published by Barry Cunliffe and Michael Fulford, in Corpus of Sculpture of the Roman World (Corpus signorum imperii romani), I: Great Britain, Fasc. 2: Bath and the Rest of Wessex, Oxford 1982, nos. 115, 154, 176–7. 27 Of the twenty-five fragments of travertine and twenty fragments of antique marble veneer recovered from various sites in Winchester dating from Roman to later medieval periods, only two fragments of red porphyry and two fragments of Laconian marble (green ‘porphyry’) came from twelfth-century contexts at Wolvesey palace, for which see Martin Biddle, ‘Italian and Other Marbles’, in F. W. Anderson, ‘Provenance of Building Stone’, in Object and Economy in Medieval Winchester: Artefacts from Medieval Winchester, ed. Martin Biddle, Winchester Studies 7/ii, 2 vols, Oxford 1990, I, 306–14 at 313–14. 28 Avrom Saltman, Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, London 1956, 12–27, 169–75; The Letters of John of Salisbury, I: The Early Letters (1153–1161), ed. W. J. Millor and H. E. Butler, rev. C. N. L. Brooke, London 1955, pp. xxv–xxx. With regard to Henry’s hopes for metropolitan status first at ­Canterbury and later at Winchester, it is of interest to note Chibnall’s observation that ‘[for] all forms of self-seeking – above all, those that created scandal or schism in the Church – [John] had only the harshest condemnation’: Historia Pontificalis, p. xxxvi. 29 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 78–80. 30 The suggestion made by Reinhold Pauli (in ‘Über die kirchenpolitische Wirksamkeit des Iohannes Saresberiensis’, Zeitschrift für Kirchenrecht, 16, 1881, 265–87) that John was the grammarian was noted by R. L. Poole, ‘John of Salisbury at the Papal Court’, EHR 38, 1923, 1–30, reprinted in R. L. Poole, Studies in Chronology and History, Oxford 1934, 248–58 at 255. See also Ioannis Saresberiensis historia pontificalis quae supersunt, ed. Reginald L. Poole, Oxford 1927, pp. lvii, 81. 31 The evidence relating to Henry’s visits is summarized by Voss, Heinrich von Blois, 65, n. 57, and in Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 91–4. For the date and circumstances of composition see Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, pp. xxiv–xxx, and Marjorie Chibnall, ‘John of Salisbury as Historian’, in The

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hostilities in northern Italy and Burgundy which can neither be identified at the time of Henry’s visits, nor corroborated by John’s account of his own crossing of the Alps around the same dates.32 Finally, and with reference to Rome as representing the location of the papal court, Eugenius III was in Rome only between January and April of 1150. For the remainder of the critical period he was at Tusculum, Viterbo, Ferentino, and Segni, stopping points in a pontificate of 100 months of which only sixteen were spent at the Lateran.33 Though the first section of chapter 40 has little direct bearing on Henry’s purchase, it provides an insight into why Archbishop Theobald did not exercise the power granted him to rescind the papal summons for Henry to appear in Rome, while, at the same time, preparing the ground for what follows.34 And what follows is that Henry recognizes the pope’s lordship of Rome by asking his permission to buy statues in the city. Thus far what John has to say may be seen as a straightforward record of events, but at the time of Henry’s visits to Rome the pope’s jurisdiction over the city was anything but secure. In chapter 27 of the History John alludes to the Roman revolt of 1143 and outlines the subsequent activities of the Roman senate.35 Among the outrages (iniurias) that he chooses to record are the senate’s usurpation of ‘all [papal] powers of jurisdiction and administration throughout the city’, its appropriation of ‘the regalian rights of the Holy See’, and the use of those rights ‘to support the public burdens’.36 Attempts on the part of successive popes to regain control of the city by force of arms had failed, and in 1153 hope rested on the Treaty of Constance by which the emperor Frederick Barbarossa undertook to use his influence to make the city submissive to World of John of Salisbury, ed. Michael Wilks, Studies in Church History, Subsidia 3, Oxford 1984, 169–77 at 169. 32 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 94. John’s statement that the hostility of the Tuscans, Lombards, and Burgundians forced Henry to abandon the Alpine routes on his return from Rome is at odds with the evidence of Henry’s visit to Cluny on his return from Rome in 1149 and finds no mention in John’s own claim to have crossed the Alps ten times by 1159 (for which see Saltman, Theobald, 173–4; Letters of John of Salisbury, I, 253–6). One possibility is that John telescoped events in the interval between Henry’s visits to Rome and the composition of the Historia Pontificalis, including Frederick Barbarossa’s campaign to exert his authority over these regions and control the Alpine passes as part of his ‘grand design’ for Italy, culminating in the Diet of Roncaglia in 1158 and the fall of Milan in 1162; for which see Peter Munz, Frederick Barbarossa: A Study in Medieval Politics, London 1969, 102–25, esp. (for the Alpine passes) 103 n. 1; Robert L. Benson, ‘Political Renovatio: Two Models from Roman ­Antiquity’, in Renaissance and Renewal, ed. Benson and Constable, 339–86 at 340; Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250, Oxford 1989, 192. See also J. E. Tyler, The Alpine Passes: The Middle Ages (962–1250), Oxford 1930, 124–5, referring to hostilities in the Brenner pass in 1155 recorded by Otto of Freising (Ottonis et Rahewini gesta Friderici I imperatoris, ed. G. Waitz and B. de Simson, MGH SRG 46, 1912, 146–50; The Deeds of Frederick Barbarossa, by Otto of Freising and his Continuator, Rahewin, ed. and trans. C. C. Mierow, New York 1953, 155–9). While the allusion to Barbarossa might reflect John’s wish to illustrate secular infringement of papal jurisdiction, it is relevant to note that in his letter to Ralph of Sarre (letter 124) of 1160, John cites Barbarossa, Henry of Blois, and Henry’s nephew Hugh Puiset as supporters of the anti-pope Victor IV, for which see Letters of John of Salisbury, I, 207, 215. For discussion of John’s suggestion that Victor IV was related to King Stephen, see Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 45, 99–100. 33 Werner Maleczek, ‘Rombeherrschung und Romerneuerung durch das Papstum’, in Rom im hohen Mittelalter: Studien zu den Romvorstellungen und zur Rompolitik vom 10. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert: Reinhard Elze zur Vollendung seines siebzigsten Lebensjahres gewidmet, ed. Bernhard Schimmelpfennig and Ludwig Schmugge, Sigmaringen 1992, 15–27 at 24; Helmut Gleber, Papst Eugen III (1145–1153) unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner politischen Tätigkeit, Jena 1936, 198. 34 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 10–11; see also Saltman, Theobald, 26; The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Adrian Morey and C. N. L. Brooke, Cambridge 1967, letter 76. 35 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 59–60. 36 Ibid. 59.



