Writing Medieval Biography, 750-1250: Essays in Honour of Frank Barlow

Writing Medieval Biography 750–1250 ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF PROFESSOR FRANK BARLOW

Frank Barlow Painting by Michael Noakes 1976

Writing Medieval Biography 750–1250 ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF PROFESSOR FRANK BARLOW

EDITED BY

David Bates, Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton

THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2006 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 2006 The Boydell Press, Woodbridge ISBN 1 84383 262 3

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 of this publication is available from the British Library This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by Athenaeum Press Ltd, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear

Contents Preface List of Abbreviations DAVID BATES, JULIA CRICK AND SARAH HAMILTON Introduction

vii xi 1

1. JANET L. NELSON Did Charlemagne have a Private Life?

15

2. ROBIN FLEMING Bones for Historians: Putting the Body back into Biography

29

3. BARBARA YORKE ‘Carriers of the Truth’: Writing the Biographies of Anglo-Saxon Female Saints

49

4. RICHARD ABELS Alfred and his Biographers: Images and Imagination

61

5. SIMON KEYNES Re-Reading King Æthelred the Unready

77

6. PAULINE STAFFORD Writing the Biography of Eleventh-Century Queens

99

7. ELISABETH VAN HOUTS The Flemish Contribution to Biographical Writing in England in the Eleventh Century

111

8. DAVID BATES The Conqueror’s Earliest Historians and the Writing of his Biography

129

9. JANE MARTINDALE Secular Propaganda and Aristocratic Values: The Autobiographies of Count Fulk le Réchin of Anjou and Count William of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine

143

10. CHRISTOPHER HOLDSWORTH Reading the Signs: Bernard of Clairvaux and his Miracles

161

11. LINDY GRANT Arnulf’s Mentor: Geoffrey of Lèves, Bishop of Chartres

173

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12. MARJORIE CHIBNALL The Empress Matilda as a Subject for Biography

185

13. EDMUND KING The Gesta Stephani

195

14. JOHN GILLINGHAM Writing the Biography of Roger of Howden, King’s Clerk and Chronicler

207

15. DAVID CROUCH Writing a Biography in the Thirteenth Century: The Construction and Composition of the ‘History of William Marshal’

221

16. NICHOLAS VINCENT The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies: The Lives of the Plantagenet Kings of England 1154–1272

237

Index

259

Preface The genesis of this volume was an evening telephone conversation between the late Timothy Reuter and myself which concluded that a conference must be organised in Frank Barlow’s honour. The subject of the conference chose itself instantly. Frank has published a vast amount during his career, including numerous editions of texts and a textbook still in print fifty years after it was first published. But the writing of biography has been such a significant and influential part of his work that simply no other topic was appropriate. If memory serves me right, it was Tim who was the driving force at the start. His tragic death so soon after the conference started to be planned deprived it of all that his imagination and energy would have brought to it. It also took from him the opportunity to pay tribute to a historian whom he had long admired deeply – I well remember the first conversation we ever had, on a Paddington-bound train in the early 1970s, after the interviews for a lectureship at Exeter in which Tim was successful and I was not, in which he expressed to me this admiration warmly and fulsomely. He and Frank thus became colleagues until Frank’s retirement in 1976 and remained friends thereafter. While this volume is dedicated to Frank Barlow, it must also be dedicated to the memory of Tim Reuter. The organisation of the conference, entitled ‘The Limits of Medieval Biography’ and held at the University of Exeter between 10 and 12 July in 2003, was taken forward with exemplary efficiency by Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton. Invitations to take part elicited an extraordinarily enthusiastic response and in all eighteen talks were given. All of us were delighted that Frank attended the conference. It was clear to all involved that the talks had sufficient thematic cohesion and originality to merit publication in a volume. Enthusiasm to publish was therefore unanimous. Only two of the speakers, Robert Bartlett and Judith Green, were (for good reasons) unable to contribute; they and Nicholas Orme, who presented a warm and entertaining tribute to Frank, are, however, every bit as much full participants in this project as the editors and the sixteen contributors. An Introduction to the essays, largely written by Julia Crick and Sarah Hamilton, has been added in order to reflect on the general issues of the writing of biography in the Middle Ages and of medieval people by modern authors. The British Academy and the University of Exeter provided necessary and immensely helpful financial support for the conference. The editors are also grateful to Boydell and Brewer for accepting the volume, to Caroline Palmer for her support, and to Samantha Jordan for all her hard work in preparing the text for publication. The three books Edward the Confessor, William Rufus and Thomas Becket, first published in 1970, 1983 and 1986 respectively, stand in the forefront of Frank’s biographical contribution, but an interest in character and personality inform many others of his publications and also the way in which he taught his

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PREFACE

subject. Barbara Yorke, like me an undergraduate and postgraduate student of Frank’s, illuminates brilliantly in her essay the way in which Frank’s lectures brought subjects alive with dry and witty comments on medieval people, usually using modern analogies to illuminate what seemed very strange behaviour to us young undergraduates.1 If Frank’s scholarly austerity and at times wicked sense of humour did at times seem disturbing to us, all who took to medieval history at Exeter were enthused and inspired by someone who could so vividly bring the past alive. At Special Subject and postgraduate level, his precise reading of texts and his readiness to explore them in adventurous and interesting, but rigorous, ways made him a demanding teacher, and one who made it very clear what was required. We were aware that he set the highest standards not just for us, but for himself, and respected and admired him accordingly. Frank was always aware that biography was a difficult genre. At the Exeter conference I quoted the passage from Anthony Powell’s The Kindly Ones which prefaces Edward the Confessor as evidence of this: I wondered what other men – in addition to Stringham – had been ‘in her life’, as Mrs Erdleigh would have said; what, for that matter, had been Miss Weedon’s true relationship with Stringham. One passes through the world knowing few, if any, of the important things about even the people with whom one has been from time to time in the closest intimacy.

Since then Frank has made available to me some unpublished lectures in which he reflected on the biographer’s responsibilities. They confirm to me that I was right to highlight this passage. They also show that Frank’s awareness of the complexity of the biographer’s task deepened hugely as he wrote Edward.2 A significant theme in the lectures is the importance to him from an early age of literature – as an undergraduate he considered becoming a novelist – and of the insights which can be gained from it. Another is his continuous anxiety about, and exploration of, the limitations and the possibilities of the genre. He compares the medieval biographer’s task to that of a modern biographer, such as Michael Holroyd, and he relates his own practice to that of the nineteenth-century ‘Life and Times’. The onus on the medieval biographer is to probe every piece of evidence meticulously and exhaustively. A report of a conversation with V. H. Galbraith contains a typical piece of Frank Barlow’s humour, deployed to make a serious point: I told him that if we knew more about Edward I would be able to write a much shorter book. As every fact is doubtful, every action capable of half-a-dozen different explanations, it was fraudulent to write briefly. One simply had to discuss.3

Yet for all the emphasis on the need for caution, there is also a sense of the biographer’s responsibility to stretch the evidence as far as can legitimately be 1 2

3

I am grateful to Barbara Yorke for sharing with me her memories of Frank as a teacher of undergraduates and a postgraduate supervisor. Note Frank’s own comment that ‘During my career as an historian I have written several biographies of kings. When I wrote my first, a short life of William the Conqueror, in 1965, I did so blithely’, ‘William Rufus’, undated unpublished lecture, p. 1. ‘Edward the Confessor’: unpublished lecture to the Battle and District Historical Society, Autumn 1970, p. 2. For the comparison with Michael Holroyd, see pp. 3–4.

PREFACE

ix

done. The absence of the possibilities open to the modern biographer must be acknowledged, but one must not give up: To explore psychologically such shadowy creatures is usually an impertinence. One can sometimes speculate on the effects of some familiar situation, for example William of Normandy’s bastardy, Edward’s early separation from his mother and his childlessness. But to press analysis too far is to enter the world of phantasy.4

One must also be prepared to use judiciously one’s personal experience. Thus: The achievements of a mediocre but tenacious and resilient manager can be overlooked – are often despised – but they are nevertheless often substantial.5

Another theme in the lectures and Frank’s books is the importance of keeping up-to-date with new ways of interpreting the past. He says as much in Edward. When it came to William Rufus he convincingly included more social history, drawing on French and German scholarship on aristocratic values and life-style. Yet the unpublished lectures show that the attempt to visualise context was part of Frank’s approach long before this. A passage in an unpublished lecture on Edward the Confessor stands out for me: It is fashionable nowadays to say that it is impossible to get much idea of the character of a medieval person. As we know from Obituaries it is not all that easy today. All the same, I think it cowardly not to try. And I, in my unfashionable way, would advocate the use of the despised historical anecdote. I am as sceptical as anyone about the factual accuracy of such evidence. Most anecdotes – and I again appeal to common experience – are doctored. But they are a kind of metaphor, an illustration; and I sometimes think that they are hardly more fictional, and far more illuminating, than the more prosaic fiction which the medieval chroniclers purvey.6

It is surely in this quotation that we can see a quality which makes Frank’s biographies seem so modern in 2006. Although written in the 1970s, it says very clearly that we should look for the piece of evidence which seems to break through conventions and which seems to put us in some small way in contact with the subject. If we translate this passage into the modern discourse of ‘norms’, ‘scripts’ and ‘roles’ we can surely then ask ourselves whether we and many literary theorists are really saying anything different from what Frank wrote, and put into practice, many years ago. As Pauline Stafford and, in a different way, Simon Keynes, stress in this volume, Frank’s statements that the biographer must be aware of all possibilities, and must analyse all evidence rigorously and fully, are crucial. It is also this modernity which allows Pauline Stafford to make convincingly the seemingly improbable comparison between Frank and Pierre Bourdieu as espousing very similar opinions.

4 5 6

Ibid., p. 4. ‘Edward the Confessor’: undated unpublished lecture, p. 13. Ibid., p. 12a.

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In a variety of different ways, the contributors to this volume indicate their admiration for Frank’s work and provide assessment of his work as a biographer. They can by and large be left to speak for themselves. It is arguably otiose to single anyone out, but I cannot resist Nicholas Vincent’s tribute to Frank as ‘a historian who has sought, throughout a long and distinguished career, to discern the particular and the personal behind the masks imposed upon kings and bishops by their medieval biographers’. If guiding principles are to be discerned in Frank’s work, they must surely be that one must above all always think hard about the main literary sources and look beneath their surface (the edition of the Vita Ædwardi Regis is, of course, a superb example of how to extract meaning from an account of a medieval life); that upbringing and circumstances are crucial to understanding any individual; and that it is only through the judicious use of modern analogy, personal experience, literary parallels, and very occasionally of insights from psychiatry and psychology that we can make characters from the past accessible. This volume is offered as a tribute to a master of the art of medieval biography. David Bates

Abbreviations AA SS ANS ASC ASC, Swanton ASE BAR BHL BIHR BL Carmen CBA CCM Diceto

CCSL Domesday Book

De gestis pontificum EEA EHD

EHR EME Gesta Guillelmi Gesta Regum

Acta Sanctorum (of the Bollandists) Anglo-Norman Studies The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, ed. D. Whitelock et al., London 1969 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, trans. and ed. M. Swanton, London 1996 Anglo-Saxon England British Archaeological Reports Bibliographica Hagiographica Latina Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research British Library The Carmen de Hastingae Proelio of Guy, Bishop of Amiens, ed. F. Barlow, OMT, 1999 Council for British Archaeology Cahiers de civilisation médiévale Radulphi de Diceto Opera Historica. The Historical Works of Master Ralph de Diceto, Dean of London, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., RS, 1876 Corpus Christianorum, Series Latina, Turnhout 1953– Domesday Book; seu liber censualis Willelmi primi Regis Angliae . . . , 4 vols., i, ii, ed. A. Farley, London 1783; iii, iv, ed. H. Ellis, London 1816 William of Malmesbury, De gestis pontificum Anglorum, ed. N. E. S. A. Hamilton, RS, 1870 English Episcopal Acta English Historical Documents, 2nd edn, i, 500–1042, ed. D. Whitelock; ii, 1042–1189, ed. D. C. Douglas and G. W. Greenaway, London 1979–81 English Historical Review Early Medieval Europe The Gesta Guillelmi of William of Poitiers, ed. R. H. C. Davis and M. Chibnall, OMT, 1998 William of Malmesbury, Gesta Regum Anglorum, ed. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom, 2 vols., OMT, 1998–9

xii

Gesta Stephani

ABBREVIATIONS

Gesta Stephani, ed. and trans. K. R. Potter and R. H. C. Davis, OMT, 1976 Giraldi Cambrensis Opera Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, J. F. Dimock and G. F. Warner, 8 vols., RS, 1868–71 Historia Novella William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, ed. E. King and K. R. Potter, OMT, 1998 Howden, Chronica Chronica Rogeri de Houedene, ed. W. Stubbs, 4 vols., RS, 1868–71 Howden, Gesta Regis Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi et Ricardi Primi, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., RS, 1867 Howlett, Chronicles Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. R. Howlett, 4 vols., RS, 1884–9 HSJ Haskins Society Journal Huntingdon Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon: ‘Historia Anglorum’, ed. Diana Greenway, OMT, 1996 JEH Journal of Ecclesiastical History JMH Journal of Medieval History John of Worcester The Chronicle of John of Worcester, ii–iii, ed. R. R. Darlington and P. McGurk, OMT, 1995–8 Jumièges The Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigni, ed. E. M. C. van Houts, 2 vols., OMT, 1992–5 MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica MGH SS MGH Scriptores Newburgh Historia Rerum Anglicarum of William of Newburgh, in Howlett, Chronicles, i and ii NMT Nelson’s Medieval Texts OMT Oxford Medieval Texts Orderic The Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis, ed. M. Chibnall, 6 vols., OMT, 1969–80 Oxford DNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, 60 vols., Oxford 2004; also available online at www.oxforddnb.com PBA Proceedings of the British Academy PL Patrologiae cursus completus, series Latina, ed. J. P. Migne, Paris 1841–64 Regesta Regesta Regum Anglo-Normannorum, i, ed. H. W. C. Davis, Oxford 1913; ii, ed. C. Johnson and H. A. Cronne, Oxford 1956; iii, ed. H. A. Cronne and R. H. C. Davis, Oxford 1968 RHF Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, Paris 1738–1904 RS Rolls Series S Anglo-Saxon Charters: An Annotated List and Bibliography, ed. P. H. Sawyer, London 1968;

ABBREVIATIONS

ser. SHR Torigni TRHS Vita Ædwardi VK

xiii

revised edn, ed. S. E. Kelly et al., available online at www.trin.cam.ac.uk/chartwww series Scottish Historical Review The Chronicle of Robert de Torigni, in Howlett, Chronicles, iv Transactions of the Royal Historical Society The Life of King Edward who Rests at Westminster, ed. F. Barlow, 2nd edn, OMT, 1992 Vita Karoli, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores rerum merovingicarum, Hanover 1911

Introduction The classical art of life-writing persuasion always embraced persuasion as much as verisimilitude.1 Developed in ancient Athens to celebrate the dead and exemplify the morality of the philosophers, perpetuated in Rome to inspire public virtue and commemorate great men, biography resembled other forms of portraiture, stylised and conventional perhaps, but exposing none the less the artist’s intentions, his skill, and his relations with both his subject and the conventions of his genre.2 The idealising tendencies of the pagan bios and vita were reinforced by a complementary tradition, that of epideictic rhetoric, formulated by Aristotle in his Rhetoric I.9 and summarised by Cicero in Ad Herennium. Here orators were to attribute praise and blame according to received categories, heightening observed characteristics to rhetorical and moral effect ‘for all speakers praise or blame in regard to existing qualities, but they also make use of other things, both reminding [the audience] of the past and projecting the course of the future’.3 Biography reached the libraries of the early Middle Ages in processed form, contained by the efforts of late antique hagiographers who rendered the old tradition in the light of Christian philosophy and created a canon for the consumption of contemporaries and future readers.4 Like the pagan bios and vita, the lives of saints offered anecdote and exemplification, they commemorated departed heroes, linking the living and the dead, but after the end of antiquity increasingly they served to bridge a cultural gulf, giving human form to a Christian message from an increasingly alien culture.5 Scholars revered the gallery of great men commemorated in the Christian tradition – Anthony, Martin, Gregory, Benedict – and biographical writing imitated

1 2

3

4

5

This introduction takes the form of a series of reflections, necessarily highly selective, which we hope will guide the reader of biographies to areas of further reading. A. Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography: Four Lectures, Cambridge MA 1971, esp. 46–9 on verisimilitude and 94–5 on autobiography and portraiture. Interesting connections between the biographical and the visual are explored by P. Squatriti, ‘Personal Appearance and Physiognomics in Early Medieval Italy’, Journal of Medieval History 14, 1988, 191–202. Aristotle, De rhetorica, I.3, trans. G. A. Kennedy, Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, Oxford 1991, 48. See O. B. Hardison, The Enduring Monument: a Study in the Idea of Praise in Renaissance Literary Theory and Practice, Chapel Hill 1962, 29–32 on the epideictic tradition. On its applications to the Middle Ages see particularly R. Morse, Truth and Convention in the Middle Ages: Rhetoric, Representation and Reality, Cambridge 1991, esp. chapters 1 and 3; eadem, ‘Medieval Biography: History as a Branch of Literature’, Modern Language Review 80, 1985, 257–68; see also M. S. Kempshall, ‘Some Ciceronian Models for Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne’, Viator 26, 1995, 11–37. P. Brown, ‘The Saint as Exemplar in Late Antiquity’, Representations 2, 1983, 1–25; M. Heinzelmann, ‘Neue Aspekte der biographischen Literatur in der lateinischen Welt (1.–6. Jahrhundert)’, Francia 1, 1973, 27–44. The term hagiography is of course a nineteenth-century neologism. Influential lives are conveniently collected, translated and discussed in Early Christian Lives, ed. and trans. C. White, Harmondsworth 1998. Curiously all three of these qualities, including the last, find analogies in Momigliano’s account of the introduction of biography into Roman culture: The Development, 104.

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the great hagiographical monuments of late antiquity. Not just the core texts such as Sulpicius Severus’s Life of Martin, or Athanasius’s Life of Anthony, but other biographical forms were copied and imitated:6 the great collective biographies of antiquity, like Jerome’s De uiris illustribus, spawned imitations by Isidore, Ildefonsus of Toledo (657–67), and Sigebert of Gembloux among others, and institutional lives, Bede’s Historia abbatum, Agnellus of Ravenna’s Liber pontificalis of his own church, and the papal Liber pontificalis clearly belong in an antique tradition.7 Indeed, biography can claim to be the most prevalent Latin narrative form of the early Middle Ages and Berschin has estimated as many as 10,000 texts from the Middle Ages as a whole.8 However conservative the outward signs, however lapidary exponents of the form attempted to make it, the biographical tradition continued to change. In the seventh and eighth centuries non-native speakers of Latin such as Adomnán and Stephanus attempted to record the lives of new kinds of saints working in a new missionary field.9 Later, between 750 and 1250, the years which form the focus of this volume, the form began to mutate again. In these centuries biography, a form already more than a thousand years old with a near continuous tradition, sloughed off its late antique skin. Its practitioners reached into the future, finding new audiences in the vernacular. Versification in English is attested perhaps from the ninth century and in the eleventh Ælfric used the lives of saints to communicate his Christian message to an English-speaking audience, directing contemporaries to them for guidance in the political troubles of the late tenth century.10 Irish prose lives circulated in the same centuries.11 French vitae, often

6

7

8

9

10

11

Hagiographers working in England from the eighth century to the eleventh used the Vita Martini, for example: Felix, Ælfric, Byrhtferth, Wulfstan, Abbo of Fleury (source: Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Project, ed. Fontes Anglo-Saxonici: A Register of Written Sources Used by Anglo-Saxon Authors [CD-ROM Version 1.1], Oxford: Fontes Anglo-Saxonici Project, English Faculty, Oxford University 2002). Collective biography has received much less attention than other forms of hagiography. See, for example, D. M. Deliyannis, ‘A Biblical Model for Serial Biography: The Books of Kings and the Roman Liber pontificalis’, Revue Bénédictine 107, 1977, 15–23; see also Squatriti, ‘Personal Appearance’, 191–2. See also the comments of Bernard Guenée, who was himself constructing a collective biography: B. Guenée, Between Church and State: The Lives of Four French Prelates in the Late Middle Ages, trans. A. Goldhammer, London 1991, 2–5. W. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, 1: Von der Passio Perpetuae zu den Dialogi Gregors des Großen, Quellen und Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Philologie des Mittelalters 8, Stuttgart 1986, 3. For a sense of the sheer volume of texts available in the early Middle Ages in a not particularly favoured part of Europe see C. Rauer, ‘The Sources of the Old English Martyrology’, ASE 32, 2003, 89–109, esp. 103–9. The essential continuities of the biographical tradition are exemplified by the contributions to Latin Biography, ed. T. A. Dorey, London 1967. J. L. Nelson, ‘Royal Saints and Early Medieval Kingship’, Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World, ed. D. Baker, Studies in Church History 10, Oxford 1973, 39–44. For useful perspectives on the new saints of the seventh century see R. Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives: An Introduction to Vitae Sanctorum Hiberniae, Oxford 1991, 8–19; T. Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, Cambridge 2000, 283–91, 344–54, and contributions to Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe, Oxford 2002. On the tradition in general see M. Lapidge, ‘The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon England’, The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. M. Godden and M. Lapidge, Cambridge 1991, 243–63, at 256–61. On Ælfric in particular see M. R. Godden, ‘Ælfric’s Saints’ Lives and the Problem of Miracles’, Leeds Studies in English, new ser. 16, 1985, 83–100, esp. 94, 97. See also D. G. Scragg, ‘Vernacular Homilies and Prose Saints’ Lives before Ælfric’, ASE 8, 1979, 223–77. Sharpe, Medieval Irish Saints’ Lives, 19–26.

INTRODUCTION

3

in verse, proliferated in the twelfth century and beyond.12 A more radical development pointed in the opposite direction, however, to the past. Scholars of the Carolingian renovatio unearthed texts which allowed them to spool back received biographical tradition to its pre-Christian phase. Einhard’s use of the pagan biographical and rhetorical tradition is legendary – he emulated Suetonius and owned a copy of the Ad Herennium.13 Much as the hagiographers of late antiquity had done he processed the pagan tradition for monastic consumption, and in his Life of Charlemagne produced a new biography to add to the canon.14 The wide circulation of his work ensured the dissemination of the Suetonian model, to Asser, for example, and received imitation thereby, but it is clear that Einhard was not uniquely privileged in his access to the keys to the classical biographical and encomiastic tradition. Other Carolingian and later continental scholars knew and used the same texts. Suetonius and Valerius Maximus, both exemplars of biographical method, were copied and read in the ninth century and circulated thereafter and Sallust’s Catiline Conspiracy and Jurgurthine War, similarly influential models, apparently came to light in the same century and subsequently achieved wide popularity.15 It has been estimated that more manuscripts of the Latin classics survive from the ninth century than from any other century before the fifteenth, and that these contained ‘the major part of Latin literature’.16 If so, scholars in the ninth century could have followed Einhard’s lead more directly. Copies of Sallust, Suetonius and Valerius Maximus were obtained and studied by Lupus, abbot of Ferrières, for example.17 ‘Because we believe Einhard, we may not understand him.’18 Latin biography, particularly the biography of secular people, trespasses on complex territory. Miles and centuries separate many medieval biographers from their subjects – Ælfric from Martin, Goscelin from Archbishop Theodore – and such usually rewritten texts fit into the familiar pattern of textual fidelity and infidelity seen in so many written traditions in the early Middle Ages. The lives of recently dead contemporaries, on the other hand, pose different problems altogether. Unlike the anonymity and pseudonymity characteristic of so much writing in the early

12

13

14

15

16 17 18

See, for example, M. D. Legge, ‘Anglo-Norman Hagiography and the Romances’, Medievalia et Humanistica, new ser. 6, 1975, 41–9; P. Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance: Inventing Vernacular Authority, Woodbridge 1999, 184–5 and references; these texts have recently been discussed by S. Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the Twelfth Century, Stanford CA 2003. Kempshall, ‘Some Ciceronian Models’, esp. 11–13; see also D. Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne: The Characterisation of Greatness’, Charlemagne: Empire and Society, ed. J. Story, Manchester 2005, 38–51, at 39–40. On the circulation of this text see now M. M. Tischler, Einharts Vita Karoli: Studien zur Entstehung, Überlieferung und Rezeption, MGH SS 48, 2 vols., Hanover 2001. He has added forty to the previous total of eighty manuscripts. S. J. T[ibbetts], ‘Suetonius’, Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, ed. L. D. Reynolds, Oxford 1983, 399–404; P. K. M[arshall], ‘Valerius Maximus’, Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, 428–30; L. D. R[eynolds], ‘Sallust’, Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, 341–9; L. D. Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, p. xxvii. Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, pp. xxvii–xxviii Texts and Transmission, ed. Reynolds, 346, 400, 428; Kempshall, ‘Some Ciceronian Models’, 11–13. Ganz, ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’, 38.

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Middle Ages, for once authority resides not in the remote but in the immediate past: the biographers of contemporaries are often, although certainly not always, named individuals authorised to write by proximity to the subject whether as kinsman, disciple, protégé or admirer.19 With these kinds of texts there are always two people in the room, at least metaphorically: sitter and artist or, to borrow a recent analogy, corpse and embalmer, because the death as much as the life played an important part in biography in antiquity and in the Middle Ages.20 Consequences flow from this proximity. We have reports of unfinished biographies, works curtailed or sent off course perhaps by political circumstance.21 We may harbour the strong suspicion that secular Latin biography serves a legitimising and stabilising function: three early royal biographies, those of Charlemagne, Alfred and Edward, are composed at moments of dynastic and political crux.22 Why indeed monumentalise in a borrowed form in a foreign language when other forms of praise communicated more directly with a political constituency?23 As Frank Barlow noted, the eleventh-century biographer of St Autbert, bishop of Cambrai, scorned the futility of attempts to commemorate the deeds of lay persons and so elude oblivion.24 Whatever some contemporaries thought about the morality of such constructions, Suger, for one, knew Horace’s dictum about the enduring qualities of written monuments.25 Perhaps his twelfth-century vantage point was radically different from that of biographers a century earlier; there has certainly been a tendency to see in the proliferation of biographical writing in his time a twelfth-century enlightenment precipitated by exposure to new texts, a boom in contemporary life-writing associated with the discovery of the individual.26 The causal connection has become difficult to sustain, however. Throughout the Middle Ages some biographers recorded the lives of contemporaries while others

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23

24 25 26

On Adomnán and Jonas and the purposes of their biographies see Charles-Edwards, Early Christian Ireland, 283–91, 344–53. See also the examples in J. Rubinstein, ‘Biography and Autobiography in the Middle Ages’, Writing Medieval History, ed. N. Partner, London 2005, 22–41, at 35–6. Rubinstein, ‘Biography’, 26, 35–6. On Asser, Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, ed. S. Keynes and M. Lapidge, Harmondsworth 1983, 57–8; Orderic reported that William of Poitiers was prevented aduersibus casibus from completing the Gesta Guillelmi: Orderic, ii. 184–5; Barlow notes that the anonymous author of the Vita Edwardi changed tack for reasons unknown: Vita Ædwardi, pp. xix, 85–91. On Einhard see Kempshall, ‘Some Ciceronian Models’, 24–30. On the thinning of the royal line engineered by Charlemagne see S. Airlie, ‘Narratives of Triumph and Rituals of Submission: Charlemagne’s Mastering of Bavaria’, TRHS, 6th ser. 9, 1999, 93–119. On the challenge to Alfred’s line from his nephew, Æthelwold, see ASC A s.a. 900: also Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 16, 292. The production of the anonymous Vita Edwardi perhaps within a year of the battle of Hastings speaks for itself: Vita Ædwardi, pp. xxix–xxxiii. One thinks of the English royal praise poems in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, for example, discussed by K. O’Brien O’Keeffe, Visible Song: Transitional Literacy in Old English Verse, Cambridge 1990, 108–37. Vita Ædwardi, p. xxi. Monumentum aere perennius: Suger, Preface, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. H. Wacquet, Paris 1964, 4; quoting Horace, Carmina, iii, 30. Jerome knew the tag: Epistola, 107. W. L. Warren, ‘Biography and the Medieval Historian’, Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. D. O. Morgan, London 1982, 5–18, at 7–9.

INTRODUCTION

5

reworked the biographies of remote subjects, but the production of contemporary lives never rivalled in volume the writing of ancient lives: biography de novo must account for only a tiny proportion of Berschin’s 10,000 texts, including the fraction of them produced in the twelfth century.27 Recent writers have sought to explain intellectual change in the twelfth century as a less abrupt development. Jay Rubinstein has recently seen the psychological and intimate biography of the twelfth century not as a discovery but as an articulation of thinking about the individual.28 Nancy Partner has argued that we are subscribing to a modern cliché if we postpone thinking about the individual to the twelfth century or later still. In the early Middle Ages the interior is present but expressed in different ways: we need to think in terms of ‘pectoral psychology’.29 As commentators on Augustine have shown, patristic tradition embodied discussion of selfknowledge of a high order.30 Moreover, as we have seen, the components of twelfth-century biography had been available since the ninth.31 It is thus clear that biography proved an enduring and popular genre, on both the individual and collective level, throughout the medieval period and into the early modern one.32 There are strong reasons for viewing the popularity of biographical and autobiographical writing evident in the Italian Renaissance as the efflorescence of an existing craft, not the rediscovery of a lost one.33 Indeed, Partner has insisted that Burckhardtian notions of Renaissance individualism should not be allowed to erase medieval self-awareness. This has a direct bearing on the future as well as the past of biography.34 The Reformation brought a new impetus to the genre, as new confessional groups like the Quakers published their own collective biographies in what Keith Thomas has described as an attempt ‘to construct their own heroic canon’.35 Throughout the long eighteenth century professional groups, including bishops, botanists, and poets, turned to collective biography as part of an attempt to construct their own identities.36 More universal works were also compiled, such as

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36

See above n. 8. Rubinstein, ‘Biography’. N. Partner, ‘The Hidden Self: Psychoanalysis and the Textual Unconscious’, Writing Medieval History, ed. Partner, 42–64, at 42–5. Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo: A Biography, London 1967; B. Stock, Augustine the Reader: Meditation, Self-Knowledge, and the Ethics of Interpretation, London 1996, esp. 243–78. David Ganz has highlighted the strangeness of the Vita Karoli: ‘Einhard’s Charlemagne’. As is clear from the range of works cited by D. A. Stauffer, English Biography before 1700, Cambridge MA 1930, which although dated is still useful. Cf. M. McLaughlin’s recent observation that the quantity of biographical writing in Latin and Italian between 1300 and 1600 ‘constitutes part of the fault-line that separates the Middle Ages from the Renaissance in Italy’ in ‘Biography and Autobiography in the Italian Renaissance’, in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. P. France and W. St Clair, Oxford 2002, 37. Partner, ‘The Hidden Self’, 44–5. K. Thomas, Changing Conceptions of National Biography: The Oxford DNB in Historical Perspective, The Leslie Stephen Special Lecture 2004, Cambridge 2005, 3. Ibid.; D. A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth-Century England, Princeton NJ 1941; P. Rogers, ‘Johnson’s Lives of the Poets and the Biographic Dictionaries’, Review of English Studies, new ser. 31, 1980, 149–71. Such developments are not peculiar to the early modern period; in Islamic medieval culture a genre of ‘biographical dictionaries’ emerged, collections of lives of scholars, poets, scientists, that is the cultured elites of particular regions: M. Marín, ‘Biography and Prosopography in Arab-Islamic Medieval Culture: Introductory Remarks’, Medieval Prosopography 23, 2002, 1–13.

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the Huguenot Pierre Bayle’s influential Dictionnaire Historique et Critique (1697) (translated into English 1734–41), which was organised biographically, and supported by copious documentation, as well as national ones such as Thomas Fuller’s Worthies of England (1662), arranged by county, and the Biographia Britannica (1747–66), which aimed to be ‘a British Temple of Honour, sacred to the piety, learning, valour, public spirit, loyalty and every other glorious virtue of our ancestors’.37 Similar projects were undertaken in other European countries. The exemplary function of both individual and collective biography thus remained a strong theme of modern writings, as authors and publishers harnessed the genre to their own attempts to promote national and group identities.38 This exemplary view of history continued into the nineteenth century and was embodied in Thomas Carlyle’s confident proclamation that ‘Universal History, the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.’39 The nineteenth-century origins of history as an academic discipline are, however, often associated with a move away from narrative and biography to analysis and institutional history but, as the following brief review will make clear, the biographical approach remained throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a constant thread in professional research into medieval history.40 One obvious approach taken by historians was to construct narratives of the reigns of medieval kings. Thus Kate Norgate, a self-taught scholar and protégée of John Richard Green, used narrative to outline the lives of various Angevin kings.41 Her research was based mainly on printed sources, combined with her own knowledge of the geography of Anjou, gained from travelling around the region; initially she confined herself to chronicles, but with the publication of Public Record Office records from the 1890s onwards she came to include other records.42 More surprisingly, Bishop William Stubbs, one of the pioneers of constitutional history, and Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford (1867–84), wrote the entries for some four hundred Anglo-Saxons in the Dictionary of Christian Biography.43 This was one of several projects, of which Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography was merely the last, which sought to catalogue the lives of the great men, together with a few women, of

37 38 39 40

41

42 43

Ibid., 4–5, 11–12. P. France, ‘From Eulogy to Biography: The French Academic Eloge’, in Mapping Lives, ed. France and St Clair, 28–9. T. Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, 1841; repr. Oxford 1904, 1. On the nineteenth-century origins of history as an academic discipline in England see R. W. Southern, ‘The Shape and Substance of Academic History’, History and Historians: Selected Papers of R. W. Southern, ed. R. Bartlett, Oxford 2004, chapter 5. K. Norgate, England under the Angevin Kings, 2 vols., London 1887; John Lackland, London 1902; The Minority of Henry the Third, London 1912; Richard the Lion Heart, London 1924. J. R. Green wrote a ‘puff’ for John Lackland beginning ‘The closer study of John’s history clears away the charges of sloth and incapacity with which men tried to explain the greatness of his fall.’ F. M. Powicke and P. Millican, revised by J. Gordon-Kelter and E. Jacobs, ‘Kate Norgate’, in Oxford DNB, 41: 9. J. Campbell, ‘William Stubbs (1825–90)’, Oxford DNB, 53: 217–22.

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7

Britain.44 Stubbs also taught a generation of late nineteenth-century medieval historians: R. L. Poole, J. H. Round, and, perhaps most influentially, T. F. Tout.45 Whilst this generation, partly as a result of the beginning of the publication of documents in the Public Record Office, focused on the history of institutions, this change did not overturn the importance of biographical approaches to the history of medieval England. In fact all three wrote for the Dictionary of National Biography. Tout, for example, although he is principally known now for his work on administrative history and as founder of the Manchester School of medieval history, also wrote the entries in the Dictionary of National Biography for Edward II, Henry IV and Henry VI, as well as those of various late medieval secular and ecclesiastical magnates.46 J. H. Round’s interest in genealogy led him to study the careers of individuals, such as Geoffrey de Mandeville, first earl of Essex.47 Maurice Powicke, who was taught by both T. F. Tout and V. H. Galbraith at Manchester, consciously sought to integrate the constitutional with the biographical approach: ‘sometimes as I work at a series of patent and close rolls, I have a queer sensation; the dead entries begin to be alive. It is rather like the experience of sitting down in one’s chair and finding that one has sat on the cat. These are real people.’48 Powicke himself described his own interest as being the study of ‘the interplay of experience and ideas in the formation of medieval political societies’.49 As in his essays on Stephen Langton, he sought to explore the link between actual politics, on the one hand, and the twelfth-century renaissance in thought on the other, through the figure of one individual.50 Powicke also edited Walter Daniel’s Life of Ailred of Rievaulx, as well as writing his great study of thirteenth-century politics, King Henry III and the Lord Edward, in which he studied the relationships between men, ideas, and institutions: ‘the book is a study in social history, not in the sense in which the term is generally used, but in the sense of social life, relations, and forces in political action’.51 V. H. Galbraith was much more antagonistic towards the biographical approach, but even he was prepared to engage with medieval biography, as in his attempt to undermine the validity of Asser’s Life of Alfred.52 44

45 46

47 48

49 50 51

52

Perhaps the most surprising figure to find in any study of medieval biography is that of the legal historian, F. W. Maitland, who was commissioned by Leslie Stephen to write his biography: The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen, London 1906, was published shortly before Maitland’s own death. S. Bailey, ‘Reginald Lane Poole (1857–1939)’, Oxford DNB, 44: 845–7. V. H. Galbraith, revised by P. R. H. Slee, ‘Thomas Frederick Tout (1855–1929)’, Oxford DNB, 55: 90–93. F. M. Powicke, ‘The Manchester History School: T. F. Tout’, in his Modern Historians and the Study of History: Essays and Papers, London 1955, 19–44, at 25–6. E. King, ‘John Horace Round (1854–1928)’, Oxford DNB, 47: 943–6. F. M. Powicke, Ways of Medieval Life and Thought: Essays and Addresses, London 1949, 67. On Powicke’s career see R. W. Southern, ‘Sir (Frederick) Maurice Powicke (1879–1963)’, Oxford DNB, 45: 148–150. Powicke, Ways, 5. Southern, ‘Maurice Powicke’; F. M. Powicke, Stephen Langton: Being the Ford Lectures Delivered in the University of Oxford in Hilary Term 1927, Oxford 1926. F. M. Powicke, Ailred of Rievaulx and his Biographer Walter Daniel, Manchester 1921–2; reprinted as The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel, ed. F. M. Powicke, London 1950; idem, King Henry III and the Lord Edward: The Community of the Realm in the Thirteenth Century, Oxford 1947; repr. 1966. V. H. Galbraith, ‘Who Wrote Asser’s Life of Alfred?’, in his An Introduction to the Study of History, London 1964, 88–128.

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Powicke’s own research must be seen in a broader context. The turn to institutional history under Tout and others may, in part, have been a reaction to the growth of the power of the state in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century England, a realisation that power lay not with great men but in the hands of government officials. In the interwar period Syme’s and Namier’s belief that patronage was what mattered was influential, part of a conscious reaction against great men and great ideas, which helped engineer a turn to prosopography across the board.53 One late medievalist who adopted such an approach, K. B. McFarlane, went so far as to assert that medieval biography was an impossibility; his conclusion seems to have been based on his view that biography should describe the inner as well as outer life of the individual.54 Prosopography, that is the compilation of collective biographies in order to study the behaviour of a group, rather than that of individuals, retained its popularity as an approach through much of the second half of the twentieth century. Thus from the 1960s onwards C. Warren Hollister inspired in generations of students, including one of the contributors to this volume, Robin Fleming, an awareness of the benefits of a more prosopographical approach to Anglo-Norman and Angevin politics.55 Whilst Hollister’s own work showed the importance of continuity amongst magnates between the reigns of William Rufus and Henry I, the prosopographical approach was not unique to Santa Barbara.56 It was part of a more general effort by modern historians to overcome what George T. Beech has described as ‘one of the most serious obstacles to the understanding of virtually every period and society in medieval Europe [that] is the obscurity of the leading figures of the day’.57 As Beech himself showed in his work on eleventh-century Poitou, even where we lack contemporary writings such as vitae or gesta focused on the lives of individuals, it is possible to reconstruct a good deal about the lives of important political players, such as Peter II, bishop of Poitiers from 1087 until 1115, whose death was commemorated by William of Malmesbury in his Gesta Regum but who has been neglected by more modern scholars, from their charters.58 Judith Green has undertaken a similar study of the royal servants of Henry I in order to study his government.59 Although the prosopographical approach to biographical writing is self-consciously structuralist, it is also very similar in the questions it

53 54 55

56 57 58 59

Henry Summerson, ‘Problems of Medieval Biography: Revising DNB’, Medieval Prosopography 17, 1996, 197–222, at 210–11. K. B. McFarlane, The Nobility of Later Medieval England, Oxford 1973, p. ix, citing McFarlane’s 1927 fellowship dissertation on Cardinal Beaufort. C. Warren Hollister, ‘Elite Prosopography in Saxon and Norman England’, Medieval Prosopography 2, 1981, 11–20; S. E. Christelow, ‘All the King’s Men: Prosopography and the Santa Barbara School’, Medieval Prosopography 11, 1990, 1–15; R. Fleming, Kings and Lords in Conquest England, Cambridge 1991. C. Warren Hollister, ‘Magnates and “Curiales” in Early Norman England’, Viator 8, 1976, 63–81. George T. Beech, ‘Biography and the Study of Eleventh-Century Society. Bishop Peter II of Poitiers 1087–1115’, Francia 7, 1979, 101–22, at 101. Ibid. Judith A. Green, The Government of England under Henry I, Cambridge 1986; The Aristocracy of Norman England, Cambridge 1997.