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the pope and the Roman Church, and to assist the pope in the recovery of all that he had lost.37 Even though John might have counted the treaty peripheral to the main structure of his History, it is surprising that he has nothing to say about the senate’s announcement in 1149 that it intended to restore Rome to its golden age: not of Augustus or the Republic, but of Constantine and Justinian. In preparation for this new dawn the senate had informed the German emperor that it was working to restore the Milvian Bridge so that the imperial armies might cross the Tiber and enter Rome in safety – evoking, perhaps, Constantine’s God-given victory at the battle of the Milvian Bridge in 312.38 The choice of Constantine as the senate’s cultural figurehead cannot have been a matter of chance, if chance it was. In 1146, three years after the revolt had started, Bernard of Clairvaux wrote to Emperor Conrad III seeking his support for the papal cause and pointing out that the Church was ‘both the apostolic seat and the imperial head of Rome’, an allusion to the donation allegedly made by Constantine to Pope Sylvester I and his successors of the imper­ial insignia and title to the lordship of Rome.39 The senate’s choice of Constantine was, in some respects, a further encroachment on papal privilege, and it is surprising that John does not refer to it, if only because, as Liebeschütz observed, for John, the senate’s claim to exercise jurisdiction in Rome was ‘an audacious sacrilege’.40 Under such conditions John’s inaccurate rendering of the inscription on the Arch of Constantine in the opening lines of the Policraticus could be seen to betray a wish on his part to remove any reference to Constantine’s nominal role in the liberation of the city and, by implication, the emancipation of the Roman commune. In John’s reading, rather than Constantine being the ‘liberator of the city’ (urbis), he became the liberator of the fatherland (patria) – whatever John understood that to be.41 37

Pactum constantiense cum Eugenio III papa, in Constitutiones et acta publica imperatorum et regum, I: 911–1197, ed. Ludwig Weiland, MGH Leges 4, Hanover 1893, nos. 144–6, 201–3; Ferdinand Gregorovius, History of the City of Rome in the Middle Ages, trans. from 4th German edn by Mrs Gustav W. Hamilton, 2nd edn, 8 vols, 1900–9, IV (2), 520–1; Munz, Frederick Barbarossa, 64, 79; Morris, Papal Monarchy, 191–2. 38 A record of the announcement survives in a letter sent by the senate to Conrad III, printed in Codice diplomatico del senato romano dal MCXLIV al MCCCXLVII, I, ed. Franco Bartolini, FSI 87, Rome 1948, no. 5, lines 10–19 (Constantine and Justinian), 25–31 (Milvian Bridge). The letter was copied into Otto of Freising’s account of Barbarossa’s life in Gesta Friderici, 45–7 at 46 lines 29–32; Deeds of Barbarossa, trans. Mierow, 61–3. In view of the importance of both Constantine and the Milvian Bridge for early Christianity’s struggle for acceptance, it is difficult to resist Benson’s suggestion that the senate’s double programme of renovatio senatus and restauratio imperii romani reflected an anti-papal position: Benson, ‘Political Renovatio’, 342, 345. Although the senate did undertake the restoration of some ancient structures, the evidence for the restoration of the Milvian Bridge in 1149 is uncertain, for which see Gramaccini, Mirabilia, 182, 184. For a general history of Rome and the activities of the senate see Gregorovius, History of City of Rome, IV (2), 451–693. 39 Bernard of Clairvaux, Ad Conradum regem Romanorum, in Sancti Bernardi opera, ed. J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot, and H. M. Rochais, 9 vols in 8, Rome 1957–77, VIII, no. 244, pp. 134–6 at 135; The Letters of St. Bernard of Clairvaux, trans. Bruno Scott James, Stroud 1998, no. 320. For the forged record of Constantine’s gift of the lordship of Rome to Pope Sylvester and his successors, see the Donation of Constantine chapter 17: Das Constitutum Constantini, ed. Horst Fuhrmann, MGH Fontes Iuris Germanici Antiqui 10, Hanover 1968, 93–4, lines 261–70, translated in Constantine and Christendom, trans. Mark Edwards, Liverpool 2003, 112–13; Percy Ernst Schramm, Kaiser, Könige und Päpste, 4 vols in 5, Stuttgart 1968–71, IV (1), 181–6; Horst Fuhrmann, ‘Konstantinische Schenkung’, in Lexikon des Mittelalters, 10 vols, Munich 1980–99, V, cols 1385–7. For medieval attitudes towards Constantine, see also H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Eleventh-Century Reformers’ Views of Constantine’, Byzantinische Forschungen, 24, 1997, 63–71 at 69–72. 40 Liebeschütz, Medieval Humanism, 59. 41 On the Arch of Constantine inscription see John Higgitt, ‘The Roman Background to Medieval England’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd series 36, 1973, 1–15 at 11 n. 1; Herbert Bloch, ‘The New Fascination with Ancient Rome’, in Renaissance and Renewal, ed. Benson

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One conclusion to be drawn from this is that in writing about Henry’s submission to papal authority, John exploited the opportunities of the narrative to make a point about papal jurisdiction in Rome. If the list of Henry’s misdemeanours in the first part of chapter 40 seems unforgiving, the vehemence of John’s condemnation of the Romans in the second part is unexpected if only because it erupts at the centre of what is otherwise a satirical account of Henry among the art dealers of Rome.42 John concedes that the ancient Romans had carefully made idols ‘in the error of their hands’, but the ‘inborn, inveterate and ineradicable avarice’ of contemporary Romans had made them ‘idol-worshippers in spirit’.43 John, speaking as ‘a grammarian’, surmises that Henry’s motive in ‘buying up idols’ was to relieve the Romans of their gods and so ‘prevent them restoring the ancient rites of worship, as they seemed all too ready to do’.44 Henry then consummates this improbable act of philanthropy by taking the statues home to Winchester. Whatever John’s fears about the developing policies of the newly formed senate, the Roman revolution was a bid for political emancipation from papal control rather than a full-blooded renewal of ancient Roman culture. The restoration of the pagan gods, if it was ever mooted, cannot be documented and would run counter to evidence of church-building in the city.45 As to the statues themselves, despite the scene of ruin and disorder described by Hildebert of Lavardin, contemporary guides to the marvels of Rome attest, as does Hildebert, to the survival of some antique statuary.46 There was, however, one collection in which both the commune and the popes had an interest. This was the group of statues that had stood outside the Lateran palace since at least the tenth century, and comprised the equestrian statue believed to be of Constantine (now identified as Marcus Aurelius), the bronze figure of the she-wolf, the bronze tablet bearing the Lex Vespasiani, a colossal bronze head and a hand holding a globe, and the figure of the Spinario placed on a column.47 Although the senate’s guide to and Constable, 615–36 at 631–2; Ioannis Saresberiensis episcopi carnotensis policratici, ed. C. C. J. Webb, 2 vols, Oxford 1909, I, 13. On the notion of patria in the Middle Ages see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Princeton NJ 1957, 232–5; Benson, ‘Political Renovatio’, 361. 42 Roman avarice was something of a topos among the English twelfth-century writers, for which see Debra J. Birch, Pilgrimage to Rome in the Middle Ages: Continuity and Change, London 1998, 171–2; for a more detailed account see Josef Benzinger, Invectiva in Romam: Romkritik im Mittelalter vom 9. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert, Lübeck and Hamburg 1968, 91, 100–12. 43 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 79–80; for which compare Bernard of Clairvaux, De consideratione ad Eugenium papam, in Sancti Bernardi opera, III, 451–2; Five Books on Consideration: Advice to a Pope, trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan, Kalamazoo MI 1976, 114–15; and Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, I, 620–1, who described the Romans as having a ‘lust for gold’ (pecuniarum libidinem). 44 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 80. 45 For which see Richard Krautheimer, Rome: Profile of a City, 312–1308, Princeton NJ 1980, 61–202; Peter Claussen, ‘Renovatio Romae: Erneuerungsphasen römischer Architektur im 11. und 12. Jahrhundert’, in Rom im hohen Mittelalter, ed. Schimmelpfennig and Schmugge, 87–125; Dale Kinney, ‘Rome in the Twelfth Century: Urbs Fracta and Renovatio’, Gesta, 45 (2), 2006, 199–220 (with recent bibliography at nn. 9–10). 46 Poem ‘Par tibi, Roma’, in Hildeberti cenomannensis episcopi carmina minora, ed. A. Brian Scott, Leipzig 1969, no. 36; quoted by Malmesbury, Gesta Regum, I, 612–15; the survival of antique statuary is discussed by Greenhalgh, Survival of Roman Antiquities, 208–18; John Curran, ‘Moving Statues in Late Antique Rome: Problems of Perspective’, Art History, 17, 1994, 46–58; Kinney, ‘Mirabilia’, 208–9; Master Gregorius, trans. Osborne, 27–8, 66–8. 47 Krautheimer, Rome, 192–7; Adalbert Erler, ‘Lupa, Lex, und Reiterstandbild im mittelalterlichen Rom, eine rechtsgeschichtliche Studie’, Sitzungsberichte der wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft an der Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main, 10 (4), 1972, 123–42 at 124–36; Ingo ­Herklotz, ‘Der