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asks, and the materials it draws upon, to the approach taken by those who choose to make case studies of the life of one individual or one family. This approach has its roots at least as far back as the nineteenth century: Round’s study in 1892 of Geoffrey de Mandeville, first earl of Essex, drew upon charters, to write a history of the political career of one influential individual in one region of England.60 In the 1970s John Le Patourel made a study of the Montgomery family to show the ambitions of one family during the Norman Conquest.61 In the 1990s Nicholas Vincent studied the career of one key player in early thirteenth-century politics, Peter des Roches.62 And Frank Barlow himself published his study of the Godwins, and the role of the family in eleventh-century politics, in 2002.63 Such approaches, both constitutional and prosopographical, have been part of a self-conscious attempt to turn away from a tendency to focus on major figures – kings, popes, saints – who were themselves the subject of medieval biographical writings. Historians have sought to rectify earlier neglect of the lives of many significant medieval people, often caused not so much because of a lack of sources, as because of a lack of contemporary vitae.64 Even so, the modern academic interest in, and selection of, biographical subjects is often (but not, as is the case with the Angevin kings, always) built upon medieval literary memorials.65 Whilst it is possible, as Pauline Stafford makes clear in her contribution to this volume, to read such memorials in a structuralist way, it is also possible to read them for evidence of personal agency.66 Her essay thus reviews the impact of Annales’ school’s structuralism on historical writing, and the tension between structuralism and agency in biographical writings, medieval and modern. Medieval biography continues to attract attention: as a model for kingship,67 as a vehicle for patristic wisdom,68 and, most radically, as a site for psychoanalytic investigation.69 Many historians continue to write accounts of famous medieval figures. Whilst such an approach was perhaps out of favour in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, it continued to be practised elsewhere. In 1920s Germany, for example, Ernst Kantorowicz, a member of Stefan George’s circle, wrote what was ‘emphatically a biography, a study of a man and his impact’ of Frederick II.70 In France, however, the interest in structures and the longue durée

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68 69 70

J. H. Round, Geoffrey de Mandeville: A Study of the Anarchy, London 1892. J. Le Patourel, The Norman Empire, Oxford 1976, 292–5. Nicholas Vincent, Peter des Roches: An Alien in English Politics, 1205–1238, Cambridge 1996. F. Barlow, The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty, Harlow 2002. Beech, ‘Biography’, 105. On the Angevin kings see N. Vincent, chapter 16 below. See chapter 6 below. J. T. Rosenthal, ‘Edward the Confessor and Robert the Pious: Eleventh Century Kingship and Biography’, Mediaeval Studies 33, 1971, 7–20; P. Kershaw, ‘Illness, Power and Prayer in Asser’s Life of King Alfred’, EME 10, 2001, 201–24. M. Kempshall, ‘No Bishop, no King: The Ministerial Ideology of Kingship and Asser’s Res Gestae Ælfredi’, Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser, Oxford 2000, 106–27. See Partner’s extraordinary analysis of the Life of Christina of Markyate, ‘The Hidden Self’, 52–8. E. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite, Berlin 1927. This description: D. Abulafia, ‘Kantorowicz and Frederick II’, History 62, 1977, 193–201, at 196.

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seemingly subsumed biography, although it should be noted that both Marc Bloch and Lucien Lebvre attributed great importance to the study of the individual’s role in history.71 More recently medieval historians have revisited the legitimacy of the biographical approach. Jinty Nelson in her study of Charles the Bald argued forcefully for the benefit of royal biography for an understanding of early medieval politics: ‘its concern with a king, his personality and his personal relationships goes with the grain of early medieval politics’.72 Jacques Le Goff, like historians of more modern figures, has acknowledged the impact of Max Weber’s idea of charismatic leadership on his own approach to writing his recent biographies of Saint Louis and Saint Francis.73 Such an approach makes a virtue out of the focus in the sources on one, exemplary figure, arguing that domination is a result of how that individual’s charisma is perceived and praised by the society in which they live, rather than a direct result of his or her personality. Such an approach therefore removes the focus from the individual’s interior life and personality, and focuses it rather on the persona of the subject. Recent historians have chosen to deal with the issue of the interiority of their subjects in various ways. Some have chosen to ignore these issues,74 others to concentrate on the political structures and how they focused around the king.75 Others have taken the via media outlined by Jinty Nelson and tried to combine the study of the exterior life with that of the interior.76 Biographers will continue to face the problem of how to interpret the complexities of medieval sources associated closely with the lives of medieval people, and how to fill the many lacunae in the records.77 One approach, already alluded to, is Pauline Stafford’s attempt to use the messages from the social sciences and literary theory to locate the individual who lies behind the surviving evidence.78 Another is to use new types of evidence, such as Robin Fleming’s discussion of bone analysis, in order to gain insight into the personal stresses affecting individual lives.79 Another is to take seriously the evidence of public

71 72 73

74

75 76

77 78 79

J. Le Goff, ‘The Whys and Ways of Writing a Biography: The Case of Saint Louis’, Exemplaria 1, 1989, 207–25; G. Levi, ‘Les usages de la biographie’, Annales ESC 44.6, 1989, 1317–23. Janet L. Nelson, Charles the Bald, London and New York 1992, 11. M. Weber, On Charisma and Institution Building, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt, Chicago and London 1968; J. Le Goff, ‘The Whys and Ways of Writing a Biography: The Case of Saint Louis’, Exemplaria 1, 1989, 207–25; Saint Louis, Paris 1996; Saint Francis of Assisi, Paris 1999. On the use of Weber in modern historical biography see: I. Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris, Harmondsworth 1998, p. xiii: ‘If I have found one concept more than any other which has helped to find a way to bind together the otherwise contradictory approaches through biography and the writing of social history, it is Max Weber’s notion of “charismatic leadership”.’ For example Roger Collins, Charlemagne, Basingstoke 1998, p. viii. For what follows see S. Hamilton, ‘Review Article: Early Medieval Rulers and their Modern Biographers’, EME 9, 2000, 247–60. G. Althoff, Otto III, Darmstadt 1997; English translation by Phyllis G. Jestice, Pennsylvania 2003. R. Abels, Alfred the Great. War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, London 1998; for a more pessimistic outline of the problems involved see his chapter 4 below; for a more optimistic vision see J. L. Nelson’s chapter 1 below. M. Chibnall, chapter 12 below. P. Stafford, chapter 6 below. R. Fleming, chapter 2 below.

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acts of piety and devotion for insights into the individual’s inner life.80 Both these last two approaches allow historians to reconcile the limitations of the available evidence with the modern biographer’s preoccupations with investigating interiority. A fourth is to exploit new analytical tools: the current generation of electronic databases promises to transform prosopography into an astonishingly powerful device for the construction of social and political history.81 The bias of the sources explains the perhaps inevitable focus on kings, queens, nuns, monks, bishops, clerical authors, but, as Robin Fleming shows, the exploration of the archaeological evidence allows insights into the pressures facing ordinary people in their lives.82 Yet there is also a good deal for the modern biographer to learn from engaging with the problems raised by medieval vitae and gesta, in terms of literary conventions, the circumstances of production, and the relationship between author, subject and subject’s family.83 Investigation of the medieval authors of biographical and historical writing allows new insights into their own writings.84 The essays collected here thus offer an array of new insights into medieval biography. Biography is, however, a genre which continually seems to promote condemnation and shame, to be seen as dated, positivist, imprecise, too easy, too much associated with ‘great men’ (very seldom women), on the one hand, and on the other to be hailed as undergoing a revival, and offering insights which no other genre, no other analytical tool, can do. Thus Arnaldo Momigliano sets out his youthful embarrassment about his older relations’ practice of biography, before applauding the revival of biography in classical studies in the 1960s.85

80

81 82

83

84 85

Nelson, chapter 1; C. Holdsworth, chapter 10 below. See also Barbara Yorke’s attempts to use hagiography to construct biography, chapter 3 below, and David Bates’ attempt to get closer to William the Conqueror’s thoughts through rearranging the sources for his life, chapter 8 below. For example The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England: http://www.pase.ac.uk Kings (and emperors): Nelson, chapter 1, Abels, chapter 4, S. Keynes, chapter 5; Bates, chapter 8, E. King, chapter 13, N. Vincent, chapter 16 below. On queens and empresses: Stafford, chapter 6, Chibnall, chapter 12. On nuns: Yorke, chapter 3. On monks: C. Holdsworth, chapter 10. On bishops: L. Grant, chapter 11 below. On nobles: Jane Martindale, chapter 9 below, D. Crouch, chapter 15 below. On writers: see E. van Houts, chapter 7, and J. Gillingham, chapter 14. On ordinary people: Fleming, chapter 2. The medieval accounts of the lives or deeds of Charlemagne, Anglo-Saxon female saints such as Saint Edith of Wilton and Saint Leoba, Alfred the Great, Queens Emma and Edith, the eleventh-century count of Anjou Fulk Réchin and the near-contemporary Duke William of Aquitaine, William the Conqueror, St Bernard (with specific reference to his miracles), King Stephen and William Marshal all figure to a greater or lesser degree in the essays by Janet Nelson, Barbara Yorke, Richard Abels, Pauline Stafford, Jane Martindale, David Bates, Christopher Holdsworth, Edmund King and David Crouch. See the essays by Elisabeth van Houts and John Gillingham, who both study the authors of biographical writing in order to construct the biographies of the writers. Momigliano, The Development, 4–5. Other examples of derogatory comments: ‘biography is a peculiarly British vice’, see Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, ed. M. Bostridge, London 2004, p. xi; ‘biography is procedurally the easiest of the historians’ activities’: B. Harrison, ‘The Dictionary Man’, in ibid., 76–85; E. H. Carr denounced biography in What is History?, London 1961, 39, 41–2; Eric Hobsbawm dismissed it as ‘Victorian tomes’, cited by Ben Pimlott ‘Brushstrokes’, ibid., 165–70.

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In the 1970s the Yale English monarchs series promoted a revival of biography in medieval studies.86 In more recent years the French medievalist Jacques Le Goff has similarly rediscovered biography.87 At the same time literary critics have begun to study modern biography as a literary genre in its own right.88 Medievalists who, like Frank Barlow, move beyond investigating medieval biographical writings to creating their own accounts of medieval lives face a challenge of epic proportions, but it is a challenge attempted by a striking number of historians who have made their names publishing work of a very different kind.89 Guenée wrote of the daunting prospects of undertaking biography – ‘it is not too misleading to say that biography, once the victim of undue scorn, is now paralyzed by unwarranted expectations’ – and noted that he was drawn to it despite himself and despite the degree of self-revelation which it entailed.90 If medieval biographers worked within received forms, for modern historians writing biography quite the opposite obtains. In writing biography medieval historians in particular are freed from the normal literary and disciplinary constraints within which they work, allowing experimentation with form,91 an investigation of the unsaid and interior,92 but sometimes, too, an encounter with the limits of possibility. Lewis Warren was very clear about what he considered were and what were not appropriate biographical questions.93 Jacques Le Goff’s recent Saint Louis has generated a degree of introspection which suggests that the subject of biography remains sensitive in the French academy, in particular at the interface between narrative and analysis which he and others have worried about.94 Biography is, as we have seen, not only an important but a constant genre of historical writing, from antiquity to modern academic history, which each generation chooses to reinterpret in its own ways. Frank Barlow dedicated his own collected essays to his ‘three main teachers’: A. L. Poole, V. H. Galbraith, and

86 87 88

89

90 91 92 93 94

For reflections on writing medieval biography, J. A. Green’s account of W. L. Warren’s views in the foreword to the new edition of his Henry II, New Haven 2000, esp. pp. xv–xvi. Le Goff, Saint Louis; Saint Francis of Assisi, Paris 1999. See also Pauline Stafford’s account of her own move to individual biography in chapter 6. The Seductions of Biography, ed. M. Rhiel and D. Suchoff, New York and London 1996; R. Holmes, ‘The Proper Study?’, Mapping Lives, ed. France and St Clair, 189–18. Lives for Sale: Biographers’ Tales, ed. Bostridge. For examples, see R. W. Southern, St Anselm and his Biographer: A Study of Monastic Life and Thought, 1059–c.1130, Oxford 1963; Brown, Augustine; B. Guenée, Entre l’église et l’état: quatres vies de prelats français à la fin du moyen âge (xiiie–xve siècle), Paris 1987, trans. as Guenée, Between Church and State; Nelson, Charles the Bald; Le Goff, Saint Louis; M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life, Oxford 1997; P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England, Oxford 1997; J. A. Green, Henry I: King of England and Duke of Normandy, Cambridge 2006. Guenée, Between Church and State, 9. Stafford, Queen Emma; Stock, Augustine. J. L. Nelson, ‘Writing Early Medieval Biography’, History Workshop Journal 50, 2000, 129–36; Stock, Augustine. See also Momigliano, The Development, 4–5. Warren, ‘Biography’, 9. Tim Reuter insisted that the conference out of which this volume grew should be entitled ‘The Limits of Medieval Biography’. Le Goff, ‘The Whys and Ways of Writing a Biography’, 207–25. G. Levi, ‘Les usages de la biographie’, 1317–23.

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F. M. Powicke.95 He thus possesses a distinguished academic genealogy leading back through Powicke and Galbraith to Tout and Stubbs – all historians who were, as we have seen, in their different ways interested in biography. The authors of the essays in this volume signal the many different contributions which Frank Barlow has made to the problems of writing medieval biography, as well as linking these with current developments in the field.

95

Frank Barlow, The Norman Conquest and Beyond, London 1983, p. ix.

1 Did Charlemagne have a Private Life? JANET L. NELSON

T

HERE ARE several reasons why historians might bridle at this question. The word ‘private’ was not in common use in the eighth and ninth centuries. It has been doubted often enough if there was anything approximating to a concept of the private in the earlier Middle Ages.1 Even if there was, could the life of the aula have offered a king any privacy?2 Could he ever have been alone in a palace from which the throng and press of noisy petitioners could hardly be excluded – when even if the royal bedchamber was a separate room, the count of the palace could let in litigants while the king was putting on his shoes and clothes?3 If the topos of the unsleeping ruler had roots in the reality of lives in which only the night hours offered any possibility of getting paperwork done, how could that have affected the life of an illiterate?4 More pertinently still, how could we possibly have any real evidence for the personality of a Dark Age king, for his psychology, for his self? Several recent books on Charlemagne have abjured biography in favour of a political narrative or a set of linked thematic studies of the reign, precisely because their authors are convinced that all we can know is what this man did, and that his self remains hidden from us.5 In particular, we 1 2 3

4

5

J. L. Nelson, ‘The Problematic in the Private’, Social History 15, 1990, 355–65; M. Innes, State and Society in the Early Middle Ages, Cambridge 2000, 142, 254–9. The royal cubiculum (bed-chamber) was not a solitary place: Einhard, Translatio SS Marcellini et Petri IV, c. 13, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 15, 1 Hanover 1999, 261. Noisy throngs: MGH Capitularia regum Francorum, 2 vols., ed. A. Boretius and V. Krause, Hanover 1883–97, i, no. 64, 153; litigants allowed in so that Charlemagne could give judgement while he was dressing: Einhard, Vita Karoli, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH Scriptores rerum merovingicarum, Hanover 1911 (hereafter VK), c. 24, 29. For ‘the watchful ruler, guarding the sleep of everyone’, Seneca, Ad Polybium de consolatione 7, 2, and for this and other instances, especially the unsleeping Justinian and Charlemagne ‘vigilant at night’, see P. E. Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming in the Carolingian Empire, Lincoln NE 1993, 5–15. Illiteracy is what has often been taken to be implied in Charlemagne’s case by Einhard, VK, c. 25, p. 30, describing Charlemagne’s writing-tablets in his bed under the pillows, for use ‘when there was some spare time’. See below, p. 18. R. Collins, Charlemagne, London 1998, p. viii: ‘it is not really possible to write a biography of Charlemagne . . . ’; M. Becher, Karl der Grosse, Munich 1999, English trans., New Haven and London 2003; J. Favier, Charlemagne, Paris 1999; D. Hägermann, Karl der Grosse. Herrscher des Abendlandes. Biographie, Berlin 2000, where the subtitle ‘Biography’, needs to be read in conjunction with the brief, thoughtful, remarks at pp. 633–9, on the difficulties of establishing Charlemagne’s ‘Persönlichkeit’; A. Barbero, Carlo Magno. Un padre dell’Europa, Rome 2000 (English trans., Charlemagne: Father of a Continent, Los Angeles 2004), 129–55, ‘L’uomo e la sua famiglia’.

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have virtually nothing from his hand.6 It is hard enough, in all conscience, to write biography even of an Alcuin or a Hincmar.7 Yet each of those two left hundreds of letters and a substantial oeuvre in which, every so often, the historian might fancy s/he hears a personal note, and the sort of ‘irregularities and nuances’ that Frank Barlow listened out for in Becket’s story.8 Charlemagne’s private life has to remain a closed book then? No! I take lifewriting to involve trying as hard as possible, even if that means sailing close to the imaginative wind and certainly into the eye of the speculative storm, to make the acquaintance of my subject as a person, to guess plausibly, if no more, at what made him tick – as Frank Barlow did with Becket and also with Edward.9 Perhaps I should reformulate my question: Is it possible to know Charlemagne the man? In one or two papers, I have dared to attempt this, preferring presumption to monstrous condescension.10 I have tentatively reconstructed Charlemagne’s family life and his sex-life, through successive and distinctive phases (he died at 65, so you would expect some changes); his setting of a new agenda, public and private, in what I call the Aachen years – from c. 789 and especially after 800; the importance of his childhood training and education; its inclusion of knowledge acquired from tales as well as from books, of a history of the Franks in which his own ancestors were deeply implicated; the importance, too, of contacts with the papacy, both through letters (personal correspondence but, unlike our letters, at the same time public) and in the flesh of individual popes and the rituals they performed on and for him and his family. Charlemagne surely retained memories of those contacts, especially of 753–4 when he was five and rode out, without his parents or brother, to meet the pope, then, with his parents 6

7

8 9 10

Though for a few possible and partial exceptions, see J. L. Nelson, ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages. Studies presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. R. Gameson and H. Leyser, Oxford 2001, 77. Alcuin: D. Bullough, Alcuin. Achievement and Reputation, Leiden 2003, is replete with biographical insights but is no biography; Hincmar: R. Schieffer, ‘Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der biographischen Darstellungen frühmittelalterlichen Persönlichkeiten. Zu dem neuen Hinkmar-Buch von J. Devisse’, Historische Zeitschrift 229, 1979, 85–95, reviewing J. Devisse, Hincmar archevêque de Reims, 845–882, 3 vols., Geneva 1975–6, which reaches Hincmar ‘l’homme’ and ‘l’homme socialisé’ at pp. 1097–1119. For lucid further reflections, see S. Hamilton, ‘Early Medieval Rulers and their Modern Biographers’, EME 9, 2000, 247–60 (reviewing R. Abels, Alfred the Great, London 1998, G. Althoff, Otto III, Darmstadt 1997, and Collins, Charlemagne). F. Barlow, Thomas Becket, London 1986, p. xi. Barlow, Thomas Becket, and Edward the Confessor, 3rd edn, London and New Haven 1997. See the following papers: ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’, in Medieval Queenship, ed. J. C. Parsons, New York and London 1993, 43–61, reprinted in J. L. Nelson, The Frankish World, London 1996, 223–42; and also ‘La famille de Charlemagne’, Byzantion 61, 1991, 194–212; ‘The Siting of the Council at Frankfort. Reflections on Family and Politics’, in Das Konzil von Frankfurt, ed. R. Berndt, 2 vols., Mainz 1997, i, 149–66, and ‘La cour impériale de Charlemagne’, in La royauté et les élites dans l’Europe carolingienne, ed. R. Le Jan, Lille 1998, 177–91, reprinted in Nelson, Rulers and Ruling Families in Early Medieval Europe, Aldershot 1999, chapters XII, XIII and XIV; ‘Making a Difference in Eighth-Century Politics: the daughters of Desiderius’, in After Rome’s Fall. Narrators and Sources of Early Medieval History. Essays presented to Walter Goffart, ed. A. Murray, Toronto 1998, 171–90; ‘Writing Early Medieval Biography’, History Workshop Journal 50, 2000, 129–37; ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’, in Belief and Culture, ed. Gameson and Leyser, 76–88; ‘Charlemagne – pater optimus?’, in Am Vorabend der Kaiserkrönung, ed. P. Godman, J. Jarnut and P. Johanek, Berlin 2002, 269–82; ‘Was Charlemagne’s Court a Courtly Society?’, in Court Culture in the Early Middle Ages, ed. C. Cubitt, Turnhout 2003, 39–58, and ‘Charlemagne the Man’, in Charlemagne. Empire and Society, ed. J. Story, Manchester 2005, 22–37.

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and brother, received from the pope a royal consecration, and of 774, when he was 26 precisely – for it was on his own birthday, 2 April, Holy Saturday that he met Pope Hadrian for the first time – and ‘at the top of the steps leading to the doors of St Peter’s, the two men embraced, and Charles held the pope’s right hand and in this way they entered the hall of St Peter’.11 Is it possible to make a whole out of these parts? Virginia Woolf called biography ‘a bastard, an impure art’, and observed that the biographer was driven to attempt ‘two incompatible things. He is providing us with sterile and fertile. Things that have no bearing upon the life. But he has to provide them. He does not know what is relevant. Nobody has decided.’ Virginia Woolf’s recent biographer, quoting this, commented: ‘she was appalled at the gap between the necessary facts of a life-story, and its hidden truth’.12 Necessary facts and hidden truth turn out in Charlemagne’s case to be both divided by an appalling gap and inextricably mixed up. But biography, whether of a medieval or modern subject, cannot be written without resolute disentangling of some hidden truth, as I think Frank Barlow did with Edward the Confessor or Becket, and other contributors to this volume have done in life-writings of other medieval personages. If we don’t agonise too long over the anachronism of ‘private’, we can look for a private life even in public acts, and in records, however refracted or refractory, of infancy and childhood and of relations with parents and siblings; of dreams and memories; of jokes; of displays of emotion; of sexual conduct: all constitute and reflect the subject. But it’s our job – our craft – to insist that all these necessary facts are timebound. They need to be historicised. Patrick Wormald remarked that ‘to early medieval rulers, property law was at least as interesting as sex – one of the objectives of which was, after all, the spawning of heirs to whom property might be passed’.13 Or not passed, we would have to add, in Charlemagne’s case, for if some of his wakeful nights were spent agonising over which of his estates would pass to whom, that was because he had also in mind unmarried daughters, who were also unmarried mothers, and little bastard children and grandchildren. This royal paterfamilias decided that church property would have to provide for most of his offspring, in the end. At the same time, concerns about royal property in the early Middle Ages cannot readily be categorised as private, or public, thus confirming the point that the way we make that distinction is itself time-determined. I will return to the little bastards presently. Asked in 1983 if, after he had finished Le souci de soi, there would be ‘more on the christians’, Michel Foucault replied: ‘Well, I am going to take care of myself!’14 Sadly, the Christians were never to get the Foucault treatment. He died in 1984. All that’s left are a few insights: ‘there was a kind of internal juridification

11

12 13 14

Life of Stephen II c. 25, ed. L. Duchesne, Le Liber Pontificalis, rev. edn, C. Vogel, 3 vols., Paris 1955–7, SW4 70:1.a.85.6, trans. R. Davis, The Lives of the Eighth-Century Popes (Liber Pontificalis), Liverpool 1992, 63; Life of Hadrian cc. 37–8, ed. Duchesne, I, 497, trans. Davis, Lives, 139. H. Lee, Virginia Woolf, London 1997, 10, after quoting Woolf’s Notebooks, October 1934. P. Wormald, ‘On d–a Wæpnedhealfe. Kingship and Royal Property from Æthelwulf to Edward the Elder’, in Edward the Elder, ed. N. J. Higham and D. H. Hill, Manchester 2001, 264. M. Foucault, in P. Rabinowicz, The Foucault Reader, London 1991, 342.

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of religious law inside christianity’; ‘[in Christian asceticism as distinct from its antique predecessor] self-examination takes the form of self-deciphering’; for the classical idea of a self created as a work of art, ‘Christianity substituted the idea of a self which one had to renounce.’15 But I am struck by the way that Foucault, after each of these remarks, leapt from antiquity to the sixteenth century. Though Charlemagne and his elite contemporaries were as fascinated as Foucault was by Late Antiquity, frankly I am not sure that they would ever have been Foucault’s quarry; for he saw the medieval Church as wielding a pastoral power which took over the care of souls and so left minimal space for the souci de soi, and for the laity only self-renunciation. Now, there’s an appalling gap! – but is it true, in the sense of historically evidenced? I will come back to that as well. Meanwhile there’s clearly more to be said about Charlemagne’s nights. We do have more than indirect evidence that what would otherwise have been moments of ‘spare time’ were busy times for Charlemagne. Einhard’s biography of Charlemagne – and it was thence that I took the vignette of the king putting on his shoes and clothes while hearing disputes – is a gift to a modern biographer that comes with health warnings. But, like Alice, I can’t resist when the label says: ‘Drink me!’ It is Einhard, and Einhard alone, who reveals what was under Charlemagne’s pillow: ‘tabulae codicellique – ut, cum vacuum tempus esset, manum litteris effigiendis adsuesceret’.16 Gallons of ink have been spilled on the meaning of this last phrase, but Lewis Thorpe’s ‘so that he could try his hand at forming letters’ has inevitably embedded the image of the illiterate, even child-like, Charlemagne in the minds of anglophones.17 But what about vacuum tempus? In the present context, ‘leisure time’, as Thorpe translates it, might look promisingly indicative of private life. But vacuus simply means ‘vacant’, ‘empty’. Introducing what is in effect part II of his work, Einhard says he will ‘tell of Charlemagne’s interior atque domestica vita’.18 That sounds like private life – except that Einhard was borrowing from Suetonius who, after describing Augustus’s public acts, said he would move on to his interior et familiaris vita.19 But where Suetonius glossed Augustus’s ‘interior life’ as ‘quibus moribus atque fortuna domi et inter suos egerit’ (‘in what ways and with what outcomes he behaved in his own household and amongst his own family’), Einhard glossed Charlemagne’s ‘interior life’ as ‘animi dotes et summa . . . constantia’ (‘his intellectual qualities, his extraordinary strength of character’). Animi dotes and constantia import strong moral connotations here. Einhard clearly imitated and adapted Suetonius in ways that require deciphering before we can exploit. He

15 16 17

18 19

Foucault, The Foucault Reader, 356, 358, 362. VK, c. 25, 30. L. Thorpe, Einhard and Notker the Stammerer. Two Lives of Charlemagne, Harmondsworth 1969, 79. My late colleague Julian Brown, who knew more than most about early medieval palaeography, would wonder aloud if the writing Charlemagne practised was Caroline minuscule. VK, c. 18, 21. Suetonius, Divus Augustus, c. 61, in De vita Caesarum, ed. and trans. J. C. Rolfe, Cambridge MA 1998, 240–1.

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highlighted Charlemagne’s mind and character by setting them off against what Suetonius described here neutrally as conduct and outcomes. Suetonius of course presented ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emperors. Thus, Einhard implicitly likened this habit or that skill of Charlemagne to one of Suetonius’s positive models, and anyone who knew their Suetonius would be able to hear the resonance. But then Einhard, for his Frankish audience, added information to evoke a positive response even in someone unfamiliar with Suetonius. Augustus wore linen underpants, Charlemagne wore linen underpants which were part of the Frankish style of dress: vestitus patrius, id est Francicus; Titus was very good at riding, Charlemagne applied himself assiduously to riding and hunting ‘which came naturally to him’ (quod illi gentilicium erat, that is, resulted from his socialisation in his gens, as a Frank), ‘because scarcely any other nation can be found on earth to equal the Franks in this skill’ (‘quia vix ulla in terris natio invenitur quae in hac arte Francis possit aequari’).20 Or Einhard subtly compared: Titus when he bathed sometimes admitted the plebs to his baths (thermae); Charlemagne bathed in the natural springs at Aachen ‘and would invite not only his sons to bathe with him (ad balneum) not only his sons but his nobles and friends as well, and sometimes a crowd of his followers and bodyguards, so that a hundred men or more would be bathing together’.21 Elsewhere, Einhard implicitly contrasted Charlemagne with one of Suetonius’s negative models: Caligula [at times] wore neither the traditional dress of his forefathers nor the clothing of a [Roman] citizen, but liked to dress up as a woman; Charlemagne would wear the dress of his forefathers, ‘that is, Frankish dress’.22 Einhard devoted two chapters to Charlemagne’s practice, summa pietate, of the Christian religion. Though pietas and religio are classical terms, and there is one faint echo of Suetonius, the rest is new.23 First, Charlemagne’s religio was something with which he had been ‘ab infantia inbutus’. Second, it was manifested especially in the building and adornment of the church at Aachen which Charlemagne frequented ‘morning and evening, for the night hours and for mass, as long as his health allowed’, and for the honestas of which he cared so deeply that not even the door-keepers, ‘qui ultimi ecclesiastici ordinis sunt’, had to perform their jobs privato habitu (wearing their own everyday clothes – the only appearance of the adjective ‘private’ in the Vita Karoli), but, by implication, they wore special dress, which might have the further implication that everyone at court wore some kind of uniform.24 And three lines on is the one appearance in 20

21

22 23 24

Underpants: VK, c. 23, 27 (Thorpe, 77, translates ‘drawers’), echoes Suetonius, Augustus c. 82, 270–1. Feminalia is classical, from femor, ‘thigh’; Carolingian writers prefer femoralia, in monastic and secular contexts (see J. F. Niermeyer, Mediae Latinitatis Lexicon Minus, Leiden 1997), perhaps because of unease with what sounded like woman-ish associations in a sensitive place. Riding: VK, c. 22, 27 (Thorpe, 77), echoes Suetonius, Titus, c. 304–5. VK, c. 22, 27 (trans. Thorpe, 77), echoes Suetonius, Titus, c. 8, 314–15. See J. L. Nelson, ‘The Lord’s Anointed and the People’s Choice: Carolingian Royal Ritual’, in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, ed. D. Cannadine and S. Price, Cambridge 1987, 137–80, repr. Nelson, The Frankish World, 99–132, at 112–13. VK, c. 23, 27 (Thorpe, 77), counter-echoes Caligula c. 52, 418–19. VK, c. 26, 30: the words ‘religionem . . . coluit’ echo Augustus cc. 90 (‘religiones’) and 93 (‘caerimoniarum . . . veteres . . . praeceptas reverentissime coluit’), 282–3, 284–5. A suggestion I ventured in ‘Was Charlemagne’s Court a Courtly Society?’, 47.

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the Vita Karoli of the word ‘public’: ‘Charlemagne was learned (eruditus) in both reading out the scriptures and in chanting, yet he would never do readings publice and would only chant in a low voice and along with the other worshipers (submissim et in commune).’25 Thirdly, Charlemagne’s almsgiving (gratuita liberalitas quam Graeci eleimosinam vocant) was ‘most zealously practised not only in his own fatherland but overseas (trans maria) in Syria, Egypt and Africa, wherever he knew of Christians living in poverty’.26 The chief reason he sought friendships (amicitiae) with kings across the sea was to have some refreshment and relief brought to Christians living under their dominatus.27 Eleimosinae are the main theme of Charlemagne’s will drawn up in 811, for which, again, Einhard is the only source.28 Fourth, above all other holy places, he venerated the church of St Peter at Rome, and throughout his whole reign rated nothing of greater importance than ensuring that it flourished in its ancient authority, not only protected and defended by him, but adorned and endowed by him above all other churches.29 However entangled the intensely personal and insistently social in Charlemagne’s agenda, we can disentangle some traits of a private life. Consider Charlemagne’s sense of humour. Was it, as Alessandro Barbero recently claimed, ‘coarse and vulgar’?30 The evidence is in the Appendix (A and B), and I make no apology for it. These two passages from Notker’s Gesta Karoli tie in with other documentation, not just Einhard’s but also Charlemagne’s famous letter to Offa with the complaint about short cloaks.31 They are body-centred, hence revealing of, and addressing, concerns that are private as well as public. Frankish traditional male dress is a key idea in both jokes. Dress takes us to how the self is gendered and privately constructed, and how it is publicly displayed. These are jokes that presented what purport to be stories of private experiences to a public of courtiers. Charlemagne is said to have laughed as he made his own joke contrasting the requirements of hard-riding Franks with the Greeks’ inability to provide underpants. You can imagine men laughing. And why not women too? So much for the ‘cor blimey’. Now for the sublime. Charlemagne cried, Einhard says – presumably that means, cried in public as well as private – when he

25 26 27 28 29 30

31

VK, c. 26, 31 (Thorpe, 80). VK, c. 27, 31. This mention of amicitiae in VK, c. 27, 32, refers back to c. 16, 19. See the illuminating discussion in M. Innes, ‘Charlemagne’s Will: Politics, Inheritance and Ideology in the Early Ninth Century’, EHR 112, 1997, 833–55. VK, c. 33, 38, 39, 40. Barbero, Carlo Magno, 142, finds ‘coarseness and vulgarity’ (‘la grossolanità e diciamo pure la volgarità’) in Charlemagne’s humour. Hitherto it must be said that students seem to have paid more attention than scholars to this subject. See J. L. Nelson, ‘Carolingian Contacts’, in Mercia. An Anglo-Saxon Kingdom in Europe, ed. M. Brown and C. Farr, London 2001, 142. Another story about Franks in pants is told by Notker at II, 8, 60, where the word is hossae, which as the editor points out is cognate with German ‘Hosen’ (and also English ‘hose’). Thorpe, 145 translates ‘riding-boots’, which cannot be right. Again the story is clearly meant to be funny, and Charlemagne has the last laugh. For the sources of Notker’s stories, and a good case for taking at least some of them seriously, see M. Innes, ‘Memory, Orality and Literacy in an Early Medieval Society’, Past and Present 158, 1998, 3–36. On reading Notker, see D. Ganz, ‘Humour as History in Notker’s Gesta Karoli’, in Monks, Nuns and Friars in Mediaeval Society, ed. E. King et al., Sewanee Mediaeval Studies, Number Four, Sewanee TE 1989, 171–83.

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learned of the death of Pope Hadrian, ‘foremost among his friends’. He wept ‘as if he had lost a brother or dearest son’. He wept too for the deaths of his actual sons, two of whom predeceased him, and for his eldest daughter Rotrude. This was a sign of magnanimitas rather than of the patientia that pietas would have prescribed. Einhard notes what might have been construed as a lapse precisely in order to claim as virtues these demonstrations of feeling: not weakness, Einhard protests, but Charlemagne’s double gift for fatherhood and friendship. ‘He kept his friends most constantly’ – there Einhard echoes Suetonius on Augustus – but at the same time, and this is not in Suetonius, ‘colebat sanctissime quoscumque hac adfinitate [amicitiae] sibi coniunxerat’.32 Strong words! Stronger still are the terms in which in this same chapter Einhard praises Charlemagne for having his grand-daughters brought to his court after their father’s death so that they could be brought up along with his own daughters: this was the ‘foremost proof’ (praecipuum documentum) of Charlemagne’s pietas. Yet girls were Charlemagne’s weak point. An acrostic poem composed at Reichenau in 824, and purportedly describing the next-worldly vision of Wetti, a Reichenau monk, publicised an aspect of Charlemagne’s life which might be called private but certainly was not secret.33 Einhard, whose reasons for writing the Life of Charlemagne probably included the rebuttal of these charges, could not avoid dangerous territory, though this made disingenuousness unavoidable. He implies without actually saying so that Charlemagne had one mistress during the period of his life when he was a married man, that is, before 800, when the last of his successive wives died. He lists three mistresses during the years after 800; and he gives their names and the names of their children. But he postpones mention of Charlemagne’s first wife, Himiltrude, and calls her a concubine – a label belied by the strictly contemporary evidence of a papal letter written in 770.34 Further, Einhard is coy on the surprising fact that Charlemagne never let his daughters marry, keeping them in the household as long as he lived, saying that he could not do without their contubernium – sharing his accommodation.35 A careful reading of what I have written on this subject will show, I hope, that though I have said this might amount to an accusation of incest, I never said it did. But I do think the doubleentendre was deliberate.36 An important point is that Einhard fails to mention the bastard sons of Charlemagne’s daughters Bertha (Nithard and Hartnid) and Rotrude (Louis), though all three were presumably around the court and well-known to Einhard’s target-audience at court and in country monasteries.37 Why this silence? Because, I suspect, these boys, bastards but the sons of highborn fathers and royal mothers, presented more serious political claims, that is, claims to property and power, hence greater political threats, than the offspring of Charlemagne himself 32 33

34 35 36 37

VK, c. 19, 24. Appendix C. On the significance of this vision, the wisest words I have read in recent years are those of Paul Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming, 60, 55–7, and David Ganz, ‘Charlemagne in Hell’, Florilegium 17, 2000, 175–94. VK, c. 20, 25, for Himiltrude, and c. 19, 22–3, for the other concubines. Stephen III, in Codex Carolinus 45, ed. W. Gundlach, MGH Epistolae III, Berlin 1892, 561. VK, c. 19, p. 25. Cf. Nelson, ‘Women at the Court of Charlemagne’, 240; ‘La cour impériale’, 191. Nelson, ‘La cour impériale’, 185–91.

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by low-born women. There was much in a name. Drogo, Hugh, and Theoderic did not smack of king-worthiness: Louis did. But names were only part of the story. Wala wasn’t a kingly name either, yet Wala, Charlemagne’s cousin, was also his right-hand man especially during the years after 800; and Wala was the man whom in 814 Louis the Pious feared most – as a rival for the succession.38 It was in these circumstances of ambiguous signs and contested claims that the women at court (Louis’ biographer, the Astronomer, called it ‘coetus qui permaximus erat femineus’)39 could exert even more leverage than they had while Alcuin still lived, and he had already seen fit to warn a young man: ‘non veniant coronatae columbae ad fenestras tuas quae volant per cameras palatii’ (‘don’t let the crowned doves who fly about through the inner rooms of the palace come in at your windows’).40 That was where Charlemagne’s private life spelled moral as well as political danger. Einhard couldn’t avoid mentioning ‘suspicion aroused and rumour widespread’, but could not afford to be frank. What he said of Charlemagne in this context, he could equally have said of himself: ita dissimulavit.41 If Einhard’s squeamishness has been shared by historians from medieval to modern times, there is a very good reason. It is that Charlemagne presented himself as iustitiae nutritor himself and his regime as profoundly committed to Christian morality saecloque moderno.42 His public face was that of a ruler determined to eliminate sin from homes and monasteries throughout the land, a rector engaged in pastoral care, happy to recommend his own officials, the missi, to sermonise about the moral duties of every paterfamilias: ‘humanum est peccare, angelicum est emendare’.43 Indeed! But coming from this man, does that not smack of (I choose a moderate word) humbuggery? I am not throwing the first stone – and I refer you to Henry Mayr-Harting’s wonderfully wise and charitable paper on Charlemagne’s religion, which ends with two cross-references.44 The first is to John Henry Newman: ‘It is no proof that a man is not in a state of grace that he continually sins, provided such sins do not remain on him as what I may call ultimate results, but are ever passing on into something beyond and unlike themselves, into truth and righteousness.’ The second cross-reference is to Augustine, who said something very similar about David and Bathsheba in his Commentary on Ps 50.45 The Reichenau monks might have added, slightly less charitably, that Charlemagne saved the passing-on into truth for the next life – which may indeed be called ‘ultimate results’. In the last part of this paper, I want to pick up Henry Mayr-Harting’s emphasis on Charlemagne’s ethical religion and its place in his interior life. The model

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

Astronomer, Vita Hludovici, c. 21, ed. E. Tremp, MGH Scriptores rerum germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, 64, Hanover 1995, 346–7. Astromer c. 23, 350–1. Alcuin, Carmen XII, line 6, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Poetae latini aevi carolini, I, Berlin 1881, 237. VK, c. 19, 25. See Appendix, Text C, for a retrospective recognition of this. ‘It is human to sin, it is angelic to make good’: MGH Capitularia regum Francorum, I, no. 121, 238–40. H. Mayr-Harting, ‘Charlemagne’s Religion’, in Am Vorabend der Kaiserkrönung, ed. Godman et al., 124. Enarrationes in Psalmos, In Psalmum 50, 2–3, ed. E. Dekkers and J. Fraipont, CCSL 38, Turnhout 1956, 601–2.