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Rome discounted the accepted identity of the equestrian figure, choosing instead to identify the rider as a ‘mighty king’ from ‘the time of the consuls and senators’,48 the equestrian statue, the she-wolf, and the table of law had profound historical resonance for the commune as symbols of Rome’s fabled origin and its ancient law, while the colossal head and hand were said to have come from a statue that once stood near the Colosseum, the unmistakable icon of ancient Rome.49 For the popes, on the other hand, the statues were seen to be part of the legacy of Constantine and, as Norberto Gramaccini expressed it, a symbol that ‘the pope alone was the possessor of the Antique: a possession that protected his sphere of influence against the claims of a worldly crown’.50 Though John says nothing about what happened to the statues once back in England, the space between the lines is wide enough to accommodate all manner of inference, including the possibility that John had imagined a display of statues at Winchester as expressing Henry’s pretension to papal authority, in much the same way as those outside the Lateran expressed papal lordship in Rome. Such inferences reflect the potential for variable readings inherent in statuas, and a suggestion of ambiguity may have been intended. Even so, this cannot be the explanation for John’s statement that Henry was buying up ‘idols’ (idola).51 If by the use of such a provocative word at the opening of the second section, John sought to identify Henry with the Romans, or to characterize what he saw as a shared devotion to the heritage of Antiquity, John shows Henry to be in the pursuit of that which, to quote Guibert, ‘nothing more profane could be imagined’. Rather than indulging an interest in old statues as a consolation for his frustrated ambitions in Rome, Henry’s activity as a collector of antiquities comes across as worldliness – even hubris – on a par with that of the Romans for whom John has nothing good to say.52 In a manner similar to John’s reference to the inscription on the Arch of Constantine, the apparently incidental comment at the opening of this section that Henry was conspicuous at the papal court for his long beard and philosophical bearing might also betray John’s further thought on his subject.53 Even though the long beard, or barba prolixa, was a sign of dignity and rank appropriate to Henry’s aristocratic birth, Giles Constable has shown that among the religious of the twelfth century it was also a mark of unworldliness and the sufferings of holy men.54 Devoted to the

Campus Lateranensis im Mittelalter’, Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 22, 1985, 1–43 at 17–34; Ingo Herklotz, ‘Miranda sed non scribenda: Il Campus Lateranensis nel medioevo’, in Ingo Herklotz, Gli eredi di Costantino: il papato, il Laterano e la propaganda visiva nel 12. secolo, Rome 2000, 41–94 at 57–70; Gramaccini, Mirabilia, 58–63, 145–50. 48 ‘Tempore, quo consules et senatores rempublicam administrabant, quidam rex potentissimus’: Percy Ernst Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio, 2 vols, Leipzig and Berlin 1929, II, 87, reprinted in Schramm, Kaiser, Könige und Päpste, III, 335; Gramaccini, Mirabilia, 150. 49 Master Gregorius, trans. Osborne, 22–3, 48–53; Kinney, ‘Mirabilia’, 209. 50 ‘Die Statuen, die als Erbe Konstantins in Anspruch genommen wurden, verkündeten gewissermassen die Vollstreckung des Testamentes: der Papst war der alleinige Besitzer der Antike; dieser Besitz schirmte seinem Machtbereich gegen die Ansprüche der weltlichen Krone ab’: Gramaccini, Mirabilia, 58. 51 Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 79. 52 The suggestion that Henry bought statues to console himself for the failure of his metropolitan ambitions was suggested by E. F. Jacob, ‘Some Aspects of Classical Influence in Medieval England’, in England und die Antike, ed. Fritz Saxl, Leipzig 1932, 1–27 at 14. 53 ‘barba prolixa et philosophi gravitate’: Historia Pontificalis, ed. Chibnall, 79. 54 Giles Constable, ‘Introduction to Burchard of Bellevaux, Apologia de Barbis’, in Apologiae duae, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Corpus Christianorum, continuatio mediaevalis 62, Turnhout 1985, 47–130 at 55–66, 113. For canonical practice, see ibid. 103–8; for the canons relating to beards issued at the councils of Rheims in 1131 and 1148, see Sacrorum conciliorum: nova et amplissima collectio, ed. Giovanni