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teaching of a royal official I quoted just now is notably gender-split: women are told to obey their husbands, to live in omni pudicitia, to avoid fornication, and to nurture their children in the fear of the Lord; husbands are told to love their wives, not to speak inhonesta verba to them, to govern their households in bonitate, to come to church more often. Note that men are not told to live chastely or avoid fornication. Masculine morality seems softer on some kinds of continual sinning. The phrase about coming to church reminds me of Einhard’s account of Charlemagne’s observance of Christian religio: his frequenting of the Aachen church ‘et mane et vespere, item nocturnis horis et sacrificii tempore’.46 This is already more than a conventional depiction of a pious male church-goer. And there is other evidence that Charlemagne’s devotions extended far beyond frequent church attendance. To see where those devotions come from, go to the liturgical work of Alcuin.47 He wrote a collection of private prayers for lay use.48 He wrote two letters to Charlemagne apparently sometime between 796 and 804. The king had asked for advice and instruction about daily prayer. Alcuin’s response was to recommend something like a monastic schedule.49 How realistic was this? The Frankish noblewoman Dhuoda, who may have known Charlemagne’s court as a child and certainly knew Louis the Pious’s as a young bride, recommended her son William (nurturing him in the fear of the Lord) to ‘keep the canonical hours’ on just the same lines that Alcuin indicated for Charlemagne. She ended her instructions, which also included two short morning prayers invoking the Cross, with the words: ‘Say the verses you know best, or as they occur to you. Then go out in the name of the Highest God to perform the earthly service that awaits you, whatever your lord and father Bernard orders you to do, or whatever your lord Charles orders you to do.’50 That was written in 841. In the next generation, the only lay aristocrats to have left wills, the couple Eberhard and Gisla, and Eccard, bequeathed psalters and books of private prayers to their offspring or in Eccard’s case kin. Eberhard and Gisla left psalters to the boys and books of prayers to the girls – future nurturers of bodies and souls.51 Perhaps we need to adjust our monstrously condescending expectations

46 47

48 49 50 51

VK, c. 26, 31. See D. Bullough, ‘Alcuin and the Kingdom of Heaven’, in his collected papers, Carolingian Renewal. Sources and Heritage, Manchester 1991, 161–240, and, ‘Alcuin’s Cultural Influence’, in Alcuin of York. Scholar at the Carolingian Court, ed. L. A. J. R. Houwen and A. A. MacDonald, Medievalia Groningana 22, Germania Latina 3, Groningen 1998, 1–26; also S. Waldhoff, Alcuins Gebetbuch für Karl den Großen. Seine Rekonstruktion und seine Stellung in der frühmittelalterlichen Geschichte der libelli precum, Münster 2003. Waldhoff, Alcuins Gebetbuch, 137–251, esp. 161–202, for the crucial importance of private prayers of penitential confession, and 256–67, for how the prayer-book was used. Appendix, D and E. Dhuoda, Liber Manualis, II, 3–4, ed. and trans. M. Thiébaux, Dhuoda, Handbook for her Warrior Son, Cambridge 1998, 76–83. P. Riché, ‘Les bibliothèques de trois aristocrats laïcs carolingiens’, Le Moyen Age 69, 1963, 87–104, repr. in Riché’s collected papers, Instruction et vie religieuse dans le haut moyen âge, London 1981, chapter VIII; R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the Written Word, Cambridge 1989, 211–70, esp. 245–50; C. La Rocca and L. Provero, ‘The Dead and their Gifts. The Will of Eberhard, Count of Friuli, and his Wife Gisela, Daughter of Louis the Pious (863–864)’, in Rituals of Power from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, ed. F. Theuws and J. L. Nelson, Leiden 2000, 225–80, esp. 249–59.

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of what could realistically be expected in the way of daily prayer by someone serving, or commanding, at court. That has implications, I think, for the possibility of private space and private time even in very public lives. A variety of evidence points to the Aachen years as a time when the Frankish elite remodelled themselves as agents of a self-consciously Christian regime. The enterprise was a collective one, but it involved steadfast effort on the part of individuals to meet new requirements of conduct and performance. It involved a remodelling of their selves. Magnates sought personal moral advice from Alcuin and other leading churchmen. At Aachen, they debated and pondered theological points – about baptism, about being, about scriptural meanings. They participated, not just en masse but as individuals, in rites in the church Charlemagne had built.52 They founded or patronised monasteries on a significant scale. In 797, Count Theodold of (probably) Beauvais, one of the rebels of 792, punished by confiscation of his lands, made his peace with Charlemagne, had his property restored, and endowed Saint-Denis with part of it.53 In 804, Charlemagne’s kinsman and palatinus Count William of Toulouse retired from a life of service at court and on the frontier to become a monk, perhaps at his own monastic foundation of Gellone.54 Another of Charlemagne’s kinsmen, Adalard, a professed monk since the early 770s, served at court during the Aachen years.55 Angilbert, abbot of Saint-Riquier, Bertha’s lover at court, contrived to straddle what we wrongly tend to see as two separate spheres – no doubt with happy ultimate results.56 Monastery and court were not remote from one another, then.57 Prayer in bed or on getting up was not just for virtuosi, as Max Weber called monks, but for the ‘homo laicus adhuc in activa vita’.58 Such prayer did not make monks, still less saints, out of these laymen. They remained, no doubt, fairly fundamentally the types required by the public duties of their time and status: tough warriors imbued with ideas and ideals that had much to do with honour and service and with a masculine self-discipline that didn’t always put too much stress on the sexual kind.59

52 53 54

55 56 57 58

59

See Nelson, ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’, and ‘Was Charlemagne’s Court a Courtly Society?’ Diplomata Karoli, no. 181, in MGH Diplomata Karolinorum, ed. E. Mühlbacher, I, Hanover 1906, 244–5; L.-J. Tardif, Monuments historiques, Paris 1866, 72, no. 97. See P. Depreux, Prosopographie de l’entourage de Louis le Pieux, Sigmaringen 1997, no. 128, 224–5. Retirement to monastic (or quasi-monastic) life seems to have been common for propertied persons of more advanced years in the ninth century. Some of his service was done at the palace of Pippin of Italy: see Depreux, Prosopographie, no. 8, 76–7. He may have spent increasing amounts of time at Saint-Riquier from c. 800, S. Rabe, Faith, Art and Politics at Saint-Riquier. The Symbolic Vision of Angilbert, Philadelphia 1995, 74–5, 80. Cf. J. L. Nelson, ‘Gendering Courts in the Early Medieval West’, in Gender and the Transformation of the Roman World, ed. J. Smith and L. Brubaker, Cambridge 2004, 185–97. ‘The lay man who remains in the active life’: see Appendix, D and E; and cf. Dhuoda, Liber Manualis, II, 3, 80–1: ‘. . . dic orationes per proprietates orarum, et tunc in nomine Dei summi egredere in servitio tibi adcrescente temporali . . . ’ (‘. . . say the appropriate prayers for each of the hours. And then, . . . go and accomplish the temporal service that awaits you . . . ’); cf. III, 11, 122–5, where Dhuoda recommends confession. Dhuoda certainly prescribes purity for her son before marriage and fidelity within marriage, but does not dwell on these points at any length, and sees no conflict between ‘serving in the marriage-bed’ and ‘keeping a heart pure in Christ’: see Liber Manualis, IV, 6, 144–5 (where the translation ‘soldiered against the world’ is misleading), and cf. III, 3, 90–1, IV, 2, 130–1, IX, 4, 214–15.

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But each was encouraged, even driven, to identify with the regime and conform to its norms and requirements while sharing in its legitimacy. That was the new covenant of the Franks: a new-modelled army. To say that the primum mobile of this enterprise was Charlemagne is not wholly to endorse Foucault’s vision of a disciplining and repressive state – for two reasons: first, that this regime lacked the instruments of social control of either the antique or the modern state; second, and more important, that Charlemagne himself was among the disciplined as well as being the disciplinary authority. He was engaged in his own souci de soi. In 811, the year when he contemplated the possibility of withdrawing from the world to monastic retirement, he issued a capitulary inciting clergy and laity to join in the deepest of self-decipherings, of ‘whether we are truly christian’, and elevating the interior moral values of the New Testament above the exterior ones of the Old.60 Lynn Hunt recently argued that the 1760s were a crucial decade in European history. Drawing on Foucault, but also critiquing him, Hunt pointed out that not all regimes seek to discipline and repress the self, and not all of the time. She suggested we learn to identify moments of genuine openings for self-discovery and selfrealisation: when the state enables rather than represses. Hunt proposed the 1750s as one such moment, characterised by the appearance of a new genre, the novel, and a new public, civil society, and demonstrable in terms of what happened in the decades immediately following. The discovery of the 1760s was encapsulated in a new phrase, that once enunciated was rapidly diffused in private letters and diaries, and all sorts of public texts: the rights of man – an idea that changed the world.61 Was there nearly a millennium earlier another comparable moment in the reign and regime of Charlemagne? The new genre? Private prayer. The instruments? Literacy, a court, a governmental system heaven-bent on reform. The new public? The elite in court and country, encouraged, now, to take responsibility for the moral well-being of the population at large – the Christian people. Charlemagne’s vision of the self was to be shared by the aristocracy in a civilising process that worked its way through the ninth century as the reception of new liturgical forms led and complemented the practice of penance, newly promoted by the regime.62 Yes, Charlemagne had a private life. In a familial and sexual sense, that life was conservative; in the sense of requiring and inspiring an exploration and re-formation of the self by subjects, it was radical. As that private life impacted on and intruded into public life, setting new goals and a new tone, the sum of individual conversationes became a social and cultural transformation that long outlived its impresario. Other private lives were changed.63 Biography can often provide a small entrée into a large history: life – and times. In this case, though the key has been forgotten, the history could hardly be larger. It too changed the world, in ways that are ongoing. 60 61 62 63

Nelson, ‘The Voice of Charlemagne’, 83. Lynn Hunt, ‘Bodies and Selves in the Eighteenth Century’, read at the Anglo-American Conference of Historians at the Institute of Historical Research in London, in July 2003. S. Hamilton, The Practice of Penance, 900–1050, London 2001, 18, notes ‘a curious historiographical hiatus between the Carolingians and the long twelfth century’, and closes it, passim. J. L. Nelson, ‘Monks, Secular Men and Masculinity c. 900’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. Hadley, London 1999, 121–42.

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APPENDIX Texts A and B Two jokes of Charlemagne, as reported by Notker the Stammerer, The Deeds of Charlemagne (Gesta Karoli) I, 34, ed. H. F. Haefele, MGH, Scriptores rerum germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi, new ser. 12, Munich 1980, 47–8, 53 (trans. JLN, adapting and owing much to Thorpe, Two Lives of Charlemagne). I, 34: But, as is the habit of human taste, when the Franks were fighting among the Gauls, they noticed that they were resplendent in their short striped cloaks, and were delighted by this novelty. They abandoned their own ancient custom, and began to imitate them. For a while, the most rigorous emperor did not forbid this, because this style of clothing seemed to him more suitable for waging war. But he realised that the Frisians were abusing this freedom he had permitted them when he caught them selling these little short cloaks for the same price as the large ones. He gave orders that no-one was to buy from them at the customary price any cloaks except the big ones, which were both very broad and very long. He added: ‘What’s the use of those little napkins? When I’m in bed, I can’t cover myself up in them, when I’m out riding I can’t protect myself against wind and rain, and when I have to go off to answer a call of nature, I suffer from freezing-cold legs.’ II, 5: In the midst of such concerns [war and man-management], the greathearted emperor in no way omitted to send envoys bearing letters and gifts to all kinds of kings of very distant places; and from these, in return, were sent the honours of all these provinces. When he sent from the midst of the Saxon war envoys to the king at Constantinople, the king asked [the envoys] whether the kingdom of his son Charles was at peace or was it suffering incursions from neighbouring peoples? The chief envoy replied that all was at peace except that a certain people called the Saxons were disturbing the Franks’ frontiers with very frequent acts of brigandage. ‘Oh dear’, said that man who was sluggish in idleness and was useless for any warlike action, ‘why does my son struggle against enemies who are so few, have no reputation and totally lack manly courage? You can have that people, together with everything that belongs to them!’ When the envoy returned and reported this to the most warlike Charles, he laughed and said: ‘That king would have done you a lot more of a good turn if he’d given you a pair of linen pants for your long journey back!’

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Text C: from the Visio Wettini, ed. P. Godman, Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance, London 1985, 214–15 (trans. JLN, owing much to Godman). Contemplator item quondam lustrata per arva Ausoniae quondam qui regna tenebat et altae Romanae gentis, fixo consistere gressu Oppositumque animal lacerare virilia stantis Laetaque per reliquum corpus lue membra carebant. Viderat haec, magnoque stupens terrore profatur ‘Sortibus hic hominum, dum vitam in corpore gessit, Iustitiae nutritor erat saecloque moderno Maxima pro domino fecit documenta vigere Protexitque pio sacram tutamine plebem. Et velut in mundo sumpsit speciale cacumen, Recta volens dulcique volans per regna favore. Ast hic quam saeva sub conditione tenetur, Tam tristique notam sustentat peste severam. Oro, refer!’ Tum doctor: ‘In his cruciatibus’, inquit, Restat ob hoc, quoniam bona facta libidine turpi Fedavit, ratus inlecebras sub mole bonorum Absumi et vitam voluit finire suetis Sordibus, ipse tamen vitam captabit opimam, Dispositum a domino gaudens invadet honorem.

Considering also a man in the fields they had surveyed Ausonia’s sometime ruler and master of the mighty Roman people, standing rooted to the spot Opposite him was a beast tearing at his genitals. Lucky were the other limbs on his body not covered with gore. Under this impression, staggered and terrified, Wetti cried out ‘Some fate made him of all men, while he was still alive, Instiller of justice, and for the modern age Mightiest proofs he made flourish for the cause of the Lord, Protected with dutiful defence the Lord’s people. Eminence of a special kind he achieved, as it seemed, in this world, Righteous things he desired, flying with sweet favour through his realms. Awful are the conditions, though, in which he is held here! Terrible too are the heavy punishment and grim affliction he endures! O, I beg you, explain!’ His guide replied: ‘In these torments he Remains, because he defiled his good deeds with filthy lust, Thinking his lewd conduct would be effaced by the mass Of his good actions, and wanting to end his life in his accustomed Filth. Nevertheless, the life he will attain will be the best And he will enter, rejoicing, the honour laid up for him by the Lord.

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Texts D and E, Alcuin, Epp. 304, 304A, ed. E. Dümmler, MGH Epistulae IV, Berlin 1885, 462–4 (trans. JLN). Text D You asked me for a brief work with a word of commentary about how a layman who remains in the active life can pray to God at the [canonical] hours . . . As you lie on your bed, say first: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, in your name I raise my hands, “O God, come to my aid” ’ [Ps 69, 2], three times, with the psalm, ‘Hear with your ears my words, Lord’, down to ‘In the morning I shall stand close to you’ [Ps 5, 2–5]. Then, ‘Our Father’, and these prayers: ‘Deign, O Lord, this day’; ‘Perfect my steps’ [Ps 16, 5]; ‘Blessed be the Lord every day’; ‘Deign to direct and sanctify’; ‘May thy mercy, Lord, be upon us’. Getting up, begin this verse: ‘O Lord open thou my lips.’ When that is finished with the Gloria, begin the psalm, ‘Lord, why are they that trouble me multiplied?’ [Ps 3, 2]. Then there should follow: ‘Have mercy upon me O God’, and then ‘come let us rejoice in the Lord’. And then as many psalms as you want. Text E We celebrate Nocturns [night prayers] because it is believed that it is in the middle of the night that the Lord will come to Judgement . . . We say Matins [morning prayers] because the Psalmist said, ‘In the morning I will meditate upon thee’, and in the morning the Lord is believed to have risen from the dead. Prime is so called because it is at the beginning of the day and because it was at the first hour that the Lord was judged by priests as a prisoner for our sake. Terce: because that was when the Jews cried out, ‘Crucify, crucify’; and also it was at the third hour that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles. Sext: because that was when Christ was hung on the cross, and darkness fell; also because that was the hour at which he ascended into heaven as the apostles watched, and a vessel from heaven was shown to Peter at that hour. Nones: because at that hour the Son of God bowed his head and yielded up his spirit and because that was the hour at which Peter and John healed the lame man in the Temple. Vespers: because of God’s departure and because the Saviour was buried at that hour; also because that was the hour at which the lord was recognised in the breaking of bread. Compline: because that was when the doors were shut, and Jesus stood in the midst of his disciples.

2 Bones for Historians: Putting the Body back into Biography ROBIN FLEMING

F

OR MANY people the men, women and children who lived fourteen or fifteen centuries ago are mere abstractions, and it is sometimes hard to comprehend that the people we early medieval historians study were actually people rather than concepts or faceless automatons pushed across time and space by anonymous, impersonal, historical forces. But the evidence of human bones helps to re-animate the historical dead. When confronted with the skeletons of a mother and baby who died during pregnancy, or the body of a tenth-century peasant with polio, or a woman whose arthritic toes and bunions must have caused her feet to ache, it is only then that we truly begin to comprehend that people in early medieval Britain did live and did breathe. Bones, as a matter of fact, enable us to say all sorts of things about the overall health and well-being of people living a millennium before we have any other useful demographic data. Skulls and tibias, for example, can betray dubious water and teetering health; tiny bodies infant mortality; broken-necked corpses the terrible, bodily consequences of thievery. While bones permit us to track broad demographic trends that none of the period’s texts disclose, the specificity of bones allows for more than this. Skeletons, first and foremost, are the remains of individuals, who, while living, had hopes and sorrows all their own. These were people with individually aching knees and their very own sore shoulders. They had private sufferings brought on by infected lungs, poorly-mended fractures and dead loved ones. Because of this, their remains can disclose truths about unique beings and singular lives, present in no text and otherwise obliterated from all memory. So, let us begin with some intimate details about the life and death of an otherwise anonymous seventh-century woman, a woman whom I shall call ‘Eighteen’ after the number archaeologists assigned to her grave. Eighteen was probably not quite twenty when she died. In life, she had been on the tall side, indeed, as tall as some men. Her early childhood had been a healthy one: she had never suffered from serious anaemia, the way almost a fifth of her neighbours had, nor had she lived through serious, growth-stopping malnourishment or dangerously high fevers. She had never fallen so badly that she had broken a limb, although admittedly, this happened more to men more than to women, and she was not plagued

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by arthritis, but what nineteen-year-old is? Nonetheless, hers was an early death. The most dangerous years for the women buried alongside her were those between twenty and thirty-five. This is probably because they married late and did not begin succumbing to the complications of pregnancy and childbirth until their twenties. Eighteen, however, did not make it that far. The community in which she lived, somewhere near Barrington in Cambridgeshire, was a little old fashioned. It was not as hierarchical as some seventhcentury communities: certainly, there were no new-fangled ‘princely burials’ in the cemetery where her community laid its dead to rest. Nor were women there, if their graves are anything to go by, wearing much continental exotica, objects that were wildly popular in other contemporary settlements. Still, some among the community were given more elaborate send-offs than others, and this included Eighteen herself. She was buried next to a clutch of spear-bearing males and was accompanied by the most impressive cache of grave goods in the cemetery. The most interesting thing about her grave is that it contained a bed, and hers is one of only eleven bed burials known in England. Our woman wore a necklace hung with silver rings and had latch-lifters hanging from her belt, accessories reserved for high-ranking women, and she was laid to rest with special things – an oak bucket, a small vessel made from maple wood, a rare sword beater, and a box full of little treasures, including a fossilized sea urchin. The most astounding thing about Eighteen, though, was not her grave, but her skull. It is the skull of a leper. Given what we know about the disease, she probably contracted it from someone within her own household in her early teens, but its tell-tale lesions would not have appeared for another three or four years. Although the disease, by the time of her death, had not caused her to lose any fingers or toes, as sometimes happens with leprosy, her lower legs were badly infected, and her face was terribly disfigured. She had lost much of the bone supporting her upper front teeth and nose. Her face would have sunk in at its centre, and her wreck of a nose would have been an infected, discharging horror. Yet in spite of her deformities, she was treated in death with great respect, buried with considerable wealth and some ceremony in a well-dug grave lying at the heart of a communal cemetery. There is no sign here that she led a pariah’s life the way later medieval lepers did.1 The bones of Eighteen, her family, and her friends tell us things about life and death in early medieval Britain that texts rarely do – intimate things, the kinds of things that we know from our own experiences make or break individual lives and are the mainstays of modern biographies. But Eighteen is obviously a special case, her remains extreme and dramatic in ways that most are not. Eighteen’s own affliction, after all, a rare, bone-deforming malady, enables us to know things about her life and death that we can never discovered about the vast majority

1

The paragraphs on Eighteen are based on T. Malim and J. Hines with C. Duhig, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), CBA 112, 1998; K. Manchester and C. Roberts, ‘The Palaeopatholgy of Leprosy in Britain: a Review’, World Archaeology 21, 1989, 265–72; S. Anderson, ‘Leprosy in a Medieval Churchyard in Norwich’, Current and Recent Research in Osteoarchaeology 3, 1998, 31–7; M. A. Judd and C. A. Roberts, ‘Fracture Trauma in a Medieval British Farming Village’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 109, 1999, 229–43; T. Waldron, Counting the Dead: The Epidemiology of Skeletal Populations, New York 1994, 73, n. 17.

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of early medieval people, even the ones we dig up, because most died as a result of infections that moved so quickly that they left no impressions on the bones of their victims.2 Beyond this, Eighteen’s skeleton and the story it tells are only meaningful in the context of the bones and stories of the rest of her community, and this is a truism for all osteological evidence: it is really only useful when aggressively aggregated. When used properly – to identify problems that plagued whole communities, to compare the prevalence of these problems among different groups, and to think about their causes and their effects across entire populations – human bones can provide historians with important and compelling evidence. Before we can explore this evidence and its implications, however, most historians will first need a short, crash course on the four gross skeletal indicators of ‘stress’, things that can help us make determinations about the overall health, morbidity (that is, disease load) and longevity of medieval people. The first indication of stress is constituted by a porous bone lesion, known as porotic hyperostosis (when found in the crown of the skull) or cribra orbitalia (when manifest in the orbits of the skull). It is formed as a result of iron-deficiency anaemia suffered between the age of six months and about twelve years. When anaemic, a child’s body increases the bone tissue that creates red blood cells at the expense of outer, non-blood-cell-producing bone, and it is this reaction that creates the tell-tale lesion.3 Although developed early in life, it is permanently inscribed on the skull, and thus, in adult skeletons these lesions preserve information about serious bouts of childhood anaemia.4 Anaemia’s effects include exhaustion and decreased learning ability, both of which can have major effects on the wellbeing of communities. More seriously it can also result in the late onset of sexual maturity; and severe maternal anaemia can lead to underweight newborns and premature births: these, in turn, can significantly impact birth rates and infant mortality.5 The most important thing, however, for historians to understand about

2 3

4

5

See below, p. 34. D. J. Ortner and W. G. J. Putschar, Identification of Pathological Conditions in Human Skeletal Remains, Smithsonian Contributions to Anthropology 28, Washington D.C. 1981, 257–63; P. StuartMacadam, ‘Porotic Hyperostosis: Representative of a Childhood Condition’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 66, 1985, 391–98, and ‘Anemia in Roman Britain: Poundbury Camp’, in Health in Past Societies. Biocultural Interpretations of Human Skeletal Remains in Archaeological Contexts’, ed. H. Bush and M. Zvelebil, BAR, Int. Ser. 567, 1991, 101–13, at 105; D. M. Mittler and D. P. van Gerven, ‘Developmental, Diachronic, and Demographic Analysis of Cribra Orbitalia in the Medieval Christian Populations of Kulubnarti’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 93, 1994, 287–97. On the difficulty of scoring the severity of cribra orbitalia and judging whether the lesion is ‘active’ or ‘healed’, see K. P. Jacobi and M. E. Danforth, ‘Analysis of Interobserver Scoring Patterns in Porotic Hyperostosis and Cribra Orbitalia’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 12, 2002, 248–58. On a possible solution to this and other problems associated with determining cribra orbitalia, see M. Schultz, ‘Paleohistopathology of Bone: a New Approach to the Study of Ancient Diseases’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 44, 2001, 106–47. S. M. Garn, ‘Iron-Deficiency Anemias and their Skeletal Manifestations’, in Diet, Demography and Disease: Changing Perspectives on Anemia, ed. P. Stuart-Macadam and S. K. Kent, New York 1992, 33–61, at 33, 46–7; and G. R. Wadsworth, ‘Physiological, Pathological, and Dietary Influences on the Hemoglobin Level’, in ibid., 63–104, at 92; A. S. Ryal, ‘Iron-Deficiency Anemia in Infant Development: Implications for Growth, Cognitive Development, Resistance to Infection, and Iron Supplementation’, Yearbook of Physical Anthropology 40, 1997, 25–62, at 35–6, 40–41, 45–50.

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anaemia is that although it can be caused by starvation, poor diet, or scurvy,6 it is much more commonly the result of either chronic blood loss (through, for example, diarrhoeal diseases, many of which are caused by parasites), or because of bacterial or viral infections.7 This is because in the face of chronic infections, the body removes iron circulating in the bloodstream in an attempt to reduce its availability to whatever bacteria, parasites, or viruses are infecting it, all of which need iron to thrive, but none of which produce it on their own.8 Anaemia is, therefore, typically an adaptation to poor environmental conditions such as appalling sanitation or high levels of pathogens, rather than diet.9 As a result, the amount of hyperostosis and cribra orbitalia found within a burial community tells us things worth knowing about the overall health and living conditions of that population. The second skeletal manifestation of environmental stress is dental enamel hypoplasia, a condition that typically displays itself as horizontal lines etched across the external surfaces of teeth, lines most clearly seen on the canines and incisors. There is considerable evidence to suggest that dental enamel hypoplasia is caused by stress-induced interruptions of tooth growth during childhood, and that it is brought on by, among other things, an onslaught of disease, malnourishment, low birth-weight, or parasitic infection.10 Since tooth tissue is not remoulded during life, and the tooth one has at seven is still the tooth one has a thirty, dental enamel hypoplasia is a permanent record of early childhood trauma. The location of hypoplastic lesions on the tooth, moreover, reflects the timing of stress during childhood; and although aging these events is difficult, most experts agree that the bulk occur between the ages of two and four, although lesions can begin to form in the womb and continue to appear as late as six or seven.11 The severity of the lesions, and thus the severity of the stress, can be measured by the deepness of the ridges; and the number of stress incidents can be counted by toting up the number of horizontal lines on individual teeth. This allows us to see how seriously and how often children in a community suffered from bouts of ill health. The third gross indication of stress is delayed or stunted growth. Patterns of growth in a population are a good measure of a community’s overall health and

6 7

8 9 10 11

Schultz, ‘Paleohistopathology of Bone’, 137; D. H. Ubelaker, ‘Porotic Hyperostosis in Prehistoric Ecuador’, in Diet, Demography and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 201–17, at 212–13. Wadsworth, ‘Physiological, Pathological, and Dietary Influences’, 63–104; K. J. Reinhard, ‘Patterns of Diet, Parasitism, and Anemia in Prehistoric West North America’, in Diet, Demography and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 248–51. S. Kent, ‘Anemia through the Ages: Changing Perspectives and their Implications’, in Diet, Demography, and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 2–8. P. Stuart-Macadam, ‘Anemia in Past Human Populations’, in Diet, Demography and Disease, ed. Stuart-Macadam and Kent, 159. S. Hillson, Dental Anthropology, Cambridge 1996, 165–77. A. H. Goodman and R.-J. Song, ‘Sources of Variation in Estimated Ages at Formation of Linear Enamel Hypoplasias’, in Human Growth in the Past: Studies from Bones and Teeth, ed. R. D. Hoppa and C. M. FitzGerald, Cambridge 1999, 210–40; D. J. Reid and M. C. Dean, ‘The Timing of Linear Hypoplasias on Human Anterior Teeth’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 113, 2000, 135–39. On the possibility that male and female episodes of dental enamel hypoplasia may be timed slightly differently, see V. Gallien, ‘La Femme: Témoin de l’évolution du cimetière de la basilique, à Saint-Denis, durant le haut moyen âge’, in La Femme pendant le moyen âge et à l’époque moderne, ed. L. Buchet, Dossier de Documentation Archéologique 17, Paris 1994, 69–86, at 81–82.

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nutrition, so failure to thrive is a useful indicator of stress.12 Skeletal evidence makes it is clear that medieval children were much smaller than their modern counterparts, and this suggests that the former were subject to stresses that the latter are not. Nonetheless, those who reached adulthood had heights very similar to those of mid-twentieth century Britons, so adult heights are not very useful for determining levels of stress.13 Besides subadult height measurements, Harris lines are another indication of childhood-growth interruptions. Harris lines are horizontal lines of increased bone density, most frequently found in long bones and detected through x-ray. They are formed when a child’s growth has ground to a halt, and thus they can signal periods of childhood illness or malnutrition. Since bones are remodelled throughout life, however, Harris lines gradually disappear, so they should only be studied systematically in the skeletons of those who died as children or adolescents.14 Although there is no significant correlation between Harris lines and long-bone length (in other words, children with Harris lines are as tall as children without),15 there is a relationship between Harris lines and the thickness of cortical (outer) bone, and in some cemetery populations there is a correlation between Harris lines and dental enamel hypoplasia or Harris lines and cribra orbitalia.16 The fourth and final stress marker is periostitis, an inflammatory response to infection or injury that manifests itself in the formation of bony plaques grown on the outer surface of bones. Unlike our previous three stress markers, periosteal reactions can occur in adulthood as well as childhood. The lesions can be systemic, and found throughout a skeleton, or they can be highly localized; and in medieval English populations periostitis is often confined to the tibia, that is, to

12

13

14

15 16

R. D. Hoppa, ‘Evaluating Human Skeletal Growth: an Anglo-Saxon Example’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 2, 1992, 275–88; L. Humphrey, ‘Growth Studies of Past Populations: an Overview and an Example’, in Human Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Science, ed. M. Cox and S. Mays, London 2000, 23–38. Stunting occurs only if individuals suffer prolonged, severe deprivation. Otherwise, the growing period is simply extended (S. Mays, ‘Linear and Appositional Long Bone Growth in Earlier Human Populations: a Case Study from Medieval England’, in Human Growth in the Past, ed. Hoppa and FitzGerald, 290–312; R. H. Steckel, ‘Stature and the Standard of Living’, Journal of Economic Literature 33, 1995, 1911, 1923). As Brothwell points out, the difference in adult male height was negligible between the peasants of Wharram Percy, members of York’s Jewish community and the monks at Fishergate despite their radically different diets (D. Brothwell, ‘On the Possibility of Urban-Rural Contrasts in Human Population Palaeobiology’, in Urban-Rural Connexions: Perspectives from Urban-Rural Archaeology, ed. A. R. Hall and H. K. Kenward, Symposia of the Association of Environmental Archaeology 12, Oxbow Monographs 47, Oxford 1994, 129–36). S. Mays, ‘The Relationship between Harris Lines and Other Aspects of Skeletal Development in Adults and Juveniles’, Journal of Archaeological Science 22, 1995, 511–20; J.-L. Groulleau-Raoux, E. Crubélzy, D. Rouge, J.-F. Brugne and S. R. Sanders, ‘Harris Lines: a Study of Age-Associated Bias in Counting and Interpretation’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 103, 1997, 209–17. I. Ribot and C. Roberts, ‘Study of Non-Specific Stress Indicators and Skeletal Growth in Two Mediaeval Subadult Populations’, Journal of Archaeological Science 23, 1996, 67–79. Mays, ‘Linear and Appositional Long Bone Growth’, 290–312. For a correlation between Harris lines and enamel hypoplasia at Wharram Percy, see Mays, ‘Relationship between Harris Lines’, 511–20. For the correlation between cribra orbitalia and Harris lines at Barrington A, see Malim and Hines, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), 176. See also, C. S. Larsen, Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, Cambridge 1997, 42–3.

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the shin bone.17 This is a site of poor circulation, and thus an excellent home for bacteria. Shin bones, moreover, have little padding, and bruising along the shin promotes bacterial proliferation at the bone. Periostitis of the tibia was sometime likely accompanied by oozing, chronic leg ulcers.18 As compromised as the health of excavated individuals were whose skeletons and teeth are marked by stress, these people were not necessarily the sickest members of their communities. We know, because of their skeletal and dental lesions, that they were hearty enough to survive whatever ailed them long enough for their teeth or bones to have been marked by the stress. Those who died of their ailments swiftly, on the other hand, did not live long enough to undergo such changes. Thus we face the famous ‘osteological paradox’: ‘bad skeletons’ (that is, skeletons marked by stress) sometimes represent healthier people than ‘good skeletons’.19 Nonetheless, broad studies comparing trends across cemetery populations do show, on average, that those whose skeletons exhibit signs of stress had shorter lives. Individuals with dental enamel hypoplasia, for example, show a marked tendency to die younger, indeed, much younger, than people in their communities whose teeth were unmarked by enamel deformities. One study, for example, has shown that individuals whose teeth display a single episode of dental enamel hypoplasia died on average five and a half years earlier than individuals without such lesions, and those with two episodes died on average eight years earlier.20 Similar examples are legion.21 This suggests that individuals in historic populations who were ill in childhood were more likely to be ill as adolescents and adults, because their immune systems had been damaged by stress, because those who were already sick were more likely to succumb to yet other infections, or because such individuals were more vulnerable as a result of their social or economic circumstances.22

17

18 19

20 21

22

C. Roberts and K. Manchester, The Archaeology of Disease, 2nd edn, Ithaca 1997, 129–30; Ortner and Putschar, Identification of Pathological Conditions, 129–38; C. S. Larsen, Bioarchaeology: Interpreting Behavior from the Human Skeleton, Cambridge 1997, 82–91. Larsen, Bioarchaeology, 85; Roberts and Manchester, Archaeology of Disease, 129. For this paradox, see J. W. Wood, G. R. Milner, H. C. Harpending, and K. M. Weis, ‘The Osteological Paradox: Problems of Inferring Prehistoric Health from Skeletal Samples’, Current Anthropology 33, 1992, 343–70. For an argument against this position when considering broad patterns across cemeteries, see M. N. Cohen, ‘Does Paleaopathology Measure Community Health? A Rebuttal of “the Osteological Paradox” and its Implications for World History’, in Integrating Archaeological Demography: Multidisciplinary Approaches to Prehistoric Population, ed. R. R. Paine, Center for Archaeological Investigations, Occasional Papers 24, 1997, 242–60. A. H. Goodman and G. J. Armelagos, ‘Childhood Stress and Decreased Longevity in a Prehistoric Population’, American Anthropologist 90, 1988, 936–44. See, for example, S. M. Duray, ‘Dental Indicators of Stress and Reduced Age at Death in Prehistoric Native Americans’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 99, 1996, 275–86; A. L. Stodder, ‘Subadult Stress, Morbidity, and Longevity in Latte Period Populations on Guam, Mariana Islands’, Journal of Physical Anthropology 104, 1997, 363–80; M. Šlaus, ‘Biocultural Analysis of Sex Differences in Mortality Profiles and Stress Levels in the Latte Medieval Population from Nova Ra
a, Croatia’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 111, 2000, 193–209, at 208; D. P. Van Gerven, R. Beck, and J. R. Hummert, ‘Patterns of Enamel Hypoplasia in Two Medieval Populations from Nubia’s Batn El Hajar’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 82, 1990, 413–20; Mays, ‘Relationship between Harris Lines’, 511–20. Goodman and Armelagos, ‘Childhood Stress and Decreased Longevity’, 936–44; K. Manchester, ‘The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections’, in Death in Towns, ed. S. Bassett, Leicester 1992, 8–14.

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35

So much for the basics. We will now turn to historic populations and explore the ways in which poor sanitation, bad diet and disease affected the lives of early medieval people like Eighteen. Let us look first at mortality within individual cemeteries. One of the most striking things that comes out of the bone reports of fifth-, sixth-, and seventh-century cemetery excavations is that some communities were lucky and others were not.23 In a world in which people lived so close to the margin, a single rainless summer, a few weeks of child-killing measles, or the death of cattle could wreck the hopes of an entire hamlet for decades, and it is clear from the bones of the early medieval dead that some communities were dogged by misfortune. Nearly 40% of the skeletons excavated from the sixthcentury cemetery at Oakington, in Cambridgeshire, for example, show signs of serious stress. A toddler there, dead before its second birthday, was suffering from chronic anaemia. A dead eleven-year-old in the same cemetery had teeth marked with the grooves and pits of dental enamel hypoplasia. Skeleton after skeleton at Oakington exhibits related pathologies – just over a third with cribra orbitalia and just under a third with dental enamel hypoplasia.24 Similarly, over half the people buried in another sixth-century cemetery, this one at Norton, in Cleveland, had hypoplastic teeth, as did every juvenile buried in the eighth-century cemetery at Nazeingbury. At Mill Hill, in Deal, Kent, on the other hand, only about 5% of the population shows signs of hypoplasia.25 Clearly misfortune struck different places in different ways, but a community with many desperately anaemic and sick children would have had a grimmer future than one in which they had all been spared. Differences in communities’ fortunes can also be seen in the quite different mortality rates of men and women as we move from cemetery to cemetery, a fact recently emphasised by John Hines (see Table One).26 At Mill Hill half of all the girls who survived to the age of fifteen were dead by twenty-five, and 65% were dead by thirty-five.27 At Norton 47% of all the women were dead by twenty-five, and 82% were dead by thirty-five.28 On the other hand, at the cemetery where our leper was laid to rest – Barrington A in Cambridgeshire – only about a third of all women died by twenty-five, although almost three-quarters were dead by 23

24

25 26 27 28

For a discussion of the marked variability in mortality statistics between early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, see J. Hines, ‘Lies, Damn Lies, and the Curriculum Vitae: Reflections on Statistics and the Populations of Early Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Cemeteries’, in Burial in Early Medieval England and Wales, ed. S. Lucy and A. Reynolds, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 17, London 2002, 88–102, at 98–102. The first ‘adult’ age-band Hines uses, however, is 12–25, and this tends to even out male and female mortality rates, because women probably did not begin dying at a higher rate until they were old enough to become pregnant. A. Taylor, C. Duhig, and J. Hines, ‘An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society 86, 1997, 57–90, at 66. To see just how high the prevalence of cribra orbitalia was at Oakington, compare with the data on stress from Table Seven, below. Another early cemetery with similarly high levels of cribra orbitalia is the early medieval British cemetery at Cannington, where it was 35%. Levels of dental enamel hypoplasia at Cannington, at 54%, were also extraordinarily high, P. Rahtz, S. Hirst, and S. M. Wright, Cannington Cemetery, English Heritage Britannia Monograph Series 17, 2000, 253, 255. K. Parfitt and B. Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, Deal, Kent, Society for Medieval Archaeology Monograph 14, London 1997, 236. Hines, ‘Lies, Damn Lies’, 98–102. Hines, ‘Lies, Damn Lies’, 99, table 1. S. J. Sherlock and M. G. Welch, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Norton, Cleveland, CBA 82, 1992, 111, table 16.

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Table One: Percentage of women who reached adulthood dead by the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five Cemetery

Dead by 25 (%)

Dead by 35 (%)

Castledyke Barrington, A Raunds Norton Mill Hill

25 35 44 47 50

42 72 71 83 65

Table Two: Highest adult mortality by cemetery and sex

Same Men Women Total

Rural

Urban

Monastic

All

5 5 24 (73%) 34

0 2.5 7 (74%) 9.5

0 1.5 3 (67%) 4.5

5 9 34 (71%) 48

thirty-five.29 And at the cemetery at Castledyke South, in Barton-upon-Humber, only a quarter of the women were dead by twenty-five, and over half lived thirtyfive years or more.30 Behind these dry statistics lay real communities, some with few women and many motherless children, and others with adolescent girls and grown women in every household. In the early medieval period, in particular in the sixth century, when individuals and families were scrambling for resources and social position, a hungry year or the dearth of household labour could ruin a family, indeed could wreck a whole community, for generations. The quality of life, then, communal sociability, the commonness of orphans and the competition between young men and older men for wives were dictated absolutely by local demographic differences, which could vary markedly depending on the luck of a community or a generation. Nonetheless, in spite of their variability from one cemetery to the next, the statistics for men’s and women’s mortality tell broadly similar stories (see Table Two).31 Out of forty-eight medieval British cemetery populations for which such data is published, in five, adult men were as likely to die by the age of thirty-five as women; in nine they were more likely to die by thirty-five; but in the remaining

29 30 31

Malim and Hines, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), 293. G. Drinkall and M. Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke South, Barton-on-Humber, Sheffield Excavation Reports 6, 1998, 225. Some of the variation in the mortality rates of different cemeteries may be the result of problematic data. In some cemeteries, for example, older women’s graves may have been clustered in a part of the cemetery that was never excavated. It is probably wise therefore, when thinking about overall mortality rates to discount the outliers – Empringham II and Norton for their astonishingly early deaths, and Caister-on-Sea and Castledyke for their populations’ equally astonishing longevity – and take the midrange cemeteries as typical.