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Church though Henry certainly was, unworldly and suffering he could never claim to be. Before leaving this subject there is one further piece of evidence that might be briefly considered for what it has to say about the wider perception of Henry’s relations with Rome, and for the light that it may throw on John’s reference to Henry buying idols. It is a letter written in 1144/5 by Bernard of Clairvaux to the shortlived Pope Lucius II, in which Bernard sought to strengthen the pope’s resolve in matters relating to the disputed election to the archbishopric of York.55 By almost any standard the letter is a masterpiece of political rhetoric. Though it is best known for Bernard’s reference to Henry as ‘that old whore of Winchester’, it makes explicit much that is implicit in John’s account of Henry’s visits to Rome. Whether or not John knew of the letter while at the curia, as one of the letters written by Bernard to pontiffs in office it is reasonable to assume that it was among the collection of Bernard’s letters that Peter of Celle sent to John at his request in 1157.56 In the opening lines of the letter, Bernard alludes to a recent meeting of the curia at which certain matters relating to Henry of Blois had been settled. In expressing his impatience for an outcome, Bernard refers to a ‘common boast’ that Winchester was a second Rome.57 The metaphor is by no means unique to Winchester, and having once introduced the idea Bernard parodies the claim by reference to Rome itself, making clear his view that the bishop of Winchester had usurped the province of the bishop of Rome, and encouraging the pope to take resolute action so that the boast of the people of Winchester could be ‘silenced on their lips’.58 Henry had opposed the ‘invincible curia of the Roman Senate’, and the curia looked to the pope’s prudence to ‘crush the [serpent’s] head’.59 There is more in a similar vein, and Bernard ends the letter with an expression of the curia’s apprehension lest the old ‘whore’ of Winchester further extend his sphere of influence in England by the election of his protégé.60 Despite appearances, rather than an undignified descent into name-calling, the reference to Henry as the ‘whore’ of Winchester is of more than passing interest in the context of the matters under discussion. Knowles appears to have been first to suggest, or at least popularize, the translation of seductor as ‘whore’.61 While Mansi, 54 vols in 59, 1901–27 edn, reprinted Graz 1960–1, XXI, 464 (c. 6), 714 (c. 2); Louis Trichet, La Tonsure: vie et mort d’une pratique ecclésiastique, Paris 1990, 104–5. 55 Bernard of Clairvaux, Ad Lucium papam, in Sancti Bernardi opera, VIII, 480–2, no. 520; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, no. 204, pp. 275–6; a new translation of the letter is provided by ­Christopher Brooke in Europe in the Central Middle Ages, 962–1154, 3rd edn, Harlow 2000, 382–3. 56 Chibnall, ‘John of Salisbury as Historian’, 172; Letters of John of Salisbury, I, nos. 31–2, at pp. 51, 54. 57 ‘ut vulgo canitur … secundae Romae … O Wincestriae felix, O magni nominis sortita decus, ut secunda Roma appellatur’: Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, p. 480, lines 13–16; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, p. 275. 58 William Hammer, ‘The Concept of the New or Second Rome in the Middle Ages’, Speculum, 19, 1944, 50–62, reprinted in Rom als Idee, ed. B. Kytzler, Darmstadt 1993, 138–57. For the early history of the term see H.-G. Beck, ‘Konstantinople: das Neue Rom’, Gymnasium: Zeitschrift für Kultur der Antike und Humanistische Bildung, 71, 1964, 166–74, reprinted in Rom als Idee, ed. Kytzler, 127–37; Heinz Hoffmann, ‘Roma caput mundi? Rom und Imperium Romanum in der literarischen Diskussion zwischen spätantike und dem 9. Jahrhundert’, in Roma fra Oriente e Occidente, 2 vols, Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull’alto medioevo 49, Spoleto 2002, I, 493–556 at 511–17. 59 Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, pp. 481–2; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, pp. 275–6. 60 ‘seductor ille vetus Wintoniensis’: Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, p. 482, line 12; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, p. 276. 61 Knowles, Monastic Order, 290; Knowles, Episcopal Colleagues, 35; Knowles, Saints and Scholars, 52; David Knowles, The Historian and Character, and Other Essays, Cambridge 1963, 36, 96.



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he recognized ‘whore’ as being the more forceful epithet, he was nearer the mark with his alternatives of ‘seducer’ or ‘wizard’, even ‘the old enemy’ (i.e. the devil), all of which preserve the sense of a person who leads astray, or a corruptor, that is inherent in seductor (cf. Apoc. 12: 9; 20: 2). ‘Whore’ is not a seducer in that sense and apart from prostibulum (Lev. 21: 7) and fornicaria (Isa. 57: 3) the word most often used for ‘whore’ in the Vulgate is meretrix. If by ‘whore’ Knowles is seen to reflect the spirit of Bernard’s letter, it is relevant to note that not only had Rome been characterized as a whore (meretrix) in a hymn composed at the turn of the eleventh century, but also it had long been identified with the city of Babylon.62 In such a context Bernard’s reference to Henry as a seducer, or even a ‘whore’, might be seen to underline his allusion to Winchester as the second Rome and place Henry in the role of the meretrix magna presiding over the city (Apoc. 17: 5). The formative text is St Peter’s first catholic epistle, in which Peter refers to Rome figuratively as ‘the church that is in Babylon’ (1 Pet. 5: 13). The reference was noted by both Jerome and Augustine and, later, by Bede, who explained that Peter spoke allegorically (typice) of Rome as Babylon to reflect the confusion of her many different forms of idolatry.63 Something of the power of this allusion is drawn out in a fragmentary history of the Church in Rome written around 1070 and attributed by Schramm to Humbert of Silva Candida.64 After a brief introduction ending with a list of popes down to the ninth century, the author knits together a text composed almost entirely of biblical references to Babylon and to its great whore who, among other enormities, was ‘drunk on the blood of the martyrs of Jesus and the wine of her own whoring, that is idolatry’.65 Contrived though the passage is, it evokes Bede’s exegetical image of the Church in Babylon and suggests a context for John’s characterization of the Romans as idol-worshippers. As to John’s statement that Henry was ‘buying up idols’, although the phrase does not occur in Bernard’s letter to Lucius II, idols and idolatry might be said to be one of the letter’s recurrent motifs. The focus of Bernard’s attention is Henry’s candidate for the archbishopric of York, William fitz Herbert, who he says Henry set up as an idol (erexit simulacrum), and who Bernard saw as an agent of resist-

62

Hymn for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary: Carmen in assumptione Sanctae Mariae in nocte quando tabula portatur, in Die lateinischen Dichter des deutschen Mittelalters: die Ottonzeit, ed. Karl Strecker, 2 vols, MGH Poetae 5, Leipzig 1937–79, 466–8 at 467, lines 27–34; Schramm, Kaiser, Könige und Päpste, I, 150–2; Johannes Fried, ‘Endzeiterwartung um die Jahrtausendwende’, Deutsche Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters, 45, 1989, 385–473 at 429, translated as ‘Awaiting the End of Time around the Turn of the Year 1000’, in The Apocalyptic Year 1000: Religious Expectation and Social Change, 950–1050, ed. Richard Landes, Andrew Gow, and David C. Van Meter, Oxford 2003, 17–63 at 41. 63 St Jerome, Liber de viris illustribus, c. viii, in PL 23, col. 621: ‘sub nomine Babylonis figuraliter Romam significans’; St Augustine, De civitate Dei, in Sancti Aurelii Augustini: de civitate Dei, ed. Bernhard Dombart and Alfons Kalb, 2 vols, Corpus Christianorum, series latina 47–8, Turnhout 1955, II, 522 (bk 16, c. 17, lines 33–4): ‘ante conditam Romam, veluti alteram in occidente Babyloniam’; 594 (bk 18, c. 2, lines 61–2, 65–6): ‘Babylonia, quasi prima Roma . . . ipsa Roma quasi secunda Babylonia est’; 612 (bk 18, c. 22, lines 1–2): ‘Civitas Roma velut altera Babylon et velut prioris filia Babylonis’; Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson, Cambridge 1998, 725, 824, 848. For Bede’s exegetical commentary see Bedae venerabilis opera: in epistolas VII catholicas, ed. David Hurst, Corpus Christianorum, series latina 121, Turnhout 1983, 259 at lines 120–1: ‘Babylonem typice Romam dicit, videlicet propter confusionem multiplicis idolatriae’; The Commentary on the Seven Catholic ­Epistles of Bede the Venerable, trans. David Hurst, Kalamazoo MI 1985, 119. 64 ‘Fragment B’: Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio, I, 238–45; II, 120–33 at 129–33 (text). 65 ‘meretrix magna (Apoc. 17: 1) prius et ebria sanguine martyrium Ihesu (Apoc. 17: 6) de vino prostitutionis sue (Apoc. 17: 2) id est idolatrie’; Schramm, Kaiser, Rom und Renovatio, II, 131.