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Table Three: Percentage of adults dead by thirty-five by cemetery and sex Cemetery

Femals (%)

Males (%)

Empringham II Norton Whithorn (Late Medieval) Barrington, A Sewerby Raunds Mill Hill Berinsfield St Nicholas, London St Helen, York Great Chesterford Castledyke Caister-on-Sea

94 83 75 72 71 71 65 64 60 56 45 42 41

86 82 65 63 50 46 47 62 63 39 47 41 24

Table Four: For every 100 men and 100 women who reached adulthood, number in population who lived to the age of thirty-five Cemetery

Females

Males

Barrington, A Berinsfield Caister-on-Sea Empringham II Mill Hill Raunds Sewerby St Helen, York Whithorn (Late Medieval) Castledyke Norton Great Chesterford St Nicholas, London

28 36 59 6 35 29 29 44 13 58 17 55 40

37 38 76 14 53 54 50 61 35 59 18 53 37

Table Five: For every 100 males or 100 females born, number in population who reached the age of thirty-five (child mortality calculated at 48%) Cemetery

Females

Males

Empringham II Whithorn (Late Medieval) Norton Barrington, A Sewerby Raunds Mill Hill Berinsfield St Nicholas, London St Helen, York Great Chesterford Castledyke Caister-on-Sea

3 6.5 9 14.5 15 15 18 19 21 23 28.5 30 30.5

7 18 9.5 19 26 28 27.5 20 19 32 27.5 30.5 39.5

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thirty-four, women were more likely to die before men. The relentless and uneven nature of these statistics overall shaped individual lives and communities in profound ways (see Tables Three, Four, and Five).32 At Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, for example, a cemetery used in the tenth and eleventh centuries, twice as many women as men who reached the age of seventeen died by the age of twenty-five (44% and 22% respectively). By the age of thirty-five, 71% of the women were dead, but only 46% of the men were.33 What happened to all of these dead women’s households? Their children? How did people in Raunds clothe themselves, with female labour is such short supply? What chance did a twentyyear-old man have of finding a wife, with so many older, more established widowers on the prowl? Were forty-year-old women lonely because most of the girls they had grown up with were dead? We do not know the answers to any of these questions, but given the evidence of bones, they are questions we should at least be asking. The dearth of adult female labour, so clearly manifest in burial populations, may also help to explain broad economic and social transformations; for example, why peasant families were increasingly drawn to nucleated settlements in the middle and later Anglo-Saxon periods (because these were places where female labour could be pooled), and why places with mills became such powerful attractors of peasant populations (since the labour of what women there were was freed from grinding corn each day). In any case, one of the constants across the period we study is a worrying disparity in the mortality rates of men and women. No history of a single childhood or adult life can be divorced from such statistics. In spite of the inequalities in life expectancy between the sexes, whether male or female, what the numbers on Tables Three, Four, and especially Five show, is that the news was not good. At Raunds and Mill Hill out of every hundred boys born, something like twenty-eight survived to see their thirty-fifth year, while at Berinsfield and Barrington A only about twenty would. In twenty-first century Afghanistan, present-day home of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, people have a life expectancy at birth that is slightly more than twice what it was for the community burying at Raunds, and that of twenty-first-century Britons is

32

33

This trend was noted long ago by Brothwell, but he was using ‘average age at death’ figures, which can be misleading, D. Brothwell, ‘Paeleodemography and Earlier British Populations’, World Archaeology 4, 1972, 75–87. Data for Tables Three, Four, and Five come from V. Evison, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Great Chesterford, Essex, CBA 91, 1994, 53, table 17; J. R. Timby, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empringham II, Rutland, Oxbow Monograph 70, Oxford 1996, 30; A. Boyle, A. Dodd, D. Miles, and A. Mudd, Two Oxfordshire Anglo-Saxon Cemeteries: Berinsfield and Didcot, Thames Valley Landscapes Monograph 8, Oxford 1995, 108–9, table 29; V. Evison, Dover: The Buckland Anglo-Saxon Cemetery, London 1987, 128; M. J. Darling and D. Gurney, Caister-on-Sea Excavations by Charles Green 1951–55, East Anglian Archaeology 60, 1993, 256, table 60; Drinkall and Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke, 225; Sherlock and Welch, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Norton, 111, table 16; S. M. Hirst, An Anglo-Saxon Inhumation Cemetery at Sewerby, East Yorkshire, York University Archaeological Publications 4, 1985, 34, figure 12; A. Boddington, Raunds Furnells: The Anglo-Saxon Church and Churchyard, English Heritage Archaeological Report 7, London 1996, 115; W. White, Skeletal Remains from the Cemetery of St Nicholas, Shambles, City of London, London 1988, 30; Hines, ‘Lies, Damn Lies’, 97, figure 9; J. D. Dawes and J. R. Magilton, The Cemetery of St Helen-on-the-Walls, Aldwark, The Archaeology of York 12/1, 1980, 65, table 14; P. Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian: The Excavation of a Monastic Town, 1984–91, Stroud 1997, 520–2. Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 115.

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39

almost four times what it was for people in the early Middle Ages. The expectation of such extraordinary and commonplace longevity is transformative. How different life must have looked to those digging graves at Raunds or Mill Hill.34 What about child mortality? It is usually impossible to determine, since children, especially those under two, are badly under-represented in British cemetery populations. Only three cemeteries – the fifth- and sixth-century cemetery at Great Chesterford in Essex, the tenth- and eleventh-century cemetery at Raunds Furnells in Northamptonshire, and the somewhat later twelfth- through sixteenth-century cemetery at Wharram Percy in Yorkshire – seem to contain all the children they should, so it is only here that we can estimate the prevalence of child mortality. In spite of their chronological and geographical range, these cemeteries tell a remarkably consistent story. Very nearly half of the individuals buried in these three cemeteries were children under the age of seventeen,35 a figure that closely matches levels of child mortality both for eighteenth-century London and for undeveloped and developing parts of the world before the onslaught of AIDS.36 A closer look at our three cemeteries makes it clear that the first two years of life were the most lethal. Of all the people who were born in Raunds, for example, 6% died at birth, another 15% died during their first year, and another 3% in their second; thus, about half of all of the children who died before seventeen died in their first couple of years, and a quarter of all babies born died before they were walking and talking.37 At Great Chesterford, although overall child mortality rates were the same, more one- and two-year-olds died here: 84% of all those who died before the age of fifteen died as babies or toddlers.38 This level of mortality among children makes it clear that children as a whole were unhealthy,39 a fact borne out not only by the skeletons of these three

34

35

36

37

38 39

In Afghanistan it is 42.9 years (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/af.html#People accessed 28/11/2005), and at Raunds Furnells it was 21.8 years, Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 114, table 42. In twenty-first-century Britain, life expectancy at birth is almost four times as great (78.38 years) (http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/uk.html#People accessed 28/11/2005). It is, however, clear that the age of older adults in archaeological populations is consistently underestimated (R. G. Aykroyd, D. Lucy, A. M. Pollard, and C. A. Roberts, ‘Nasty, Brutish, but Not Necessarily Short: a Reconsideration of the Statistical Methods Used to Calculate Age at Death from Adult Human Skeletal and Dental Age Indicators’, American Antiquity 64, 1999, 55–70). It is important to remember that just because many people died in their twenties and thirties that does not mean that everyone did. Data from Parfitt and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 219, table 18; M. E. Lewis, ‘Impact of Industrialization: Comparative Study of Child Health in Four Sites from Medieval and PostMedieval England (AD 850–1859)’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 119, 2002, 211–23. J. Landers, Death and the Metropolis: Studies in the Demographic History of London 1670–1830, Cambridge 1993, 154, 340; T. Molleson and M. Cox, The Spitalfields Project, vol. 2. The Anthropology: The Middling Sort, CBA 86, 1993, 209–13; Evison, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Great Chesterford, 59. Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 114. Similarly, in the parish registers kept for the poorest York parishes in the 1590s, it seems that there was a 25 to 30% mortality rate among those under the age of one, Rahtz, Hirst, and Wright, Cannington Cemetery, 142–3. Evison, Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Great Chesterford, 52–3, table 18. According to a recent review article by Mary Lewis, child mortality and morbidity rates ‘have become accepted as a measure of population fitness’ and ‘data from non-adult skeletal material are widely believed to represent the most demographically variable and sensitive barometer of biocultural change’, M. Lewis, ‘Non-Adult Palaeopathology: Current Status and Future Potential’, in Human

40

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cemeteries, but by many others. At St Helen-on-the-Walls, a hardscrabble postConquest cemetery in York, the baby teeth of many of the youngest children buried there are marked by dental enamel hypoplasia. Hypoplastic lesions on deciduous teeth form in utero, so we know that these children’s mothers had been sick or malnourished while pregnant.40 These children, then, had been born stressed, and they must have been especially vulnerable to disease. At St Andrew, Fishergate, another York cemetery, three-quarters of all those who died before the age of twenty had hypoplastic lesions: a quarter of these had had at least three episodes and a few had had as many as seven.41 Or again, at Wharram Percy more children dying between the ages of six and eleven suffered from periostitis than any other age group, which strongly suggests that these children were not only the victims of low-level, systemic infections, but that their ability to fight other diseases was compromised by their underlying ill-health.42 The babies, children, and adolescents who were buried at Raunds, Wharram Percy, St Helen, and St Andrew, Fishergate, all exhibit high levels of stress (see Table Six),43 and when compared with those buried at the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cemetery at Spitalfields in London, we can see that medieval children had considerably more hypoplasia and periostitis. And when we compare these four medieval cemeteries with another medieval cemetery, the one excavated at Chichester’s leper hospital, we can see that ‘normal’ children did not have that much less cribra orbitalia and dental enamel hypoplasia than children buried in the cemetery of a leper hospital.44 Sick children and dead babies, then, were part of everyone’s life. A statistic from Raunds, a community of some forty souls, gives some idea of what it would have been like to live among so many dying children. Between the ages of four or five and thirty-five, a villager would have probably witnessed the deaths of well over thirty children.45 Although adults buried in medieval cemeteries were as tall, on average, as midtwentieth-century Britons, their anaemic, parasite-ridden children were not.46 One-year-olds at Raunds were the same size as modern babies, but by early adolescence many lagged behind twentieth-century children by as much as four

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Osteology in Archaeology and Forensic Science, ed. Cox and Mays, 39. For a detailed study of childhood morbidity and mortality, based in part on data from Raunds, St Helen-on-the-Wall, and Wharram Percy, see Mary Lewis, Urbanisation and Child Health in Medieval and Post-Medieval England, BAR, Brit. Ser. 339, 2002. Lewis, ‘Impact of Industrialization’, 211–23; G. Stroud and R. L. Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, The Archaeology of York 12/2, 1993, 200. Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 204. Lewis, ‘Impact of Industrialization’, 211–23. Data from Lewis, ‘Impact of Industrialization’, 217, table 3; Ribot and Roberts, ‘Study of Non-Specific Stress Indicators’, 72–4, 78; Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 204–7, 219. Ribot and Roberts, ‘Study of Non-Specific Stress Indicators’, 78. Estimate based on the statistics published in Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 113–15. According to Waldron, the nineteenth century was the shortest moment in British history since the Stone Age, but heights across the Middle Ages were the same as earlier and later periods (T. Waldron, ‘The Effects of Urbanization on Human Health: the Evidence from Skeletal Remains’, in Diet and Crafts in Towns: The Evidence of Animal Remains from the Roman to the Post-Medieval Periods, ed. D. Serjeantson and T. Waldron, BAR, Brit. Ser. 199, 1989, 55–73, at 62).

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Table Six: Prevalence of stress indicators in subadults Cemetery

Cribra Orbitalia (%)

Hypoplasia (%)

Periostitis (%)

Raunds Wharram Percy St Helen, York Fishergate, York Chichester Hospital Spitalfields

58 56 56 64 67 57

32 30 34 76 38 24

18 13 20 10 55 4

years.47 The same is true for Wharram Percy. Fourteen-year-olds there were the same height as modern ten-year-olds. Even nineteenth-century child factory workers were taller than these children. Still, undersized children grew to their more-or-less genetically-programmed adult heights in the Middle Ages; it just took them longer. Modern children finish growing at about eighteen, but in the nineteenth century, a period for which we have good data, the working classes continued to grow, on average, until the age of twenty-nine, and it looks as if something similar was taking place among medieval populations.48 This simple fact has profound economic and social implications. This was a world in which human muscle power was in chronic short supply. Many people, by the tenth and eleventh centuries, practised communal farming, which centred around the whole village’s participation in heavy ploughing with large teams of oxen. It was very hard work, and some of its associated tasks required full-grown, male labour. Yet this is a world in which about half the people living in it were children (see Figures One and Two),49 a world, moreover, in which many sixteen-year-old boys were the size of today’s twelve-year-olds, so most could not have done a man’s work.50 In a world like this it is little wonder that food was so often a worry, and it is of no surprise that conspicuous consumption and the public squandering of food were the best ways for aristocrats to show the world how rich they were.51 Hardwired into the demography of this world, then – a world where about half the people in it were children (and undersized children at that) – was the predisposition towards poverty, labour shortages, hunger, and probably violence. Town life in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries may have been even more lethal than life in the countryside. A study of those living and dying in Early Modern Vilnius has shown that, on average, people there had both more stress episodes

47 48 49 50

51

Hoppa, ‘Evaluating Human Skeletal Growth’, 284. Mays, ‘Linear and Appositional Long Bone Growth’, 299–300, and The Archaeology of Human Bones, London 1998, 66–70. Data from Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 114, table 42. By the eighteenth century the sons of aristocrats were taller than the sons of members of lower social classes, although this difference in height was more marked in childhood. During industrialisation, this height gap widened, Steckel, ‘Stature and the Standard of Living’, 1921–22. It is not clear whether there was a similar height gap in the Middle Ages. R. Fleming, ‘The New Wealth, the New Rich, and the New Political Style in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, ANS 23, 2001, 1–22.

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Population (%)

14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 0–1

1–2

2–6

6–12

12–17 17–25 Age range

25–35

35–45

45⫹

Figure One: Age structure of population at Raunds

46% adults 54% children

Figure Two: Ratio of children to adults at Raunds

and more severe ones than did Danish peasants living in the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, and something similar may hold true for England.52 Certainly, periostitis, dental enamel hypoplasia, and cribra orbitalia were more prevalent among townspeople than among those burying in many rural cemeteries, and this suggests that townspeople had higher parasite and pathogen loads.53 A comparison, for example, of the urban cemetery of St Helen-on-the-Walls and

52

53

P. Zydrune, R. Jankauskas, and J. Boldsen, ‘Enamel Hypoplasia in Danish and Lithuanian Late Medieval/Early Modern Samples: a Possible Reflection of Child Morbidity and Mortality Patterns’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 12, 2002, 189–201. 22% of the people buried at the urban cemetery of St Helen, York, for example, were suffering from periostitis, and at Fishergate 20% were. At the rural cemetery at Castledyke, on the other hand, the prevalence of periostitis was 7%, and at Mill Hill, Norton, and Raunds it was 8%, A. L. Grauer, ‘Patterns of Anemia and Infection from Medieval York, England’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 91, 1993, 203–13, at 208; Brothwell, ‘On the Possibility of Urban-Rural Contrasts’, 135; Drinkall and

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43

the rural cemetery of Wharram Percy, 30 km down the road, has shown that both porotic hyperostosis and periostitis were twice as prevalent among those buried at St Helen. There are a number of reasons for this. An individual’s immunity is influenced, in important ways, by living and sanitary conditions.54 In urban communities both were considerably more degraded than they were in small-scale settlements. Towns, with their large populations, their pools of new immigrants, and their seriously compromised drinking water were environments in which diseases tended to linger longer, kill more, and, indeed, settle in and become endemic.55 Immigrants from rural communities arriving in late adolescence would have suffered very high mortality rates in towns, because they did not have immunities to urban scourges that those who had grown up with them did.56 And because urban communities had comparatively large and vulnerable populations, they had enough people to serve as permanent human reservoirs for slow-moving killers like leprosy and tuberculosis. Many an excavated rural cemetery has disgorged a leper or two, but it was only in towns, and probably only from the twelfth century on, that leprosy was a serious scourge.57 The cemetery attached to St John Timberhill in Norwich, for example, used on either side of the Norman Conquest, contained something like thirty lepers,58 a number never seen in rural cemeteries. Rural cemeteries often contain one or two victims of tuberculosis as well, but this disease, and, indeed, a nastier form of it, was far more prevalent in towns, where it had larger numbers of hosts, and, therefore, higher levels of infection.59 Other faster-moving killers – smallpox, mumps, influenza, and cholera – were unable to persist in small, rural settlements for any length of time, because they would erupt suddenly and infect all those without immunity. Within a week or two some would have died, but everyone who had survived gained immunity, so these infections disappeared as quickly as they had come. Tenth-, eleventh-, and twelfth-century towns, however, with their hefty populations and their pools of immigrants ripe for infection were places where diseases simmered, or came back year after year.60

54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke, 231; Parfitt and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 230, table 23. Similarly, the prevalence of dental enamel hypoplasia differed between rural and urban cemeteries. At the rural cemeteries of Empringham II and Castledyke its prevalence was 13% and 9% respectively, but for the urban sites of Ipswich School Street and Norwich Castle, it was 32.4% and 80%, Timby, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empringham, 28; Drinkall and Foreman, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Castledyke, 228. For the relative rates of cribra orbitalia between early Anglo-Saxon and urban communities, see below, Table Seven. Manchester, ‘The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections’, 8–9. Manchester, ‘The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections’, 11–12. Landers, Death and the Metropolis, 29–30; B. A. Kaplan, ‘Migration and Disease’, in Biological Aspects of Human Migration, ed. C. G. N. Mascie-Taylor and G. W. Lasker, Cambridge 1988, 215–47. Indeed, between 1066 and 1250 several hundred leper hospitals were founded, C. Rawcliffe, ‘Learning to Love the Leper: Aspects of Institutional Charity in Anglo-Norman England’, ANS 23, 2001, 231. For a list of cemeteries with excavated lepers, see C. A. Roberts, ‘The Antiquity of Leprosy in Britain: the Skeletal Evidence’, in The Past and Present of Leprosy: Archaeological, Historical, and Palaeopathological and Clinical Approaches, ed. C. A. Roberts, M. E. Lewis, and K. Manchester, BAR, Int. Ser. 1054, 2002, 213–21, at 218, table 1. S. Anderson, ‘Leprosy in a Medieval Churchyard in Norwich’, Current and Recent Research in Osteoarchaeology 3, 1998, 31–37. Manchester, ‘The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections’, 10–11. Manchester, ‘The Palaeopathology of Urban Infections’, 11–12.