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ance to papal authority.66 Taking his text from the first book of Samuel (1 Sam. 5: 2/1 Kgs. 5: 2), Bernard characterizes Henry as the Philistine setting up William fitz Herbert as the idol of Dagon next to the Ark of the Lord.67 The citation takes its place after Bernard’s first parody of Winchester as the second Rome, and is picked up again at the end of the letter when Bernard exhorts the pope to throw down the idol and break it into pieces, as happened to Dagon in the chosen text.68 By interspersing comment on the rivalry between Winchester and Rome with references to idols, a closing reference to Henry as the old corrupter or seducer of Winchester also picks up earlier references to Henry as ‘the enemy’ (inimicus), and the ‘man who walks before Satan, the son of perdition’ (home ille preambulus satanae, filius perditionis).69 Bernard’s solitary reference to a whore (meretrix) is to the harlot mentioned by Jeremiah (Jer. 3: 8), who, like Henry, was rebellious. Whether Bernard’s letter evokes the mood of the curia towards Henry during John’s sojourn in Rome, or reflects only Bernard’s hostility to Henry and to his machinations over the appointment to York, its sentiments have something in common with John’s account of Henry’s visits to Rome. An obvious difference is that while the arts of Antiquity have no part in Bernard’s rhetorical exposition, John makes them the principal vehicle for satire. And yet both Bernard and John expose what they see as Henry’s usurpation of papal power and jurisdiction: Bernard by reference to a local claim to greatness, John through Henry’s interest in the arts. Both insinuate a link between Henry and idolatry: Bernard by adapting a biblical text, John by building on an apt quotation from Horace. While Bernard sought to shape the future, John sought to shape the past. If reflection on the circumstances of John’s History makes the case for Henry buying up ‘actual pieces of ancient sculpture’ less than compelling, it remains to consider the possibility that Henry’s ‘statues’ might be identified among the gifts that he made to Winchester. Given the solidity of the accepted view, it is not surprising that Bishop’s suggestion that the statues were among the objects on Henry’s gift list has not been ­hitherto explored in relation to surviving artefacts as a measure of its potential value. Leaving aside the gold rings, a survey of Roman and late Antique artefacts reveals that each of the objects identified by Bishop can be paired up with surviving antiquities: namely, the cameo, the pair of small silver candlesticks made in the form of men, and the cast silver vessel (vas) in the shape of a man.70 Bishop also singled out the gold ‘apostle’ ring as well as that which had belonged to Pope Sylvester I and contained hair of SS. Peter and Paul. In the case of the latter, the combination of ring and relics provide it with impeccable Roman credentials and, if the ring is genuine, a possible date in the early fourth century. While this review appears to validate Bishop’s suggested Roman origins for the objects and lends weight to

66

Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, p. 481, lines 20, 25; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, p. 276. I am grateful to Christopher Brooke for drawing my attention to Christopher Norton, St. William of York, York 2006, 76–88, 114–18. 67 Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, p. 480, lines 20–1; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, p. 275. In the biblical text the Philistines set the captured Ark next to the figure of Dagon, rather than the other way about. For further references to William as an ‘idol’ in St Bernard’s letters, see Christopher Holdsworth, ‘St Bernard and England’, ANS 8, 1985, 138–53 at 150–1. 68 Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, p. 482, line 9; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, p. 276. 69 Bernard, Ad Lucium papam, p. 481; Letters of St. Bernard, trans. Scott James, p. 276. 70 Bishop, ‘Gifts of Henry of Blois’. The art-historical evidence will be discussed and illustrated in a separate paper. With regard to the ‘candelabra . . . in effigie hominis’, though very rare in Antiquity, the description as candelabra is presumably based on a medieval mistaking for a candle pricket the spike used to support the wick or tallow in antique lamps.



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Boase’s observation that statuas might refer to any representational work of art, a parallel survey of medieval objects shows that – with the exception of the rings and the cameo – the same items can be paired up with medieval artefacts. Like the statue of the Christ child given to Reading that was ‘in the form of a boy’, reference to the human form of the candlesticks and the cast vessel suggests that it was regarded as something unusual or something that could not be otherwise identified in a Christian context. Seen as a measure of Henry’s aesthetic sensibility towards the Antique, the candlesticks and the cast vessel alone remain as objects without any apparent religious association; although like the cameo, without knowing something of the imagery it is not possible to assess whether they might have been perceived as Christian objects. A similar element of uncertainty also applies to the constantinus argenteus that appears in a cyrographed loan agreement between Henry and the monks of Cluny sealed in the chapter house at Cluny on Henry’s return journey from Rome in 1149.71 In setting out the terms for the repayment of the loan in the event of Henry’s death, the document lists those items that were not to be removed from the church in order to meet the outstanding debt. In the absence of written record, we might infer that like the great cross from which the gold was to be stripped to provide the loan, Henry had also given the listed objects which, at first sight, comprise a set of altar ornaments: namely, a gold cup, a Greek paten, a ewer, a constantinus argenteus, and an altar cloth.72 While context might provide a pointer to the function of the constantinus argenteus, the uniqueness of the phrase leaves little scope for further clarification. Round passed over it in silence, but Joan Evans suggested that the phrase referred to a small-scale copy in silver of the equestrian statue of Constantine outside the Lateran, much like the small ninth-century bronze equestrian statute of Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, now in the Louvre.73 If context is indeed a guide to function, the inclusion of such an object on an altar seems inherently unlikely, and the same must be said of an imperial silver bust or figure, or a silver coin or medallion bearing the likeness or name of Constantine: all of which might conceivably have been described as a constantinus argenteus.74 Though a case might be made for

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EEA VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204, ed. M. J. Franklin, Oxford 1993, no. 38; see also Recueil des chartes de l’abbaye de Cluny, ed. Alexandre Bruel, 6 vols, Paris 1876–1903, V, 488–9, no. 4142; Voss, Heinrich von Blois, 114–15. 72 EEA VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204, ed. Franklin, no. 38: ‘Promisit etiam michi abbas cum fratribus, quod si me ab hac vita migrare contingeret antequam crux sicut prescriptum est reperata esset, non ideo opus cruces reficiende mutaretur vel differretur, nec ipsa crux, nec cuppa aurea cum gemmis in qua corpus Domini reconditur, neque scutella greci operis, neque urceus, neque constantinus argenteus, neque pannus altaris auro intextus aliquo modo ab ecclesia auferrentur’. 73 CDF, no. 1395: in his translation of the document Round left ‘constantinus argenteus’ in Latin; Joan Evans, Cluniac Art of the Romanesque Period, Cambridge 1950, 33 and n. 5. For the Louvre statue see Peter Lasko, Ars Sacra, 800–1200, 2nd edn, New Haven CT and London 1994, 12–13, plate 19. 74 I am grateful to Dr Kenneth Painter for drawing my attention to the work of Ernst Künzl on imperial busts in gold and silver, notably ‘Zwei silberne Tetrachenporträts im RGZM und die römischen Kaiserbildnisse aus Gold und Silber’, Jahrbuch des Römisch-germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz, 30, 1983, 381–402, plates 64–85. A near-contemporary example of an imperial silver bust is that of Constantine’s co-emperor, Licinius, recovered as part of the Munich Treasure, for which see Bernhard Overbeck, in Rom und Byzanz: archäologische Kostbarkeiten aus Bayern, ed. Ludwig Wamser and Gisela Zahlhaas, Munich 1998, no. 124, colour plate p. 119; Bernhard Overbeck, Argentum Romanum: ein Schatzfund von spätrömischem Prunkgeschirr, Munich 1973; Bernhard Overbeck, in Jochen Garbsch and Bernhard Overbeck, Spätantike zwischen Heidentum und Christentum: Einführung und Katalog, Munich 1989, 58–64. The use of constantinus as a cognomen for a gold solidus (also known as an aureus) is recorded by Charles Du Cange, Glossarium mediae et infimae latinitatis, 10 vols in 5, Graz 1954, II, 556. For silver medallions minted in Ticinium (Pavia) possibly to celebrate Constantine’s decennial in 315 see Patrick

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the reuse of a silver figure of Constantine as a reliquary – much like the silver figure of St Peter at Cluny – the fact that Constantine was never canonized by the western Church argues against it and its inclusion among a list of altar ornaments.75 One possibility that has not thus far been considered is the class of silver largitio bowls and missoria that were distributed in late Antiquity to mark ­imperial accessions, anniversaries, victories, and the assumption of consulships.76 The largitio dishes, which typically measure around 24 cm. in diameter, are shallow, lathefinished bowls in silver that bear the name of the emperor, the occasion of the distribution, and often a portrait or figure embossed or engraved at the centre of the bowl. Not all are of the same quality or value, and the observation made by Bernhard Overbeck and Ruth Leader-Newby that the office that administered the distribution – the comes sacrarum largitionum – was also the office responsible for the issue of coins, helps to explain similarities between them.77 Only one largitio bowl seems to have survived from the reign of Constantine, and even though it is not of silver, and therefore not made for the social elite, the legend it bears on a bronze coin-stamp in the centre of the bowl is constantinus avg[ustus].78 It is the name that carries the association rather than the imperial title, and a silver bowl bearing the name of the emperor would be easily recognized as a constantinus argenteus for the purposes of a legal document. Seen in the context of the list of liturgical objects of which it forms a part, a Eucharistic function for such a bowl can be envisaged either in connection with ablution or as a container for bread. The perception of Henry of Blois as a man with a penchant for antique art is also suggested by his personal seal, which he used to counterseal his official seal as bishop of Winchester.79 The seal itself has not survived, but impressions show it to have been an antique gem, oval in shape, and with two facing profile heads engraved on its surface: that on the left male, bearded with a full head of hair falling almost to the shoulder, and with a beaker, or open-mouthed cup, on the centre of the head; that on the right female, lighter in build and with hair held close to the head and falling Bruun, ‘The Christian Signs on the Coins of Constantine’, Arctos: acta philologica fennica, new series 3, 1962, 5–35, reprinted in Patrick Bruun, Studies in Constantinian Numismatics: Papers from 1954 to 1988, Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae 12, Rome 1991, 53–69 at 55. 75 For the silver reliquary figure of St Peter (imagine sancti Petri) at Cluny, see Dominique Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000–1150), trans. Graham Robert Edwards, Ithaca NY and London 2002, 171, n. 101, citing Liber tramitis aevi Odilonis abbatis, ed. Peter Dinter, Corpus consuetudinum monasticarum 10, Siegburg 1980, 189, 260–1. The figure was described by Alain Guerreau as ‘une vraie caverne d’Ali-Baba’ containing no fewer than seventeen prestigious relics: Alain Guerreau, ‘Espace social, espace symbolique: à Cluny au XIème siècle’, in L’Ogre historien: autour de Jacques Le Goff, ed. Jacques Revel and Jean-Claude Schmitt, Paris 1998, 167–91 at 173. The apparent absence of a constantinus argenteus from the Cluny inventory also counts against such an interpretation. For the use of anthropomorphic reliquaries, see Jean Wirth, L’Image à l’époque romane, Paris 1999, 52–6. 76 Overbeck, Argentum Romanum, 49; Ruth E. Leader-Newby, Silver and Society in Late Antiquity: Functions and Meanings of Silver Plate in the Fourth to Seventh Centuries, Aldershot 2004, 15–19. For royal gifts of missoria to cathedrals in the seventh century, see George Henderson, Vision and Image in Early Christian England, Cambridge 1999, 27. 77 Overbeck, Argentum Romanum, 49; Leader-Newby, Silver and Society, 15. 78 Martin Henig, in Constantine the Great: York’s Roman Emperor, ed. Elizabeth Hartley and others, York 2006, no. 74; Nigel Sunter and David Brown, ‘Metal Vessels’, in The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath, II: The Finds from the Sacred Spring, ed. Barry Cunliffe, Oxford 1988, no. 14, plate viii. A compar­ able profile head and inscription – imp constantinus avg – occurs on a half-argenteus coin minted in Trier, for which see Constantine the Great, ed. Hartley and others, no. 40. 79 EEA VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204, ed. Franklin, pp. lxxix–lxxx, plate 4(b); W. de Gray Birch, Catalogue of Seals in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum, 6 vols, London 1887–1900, I, 352, no. 2241.



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to the nape of the neck, and with what appears to be a tall crown or cockade just back from the forehead. The earliest surviving impression of the seal is attached to a letter addressed to Pope Eugenius III and dated between 1145 and 1148.80 As far as the evidence of twelfth-century usage allow us to judge, Henry’s use of an antique gem in the mid to late 1140s places him in the vanguard of a fashion that was to gain pace in England during the middle and later twelfth century.81 Although the use of gem seals could be seen as a further reflection of Henry’s taste for the Antique, as a personal object the iconography of the gem and its possible interpretation are also of considerable interest. The only interpretive comment on the iconography of the gem is that offered by Birch, who noted that the busts wear the modius.82 In fact, only the bust on the left wears the modius, or corn measure, which is an attribute unique to the Egyptian god Sarapis, who was the subject of a joint cult with the goddess Isis established in Rome as a major cult by Caracalla around 215.83 The detail of the head-dress of the figure on the right is unclear, although its outline corresponds to that of both the lotus crown and the double feather crown with horns and sun disc worn by Isis in other antique gems.84 In its general form and iconographic detail, the impressions that survive of Henry’s seal bear comparison with similar gems of the second to fourth centuries CE, and it is probable that the lost gem used by Henry for sealing was of a similar date. As to the meaning taken from the gem, despite Birch’s suggestion that the British Museum example of Henry’s seal had faint traces of an inscription, it is not in evidence on other impressions of the seal, nor is there evidence that the gem had been provided with a Christianizing legend reinterpreting the image.85 What significance, if any, should be attached to this is uncertain, but it is possible that no explanatory legend was deemed necessary. In considering the perceived meaning of the gem, one image of two affronted heads, or busts, stands out as a universally recognizable image and one that can be shown to have had particular resonance for Henry. It is the image of the Apostles Peter and Paul, which from at least the third century had been used for medallions and later for papal bullae as an affirmation of the concordia apostolorum and as a symbol of papal authority.86 Though the image 80 81

EEA VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204, ed. Franklin, no. 31. Ibid. pp. lxxix–lxxx; J. Harvey Bloom, English Seals, London 1906, 111–13; T. A. Heslop, ‘Seals’, in English Romanesque Art, 298–300 at 299. 82 Birch, Catalogue of Seals, I, 352, no. 2241. 83 Sarolta A. Takács, Isis and Sarapis in the Roman World, Leiden 1995, 18–21, 116–17; Mary Beard, John North, and Simon Price, Religions of Rome, 2 vols, Cambridge 1998, I, 264–5. 84 See e.g. Adolf Furtwängler, Beschreibung der geschnittenen Steine im Antiquarium, Berlin 1896, no. 2626; Erika Zwierlein-Diehl, Die antiken Gemmen des Kunsthistorischen Museums in Wien, 3 vols, Munich 1973–91, III, no. 1199; Martin Henig, Classical Gems: Ancient and Modern Intaglios and Cameos in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Cambridge 1994, no. 492. For the tradition of double portraits of Sarapis and Isis, see Wilhelm Hornbostel, Sarapis: Studien zur Überlieferungsgeschichte den Erscheinungsformen und Wandlungen der Gestalt eines Gottes, Leiden 1973, 133–46. 85 Birch, Catalogue of Seals, I, 352, no. 2241. An example of the sort of Christian interpretation applied to antique gems used as counterseals is that of Bishop Robert II of Exeter, datable 1158 × 1160, which depicts Thetis facing Achilles with the added inscription + crede duobus, invoking a reference to the two witnesses of Deut. 19: 15; Matt. 18: 16; Apoc. 11: 3. For the seal see EEA XI: Exeter, 1046–1184, ed. Frank Barlow, Oxford 1996, p. lxxxix, no. 73, plate 4; and Birch, Catalogue of Seals, I, no. 1539. For a recent discussion of the genre see John Cherry, ‘Antiquity Misunderstood’, in Classicism to Neo­Classicism: Essays Dedicated to Gertrud Seidmann, ed. Martin Henig and Dimitris Plantzos, BAR ­International series 793, 1999, 143–7. 86 Important synopses of the material were published by Pietro Testini, ‘L’iconografia degli apostoli Pietro e Paolo nelle cosiddetti arti minori’, in B. M. Apollonj Ghetti and others, Saecularia Petri et Pauli,

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on Henry’s seal has only one bearded head, the iconic status of the composition might have been enough to trigger an association with Peter and Paul, Sarapis and Isis’s distinctive headgear lending themselves to Gregory the Great’s rendering of Acts 2: 3 as the ‘Holy Spirit settled upon the first pastors [of the Church] in the form of tongues of flame’.87 Though the suggestion that Henry’s seal might have been taken to represent SS. Peter and Paul is conjecture, Henry’s life as a monk and as a bishop – and, it might be said, as a papal legate – was closely linked to the two Apostles. Not only were both Cluny and Winchester dedicated to SS. Peter and Paul, but both also had corporeal relics of these saints, those at Winchester in the form of hair enclosed in St Sylvester’s gold ring, listed among Henry’s gifts to his cathedral church.88 If, by the mid-twelfth century, St Swithun had become the dominant patron at Winchester, SS. Peter and Paul retained their primary position of importance in the dedicatory preamble to Henry’s will of 6 January 1171, in which he offered his deposition ‘in honour of God, the Apostles Peter and Paul, St Swithun, and all saints and confessors commemorated at Winchester’.89 Even so, as a second Rome, Winchester never enjoyed the freedom and immunity granted to Cluny by Pope Gregory VII, and, despite its relics of Peter and Paul, it never gained a glimmer of the reputation held by Cluny as being ad limina apostolorum.90 Notwithstanding the rise of St Swithun to prominence among Winchester’s patrons, evidence for the continuing primacy of Peter and Paul comes from the counterseal of Henry’s successor as bishop of Winchester, Richard of Ilchester (1174–88).91 Rather than an antique gem, Richard’s Studi di antichità cristiana 28, Vatican City 1969, 241–323 at 260–2, 274; Charles Pietri, ‘Concordia apostolorum et renovatio urbis (Culte des martyrs et propagande pontificale)’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’Ecole française de Rome, 73, 1961, 275–322 at 293–4, 310–22; J. M. Huskinson, Concordia Apostolorum: Christian Propaganda at Rome in the Fourth and Fifth Centuries: A Study in Early Christian Iconography and Iconology, BAR International series 148, 1982, 51–9. See also Pietro e Paolo: la Storia, il culto, la memoria nei primi secoli, ed. Angela Donati, Milan 2000. For an example of a sixth-or seventh-century bronze ring depicting the affronted heads of SS. Peter and Paul, and a compar­ able silver ring in the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, see Jeffrey Spier, in Byzanz, das Licht aus dem Osten: Kult und Alltag im Byzantinischen Reich vom 4. bis 15. Jahrhundert, ed. Christoph Stiegemann, Mainz 2001, no. IV. 68. 87 ‘Hinc est enim quod super pastores primus in linguarum specie Spiritus Sanctus insedit’: Gregory the Great, Liber Regulae Pastoralis, PL 77, col. 31; cf. Grégoire le Grand, Règle pastorale, ed. and trans. Floribert Rommel and Charles Morel, 2 vols, Paris 1992, I, 190, lines 44–5. 88 For the dedication of Cluny see Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 26 (citing Joachim Wollasch, Cluny, ‘Licht der Welt’: Aufstieg und Niedergang der klösterlichen Gemeinschaft, Zurich 1996, 22–3); for the relics of Peter and Paul at Cluny see Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 81, 169; H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Two Studies in Cluniac History, 1049–1126’, part I, Lives of Abbot Hugh, II, i, ‘Epistola cuiusdam ad Dominum Pontium cluniacensem abbatem’, Studi Gregoriani, 11, 1978, 6–298 at 116–17 (where the relics of the Apostles are said to be in the form of ashes). For the dedication of Winchester see Alison Binns, Dedications of Monastic Houses in England and Wales, 1066–1216, Woodbridge 1989, 90; Michael Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun, Winchester Studies 4.2, Oxford 2003, 42–3; for the reliquary ring see Bishop, ‘Gifts of Henry of Blois’, 399, item 12. 89 Lapidge, Cult of St Swithun, 43; for Henry’s will see EEA VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204, ed. Franklin, no. 132: ‘Ego Henricus … ad honorem omnipotentis dei et beatorum apostolorum Petri et Pauli et Sancti Swithuni confessoris et reliquorum omnium sanctorum’. The earliest reference to Peter and Paul as the patron saints of Winchester occurs in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1969, 232–3; see also Wulfstan of Winchester, The Life of St. Æthelwold, ed. and trans. Michael Lapidge and Michael Winterbottom, Oxford 1991, 18–19 and n. 3. 90 Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion, 27–9, 78–82; H. E. J. Cowdrey, The Cluniacs and the Gregorian Reform, Oxford 1970, 22–8, 36–43; H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘Cluny and Rome’, Revue Mabillon, new series 5, 1994, 258–64 at 258–9; Patrick Henriet, ‘Les Villes et la Ville (Rome) dans hagiographie clunisienne’, in Les Moines dans la ville, ed. Joël Schwerdroffer and Michèle Bette, Lille 1996, 47–57 at 55. 91 EEA VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204, ed. Franklin, p. lxxxi; Heslop, ‘Seals’, no. 346 (reverse) and plate



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personal seal is a twelfth-century artefact depicting two standing figures identified as his patrons in the encircling legend +sunt michi sint q boni petrvs pavlvsq patroni. Though Henry’s seal had no legend, the legend used by Richard of Ilchester would have been entirely appropriate to him and to his life in religion. Whether or not the relevance of these associations to Henry’s religious life guided his choice of the antique gem as a seal, the possibility remains that the seal evoked the image of SS. Peter and Paul and, with it, the hint of presumption on papal authority. In conclusion, if Henry’s gifts and benefactions to the three principal religious houses with which he was closely associated throughout his life are collected together, the tally shows him to have been a generous man of catholic and cosmopolitan tastes.92 In this he was not so unusual, and even a superficial assessment of gift lists from popes to provincial prelates shows that the collecting and bestowing of relics, jewels, and artefacts, and the commissioning of buildings and works of art were very much part of what senior clergy were expected to do.93 A preliminary list of Henry’s gifts to Cluny, Glastonbury, and Winchester is as follows: sixty objects of various kinds of which between four and six have some claim to being antique artefacts;94 thirty-seven relics (some noted as being in reliquaries) excluding the hand of St James from Reading abbey;95 100 vestments and other textiles, including a Saracen carpet, a stole with a Venetian fringe, two German stoles, and a pair of sandals that may be the shoes with ‘wonderful sculpture’ that were sent to Henry from abroad – most probably from Cordoba;96 and over 730 named jewels, including topazes, turquoises, and sapphires as well as a cameo and three enamels, but excluding seven (centre). 92 Despite being hailed as ‘coenobii benefactor singularissimus suis temporibus’, the evidence for Henry’s gifts to Cluny is sparse, for which see Martin Marrier, Bibliotheca cluniacensis, Paris 1614, reprinted Brussels and Paris 1915, 593D; for Winchester, see Bishop, ‘Gifts of Henry of Blois’; for Glastonbury see Adam of Domerham, Historia de rebus gestis glastoniensibus, ed. Thomas Hearne, 2 vols, Oxford 1727, 316–18. 93 A useful overview of the early material, including the Liber pontificalis, is provided by Thomas F. X. Noble, ‘Paradoxes and Possibilities in the Sources for Roman Society in the Early Middle Ages’, in Early Medieval Rome and the Christian West: Essays in Honour of Donald A. Bullough, ed. Julia M. H. Smith, Leiden 2000, 55–83; for gifts and benefactions to specific English churches and religious foundations, see Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen zur England, Wales und Schottland vom Jahre 901 bis zum Jahre 1307, 5 vols, Munich 1955–60. 94 In addition to the items suggested by Bishop, ‘Gifts of Henry of Blois’, the ‘serpentine’ included in the gold altar listed by Bishop as item 13 was almost certainly a Roman veneer of a type commonly used in portable altars, for which see Joseph Braun, Der christliche Altar in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, 2 vols, Munich 1924, I, 431–3, 472–3, 751–3 (symbolism); to which list may be added Henry’s personal seal and the constantinus argenteus (inferred as a gift). 95 Karl Leyser, ‘Frederick Barbarossa, Henry II and the Hand of St James’, EHR 90, 1975, 481–506, reprinted in K. J. Leyser, Medieval Germany and Its Neighbours, 900–1250, London 1982, 215–40. 96 Bishop, ‘Gifts of Henry of Blois’, no. 49. For a general survey of pontifical footwear see Joseph Braun, Die liturgische Gewandung im Occident und Orient: nach Ursprung und Entwicklung, Verwendung und Symbolik, Freiburg im Breisgau 1907, 384–410. For the leather shoes with wonderful sculpture (mirabilis sculpturae) that Henry had sent from abroad, see Lehmann-Brockhaus, Lateinische Schriftquellen, no. 6661 (Vita et miracula S. Willemi archaepiscopi Eboracensis, auct. anonymo); and C. R. Dodwell, ‘The Meaning of “Sculptor” in the Romanesque Period’, in Romanesque and Gothic: Essays for George Zarnecki, 2 vols, Woodbridge 1987, 49–61 at 54–5. Cordoban leather is discussed by John Waterer, Spanish Leather: A History of its Use from 800 to 1800, London 1971, 19–46, in which reference is made to the Cordoban leather shoes (subtolares cordouanos) given by Prior Hugh of Boinville to Simon of Hargeville (Orderic, III, 188–9). Waterer illustrates at plates 75b and 121 a pair of twelfth-century liturgical half-boots in red goatskin decorated with appliqué gilt leather griffins from the Capucin monastery in Stavelot, now in the Musée Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire in Brussels. For a general history of Cordoban leather in the context of Muslim trade, see Olivia Remie Constable, Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula, 900–1500, Cambridge 1994, 192–4.

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further objects recorded as having many precious stones. While one would expect an exhaustive list to maintain the relative proportions between categories, whatever meaning is given to veteres statuas, Henry does not emerge from this overview as a man with a discernable taste for the Antique. Rather than a notable collector of antiquities, Henry of Blois seems to have been someone for whom the arts of Antiquity were but one aspect of a broader interest in the arts to which he gave his patronage. The famous anecdote of Henry of Blois buying statues, credible though it may be as an episode in John of Salisbury’s History, cannot quite shake off the hint of something embroidered to say more than is written on the page. As to its value for the history of art, it is as though the protohumanist aesthetic that Kitzinger observed is a product of John’s version of events and had no discernable place in reality. Rather than a worldly prelate indulging an eccentric and doubtful taste in idols, Henry’s benefactions reveal him to be a patron who sought to add to the spiritual wealth of the communities in his care by gifts of relics and the ornaments, objects, and vestments necessary to the religious life and the celebration of the holy mysteries. Evidence of his personal expenditure vouchsafed to us by Gerald of Wales leaves open the possibility that he filled the sumptuous palaces he built for himself with all kinds of treasure of which, sadly, we know nothing.