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Early medieval towns were also astonishingly filthy. Our evidence for this comes primarily from excavations done at York.61 From them we know that houses in Anglo-Scandinavian York were crawling with bugs, and this was probably true in all pre-Conquest towns. Rove and silken fungus beetles, hairy cellar beetles, spider beetles, and nocturnal black beetles – all of which could be found scuttling in the thatch and walls, or scurrying across the floors of town dwellers’ homes – were common house dwellers at 16–22 Coppergate. Pests with less lovely names also infested Coppergate houses: fleas, body lice, flies, and sheep keds found conducive environments indoors.62 Latrines and cesspits, too, were homes to enormous populations of insects. The total number estimated from the cesspits excavated at 16–22 Coppergate alone is on the order of ten million!63 Flies, fleas, lice, and beetles also act as vectors for pathogenic micro-organisms, including poliomyelitis, salmonella, and summer diarrhoea.64 Cesspits and heaps of rotting, carelessly dumped rubbish were omnipresent in both AngloScandinavian and Anglo-Norman York, and they were fatally near wells.65 They acted as reservoirs for intestinal nematode parasites, in particular whipworm and maw worm, which are frequently recorded in cesspit fills and in excavated faecal material; and there is evidence that some people in York bore very heavy parasite loads indeed.66 This terrible concatenation of insects, micro-organisms and filth must lie behind much of the human misery etched on the bones of the urban dead. The insalubriousness of urban life was exacerbated before the later twelfth century by the fact that so little was built in, or covered, by stone. RomanoBritish towns were cleaner, in part, because so much within them was constructed from inorganic materials like brick, tile, cobbles, and stone; and, as a result, they had much less surface build-up of organic, rotting, insect-friendly,

61 62

63 64 65

66

H. K. Kenward and A. R. Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits at 16–22 Coppergate, The Archaeology of York 14/7, 1995, 447, 662–7. Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 662, 698–705; H. K. Kenward and E. P. Allison, ‘Rural Origins of the Urban Insect Fauna’, in Hall and Kenward, UrbanRural Connexions, ed. Hall and Kenward, 55–77, at 59, 65. Human flea and lice infestations were also common in rural sites, if the findings from the early medieval Irish rath at Deer Park Farms are any thing to go by. Nonetheless, insect populations, while diverse, seem to have been smaller, H. K. Kenward and E. P. Allison, ‘A Preliminary View of Insect Assemblages from the Early Christian Rath Site at Deer Park Farms, Northern Ireland’, in Environment and Economy in Anglo-Saxon England, ed. O. Rackham, CBA 89, 1994, 93. H. K. Kenward and F. Large, ‘Insects in Urban Waste Pits in Viking York: Another Kind of Seasonality’, Environmental Archaeology (a.k.a. Circaea) 3, 1998, 35–53. Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 762–4. P. V. Addyman, ‘The Archaeology of Public Health at York, England’, World Archaeology 21, 1989, 244–64, at 257. One of the Anglo-Scandinavian wells, moreover, when excavated, was full of frogs, which had been trapped in life when they fell into the functioning well, and then died. This must have fouled the water, P. J. Piper and T. P. O’Connor, ‘Urban Small Vertebrate Taphonomy: a Case Study from Anglo-Scandinavian York’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 11, 2001, 336–44, at 342. Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 696–7, 758–9; A. R. Hall, H. K. Kenward, D. Williams, and J. R. A. Greig, Environment and Living Conditions at Two AngloScandinavian Sites, The Archaeology of York 14/4, 1983, 225–9. Evidence for human parasites and lice has also been found for tenth- and eleventh-century Norwich, ibid., 449, and Kenward and Allison, ‘Rural Origins’, 69.

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pathogen-loving waste.67 It was only from the later twelfth century on that York and other English towns began using inorganic building material as a matter of course, especially for cellars, foundations, and stone-clad wells, and they probably became healthier places as a result.68 When the prevalence of stress indicators like cribra orbitalia in urban cemeteries is compared with prevalence in early Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, it seems that early, rural populations were considerably less stressed than later, urban ones, and they were probably healthier. In many pagan-period, rural cemeteries, for example, well under 20% of the population exhibited signs of cribra orbitalia, but in urban cemeteries the number is often closer to 30%. Similarly, in many early rural cemeteries under 10% of the population exhibited signs of periostitis, but in urban cemeteries it was often closer to twice this (see Table Seven and note 53).69 Nonetheless, peasants living in the relatively large, densely settled, nucleated villages established from the mid to late Anglo-Saxon periods on were also less healthy than their early progenitors, who had generally lived in small, ‘open’, drifting settlements (see Table Seven). This suggests that life in tenth- and eleventhcentury nucleated villages – with their larger populations, greater settlement densities, and permanent locations – was hard on the health of cultivators. It is a public-health truism that in pre-industrial societies, the larger and the more sedentary the group, the greater the frequency of chronic disease, tuberculosis, intestinal infections, and parasites, and it follows that large, compact villages were less healthful than small, scattered hamlets.70 In other historical contexts, moreover, it is clear that taxing states and aggressive landlords, both of which were omnipresent in late Anglo-Saxon England, were hazardous to peasants’ health. The frequency of dental enamel hypoplasia among Florida’s Native Americans, for example, increased dramatically after they became entangled in the Spanish mission system;71 and Christian communities in Late-Antique Sudan had a much greater 67

68

69

70

71

A. R. Hall, H. K. Kenward, and D. Williams, Environmental Evidence from Roman Deposits in Skeldergate, The Archaeology of York 14/3, 1980, 133–4. Wooden houses without stone foundations or cellars must have been very damp and full of rot, given the fact that water and subterranean beetles were often found in the floor debris of Coppergate houses (Kenward and Allison, ‘Rural Origins’, 59–65). Kenward and Hall, Biological Evidence from Anglo-Scandinavian Deposits, 446; Addyman, ‘The Archaeology of Public Health at York’, 259–9. Highly organised Roman institutions and infrastructures dealing with waste removal also made Roman cities healthier human environments, J. Greig, ‘The Interpretation of Pollen Spectra from Urban Archaeological Deposits’, in Environmental Archaeology in the Urban Context, ed. A. R. Hall and H. K. Kenward, CBA 43, 1982, 47–66. Data from Malim and Hines, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Edix Hill (Barrington A), 175; Parfitt, and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 229, table 23, 230; Hill, Whithorn and St Ninian, 546; Boddington, Raunds Furnells, 123; Sherlock and Welch, An Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Norton, 119; Timby, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery at Empringham, 28; Taylor, Duhig, and Hines, ‘An AngloSaxon Cemetery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire’, 66; M. L. Blakey, T. E. Leslie, and J. P. Reidy, ‘Frequency and Chronological Distribution of Dental Enamel Hypoplasia in Enslaved African Americans: a Test of the Weaning Hypothesis’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 95, 1994, 371–83, at 376; Molleson and Cox, The Spitalfields Project, 42–3. Cohen, ‘Does Paleaopathology Measure Community Health?’, 244, 248; Molleson and Cox, The Spitalfields Project, 44; A. Keenleyside, ‘Skeletal Evidence of Health and Disease in Pre-Contact Alaskan Eskimos and Aleuts’, American Journal of Physical Anthropology 107, 1998, 61. S. W. Simpson, ‘Reconstructing Patterns of Growth Disruption from Enamel Microstructure’, in Human Growth in the Past, ed. Hoppa and FitzGerald, 258–9; M. Schultz, C. S. Larsen, and K. Kreutz, ‘Disease in Spanish Florida: Microscopy of Porotic Hyperostosis and Cribra Orbitalia’, in Bioarchaeology of Spanish Florida: the Impact of Imperialism, ed. C. S. Larsen, Gainsville FL 2001, 208–10.

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Table Seven: Prevalence of cribra orbitalia in different burial populations Cemetery

Type

Prevalence (%)

Early/Rural Early/Rural Early/Rural Early/Rural Early/Rural Early/Rural Early/Rural Early/Rural Medieval/Urban Medieval/Urban Medieval/Urban Medieval/Urban Medieval/Urban Later/Rural Later/Rural Romano-British/Urban 18th & 19th Century/Urban 18th & 19th Af.Amer/Urban

Barrington A Caister Castledyke Empringham II Great Chesterford Mill Hill Mornington Thorpe Norton Fishergate, York Ipswich, School St Jewbury, York Norwich Castle Whithorn Raunds Wharram Percy Poundbury Spitalfields Philadelphia

18 18 7 13 6 8 10 9 21 32 22 80 30 29 53 28 34 89

prevalence of cribra orbitalia than those living after state control and the power of local landlords had collapsed.72 We should not, therefore, look for broad improvements of mortality and morbidity across whole populations as we move forward in time. Nonetheless, there is some indication that by the later twelfth century those living economically and socially privileged lives were beginning to live longer, healthier ones as well. In the early Anglo-Saxon period it does not look as if there was enough real and social distance between people of high and low status for the former to enjoy more favourable levels of mortality and morbidity; and I suspect this was more-or-less the case for the whole of the Anglo-Saxon period.73 Certainly, those buried with rich collections of grave goods often had bones marked by stress, so wealth and social status did not stop the privileged few from

72 73

Mittler and van Gerven, ‘Developmental, Diachronic, and Demographic Analysis of Cribra Orbitalia’, 296. Because the skeletal reports for two high-status sites, Flixborough and Brandon, are not yet published, it is difficult to do more than guess. Nonetheless, what little has been published on the skeletal material from these sites suggests that their populations were none too healthy, in spite of their high-status natures, C. Loveluck, ‘Wealth, Waste, and Conspicuous Consumption: Flixborough and its Importance for mid and late Saxon Settlement Studies’, in Image and Power in the Archaeology of Early Medieval Britain: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Cramp, ed. H. Hamerow and A. MacGregor, Oxford 2001, 85–6, and C. Loveluck and K. Dobney, ‘A Match Made in Heaven or a Marriage of Convenience? The Problems and Rewards of Integrating Palaeoecological and Archaeological Data’, in Environmental Archaeology: Meaning and Purpose, ed. U. Albarella, Boston 2001, 160–62, 166; Parfitt and Brugmann, The Anglo-Saxon Cemetery on Mill Hill, 230, 236. The body of Count Raymond II of Toulouse (d. 978) has been examined. Besides having suffered a badly broken arm as a child, the count’s skeleton bore signs of both cribra orbitalia and dental enamel hypoplasia, and he died in his thirties, É. Crubézy and C. Dieulafait, Le comte de l’an mil, Aquitania, supplement 8, 1996, 103–32.

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breathing the same air and drinking the same bad water as their dependants. There is, however, some evidence that from the twelfth century on professional religious were living longer that other people, and this may reflect lower mortality rates among all people of means, not just monks and canons. Cemeteries of ecclesiastical communities (which, of course, did not just contain monks, but sometimes include the bodies of wealthy patrons as well) often have larger numbers of older individuals than do other cemeteries. Among the canons buried at St Andrew, Fishergate, for example, it seems that two-thirds died after the age of forty, as did two-thirds of the monks of Westminster, which is astonishing, considering the mortality rates found in cemeteries used by peasants and the urban poor.74 A condition, moreover, known as diffuse idiopathic skeletal hyperostosis, or DISH, is particularly prevalent in monastic cemeteries. In modern populations DISH is closely associated with aging, with late-onset diabetes, and with obesity. Its prevalence among monks is suggestive both of their high living and their long lives.75 Economic privilege, carefully designed water systems, organised waste disposal, and construction in stone must have all contributed to the increasing longevity of professional religious from the twelfth century on, and these factors may well have been operating in aristocratic households too.76 So, what, in the end, do the bones of the dead tell us about living and dying in early medieval Britain that texts cannot? First they suggest that numbers matter. It is not enough to say that women died in childbirth, that infant mortality must have been high, or that people were often ill. It is only when we look at the statistics provided by the bones of the early medieval dead that we come face to face with just how dire life in our period was; how sick, how sad and how short. With the cold, hard numbers in our heads we can see that one out of every two babies born in Raunds was dead by eighteen; that nine baby girls born there out of ten would be dead by thirty-five; that most first-time seventeen- or eighteen-year-old mothers’ own mothers were dead; that every village had to have had a sad, little gang of orphans. Texts, especially British texts before 1100, do not tell us any of this, and yet we have this vast reservoir of evidence that does, and it behoves us to learn how to use it. Second, the specificity of bones matters. Narrative sources, again particularly those before 1100, do not allow us to see the leg ulcers that plagued so many; the swarms of disease-carrying flies; the constant discomfort caused by a gut full of parasites; the scrawny, undersized, fourteen-year-old boys. Yet these were fundamental, bodily aspects of most peoples’ lives in the early Middle Ages, and we need to come to grips with them, if we ever hope to understand particular individuals’ lives. Third, bones betray the human cost of things often written about by historians as impersonal and faceless trends. The story of the rise of urban communities was clearly, when we look at cemeteries, about more than the rise of the commercial economy. For many, it was about sick children, fast-moving illnesses, and early death. The genesis of nucleated villages and 74 75

76

Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 256. J. Rogers and T. Waldron, ‘DISH and the Monastic Way of Life’, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 11, 2001, 357–65; W. Rodwell, Wells Cathedral: Excavations and Structural Studies 1978–93, 2 vols., English Heritage Archaeological Report 21, 2001, ii, 550–53, 561. Stroud and Kemp, Cemeteries of St Andrew, Fishergate, 255.

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interventionist landlords did more than change the look of the landscape and the pace of the economy. Peasants lived less healthy lives because of these developments. The human costs of some of the period’s grand trends, then, can sometimes be recovered if we look at bones; and with them we can begin to discern just how high a price some people did, in fact, pay. Fourth and finally, our texts, for the most part, tell us about men, about monks, about the holders of land, and about the people who lived after c. 700; but the vast majority of people in early medieval Britain could be placed in none of these categories. Thus, if we limited ourselves to texts we would never know about the likes of Eighteen. Yet this woman’s bones allow us to say something specific, personal, and meaningful about her otherwise forgotten life. In the end, then, bare bones are one of the few things that survive from the period that actually allow us to see the flesh and blood of people whose biographies we wish to write.

3 ‘Carriers of the Truth’1: Writing the Biographies of Anglo-Saxon Female Saints BARBARA YORKE

T

HIS SUBJECT allows me to evoke one of my clearest memories of Frank Barlow lecturing to me when I was an undergraduate. The topic was the liaisons of King Edgar – a gift to Frank’s sardonic humour – and I particularly remember a vivid portrayal of Wilton as a sort of finishing school with young bloods calling and asking if they could take young Edith out for the afternoon. This warning to be open-minded in one’s expectations of the true nature of the lives of distant saints was reinforced when I read (also as an undergraduate) Frank’s study of Edward the Confessor which draws a vivid contrast between Edward’s life as it was likely to have been in reality and the way it was subsequently realigned to suit later hagiographical needs.2 These influences from an impressionable age have stayed with me and, after a sufficient period of ruminatio, I would like to explore whether such approaches are also applicable to the lives of Anglo-Saxon female saints. Is it possible, for instance, for Edward’s great-aunt St Edith of Wilton also to be detached from her hagiographical cocoon to be given some kind of biographical reality? Before proceeding any further it must be admitted that there are many female saints whose cults originated in Anglo-Saxon England for whom it is not possible to provide any reliable biographical data. A number of communities in England after the Norman Conquest found themselves in possession of a wellestablished cult of an Anglo-Saxon female saint about whom little or nothing appeared to be known. When Geoffrey became abbot of Burton upon Trent in 1114 he could not find any reliable information about Modwenna, the community’s saint, and so annexed wholesale the vita of an Irish saint Monenna, presumably on the grounds that the names were at least similar.3 Others restricted themselves

1

2 3

The phrase is taken from Goscelin’s assertion of the value of the testimony of the nuns of Wilton for the life of St Edith: A. Wilmart, ‘La Légende de Ste Édith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin’, Analecta Bollandiana 56, 1938, 5–101, 265–307 (henceforth cited as Vita S. Edithe), p. 37; passage translated E. M. C. van Houts, Memory and Gender in Medieval Europe 900–1200, Basingstoke 1999, 51. F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, London 1970; 2nd edn 1979; see also F. Barlow, ‘Edward the Confessor’s early life, character and attitudes’, EHR 80, 1965, 225–51. Geoffrey of Burton. Life and Miracles of St Modwenna, ed. R. Bartlett, OMT 2002.

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to embroidering the few traditions that did survive along well-established hagiographical lines, as exemplified by the post-Conquest account of Cuthburh, the sister of King Ine of Wessex, who is known chiefly for her separation from her husband King Aldfrith of Northumbria and subsequent foundation of the nunnery of Wimborne.4 The author was able to bulk out a whole Life through imagining the eloquent, and successful, pleas to preserve her chastity which Cuthburh is made to make to her husband on their wedding night. In fact Cuthburh stayed with her husband long enough to produce at least three children and, in spite of the long tradition of the motif of the female saint who does all in her power to resist loss of her chastity, it was not used, as far as we know, in hagiographical writing composed during the Anglo-Saxon period. Such post-Conquest hagiographies of Anglo-Saxon female saints should not be considered biographies. They were written by people who had few, if any, ‘facts’ to go on and so substituted stock motifs of proven female sanctity. These works have more to tell us about the time in which they were written than that in which their subjects lived; indeed, it would be positively misleading to try to use them to reconstruct the history of Anglo-Saxon female religious. Once these have been eliminated, one is left with a small, but valuable, residue of vitae in which hagiographical conventions appear to have been adapted to accommodate aspects of their subjects’ real lives. In them, it will be argued, biographical elements were important for the purposes behind their composition. The works that fall into this category are parts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (especially the sections concerning the nuns of Barking and Æthelthryth of Ely), the material associated with St Mildrith of Minster-in-Thanet and the Lives of Edith, her mother Wulfthryth and cousin Wulfhild written by Goscelin of St-Bertin, probably in the 1080s. Special pleading might also allow inclusion of the ninthcentury Life of the West Saxon Leoba, even though the author was Rudolf of Fulda, for he ultimately depended on the testimony of four of her nuns, at least one of whom (Thecla) was related to Leoba and had travelled with her to Germany from her monastery in Wimborne (Dorset).5 All these works share the characteristic that the authors either derived their information from people who knew the subjects, or had known others who had known them, and/or had access to written accounts that drew upon such memories. Bede utilised a now lost libellus containing the miracles of the nuns of Barking that had ‘been written down by those who were acquainted with them’.6 His evidence relating to Æthelthryth of Ely, on the other hand, seems to have been drawn primarily on oral accounts from a variety of witnesses including Bishop Wilfrid and

4

5

6

J. M. J. Fletcher, ‘The marriage of St Cuthburga, who was afterwards foundress of the monastery at Wimborne’, Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club 34, 1931, 167–85; R. Rushworth, ‘The medieval hagiography of St Cuthburg’, Analecta Bollandiana 118, 2000, 291–324. Vita Leobae Abbatissae Biscofesheimensis auctore Rudolfo Fuldensi, ed. G. Waitz, MGH SS 15.1, Hanover 1887, 118–31, at 122 [henceforth Vita S. Leobae]. Rudolf used transcriptions by the priest Mago and other unnamed monks of Fulda of the memories of Thecla and three other female disciples. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OMT 1969, iv, 7, 356–9 – the material relating to Abbess Æthelburh and other nuns of Barking is contained in iv, 7–10, 356–65.

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7

Æthelthryth’s own physician Cynefrith. The material concerning Mildrith and her many saintly relatives is more difficult to assess as it is preserved in a variety of later recensions, but David Rollason has argued cogently for an origin for the core material in the eighth century at Minster-in-Thanet where Mildrith had been abbess.8 Goscelin states that he had both oral and written sources on which he could draw for his Life of St Edith which was completed c. 1080.9 Edith died at some point between 984 and 987, and so Goscelin’s informants were drawing on accounts they had had from nuns who had known Edith rather than on their own personal knowledge, though some of them could have known her mother Wulfthryth who lived into the early eleventh century and promoted her daughter’s cult, as well as inspiring one herself. In his account of Wulfthryth’s cousin Wulfhild, abbess of Barking, who was also long-lived, Goscelin reveals that his chief informant was the nun Wulfrunna-Judith who had known Wulfhild well as she had been educated by her as a young girl at Barking.10 The question of what written sources Goscelin may have been able to use for his Life of Edith is a more difficult matter. The only written source he describes in detail is an Old English record of the healing of the epileptic dancers from Colebek which had been related and recorded in the presence of Abbess Brihtgifu (d. 1065).11 But was he able to make use of an earlier written Life of Edith? Goscelin certainly refers to libri as being among his sources and, in addition to sections that are clearly based on memories of Edith, particularly through objects associated with her, seems to have been able to draw on a body of material that was concerned to assert her royal descent and connections which could have come from some form of earlier written record.12 Scepticism has been expressed about the postulated existence of lost Lives of Anglo-Saxon saints,13 but it may be equally mistaken to underestimate the scale of loss of written sources produced in the Anglo-Saxon period.14 Old English was widely used as a written medium in later Anglo-Saxon England, especially in the aristocratic circles from which nuns came, and documents in the vernacular were likely to be particularly vulnerable to destruction

7 8 9 10 11 12 13

14

Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, iv, 19–21, 390–401. D. W. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend. A Study in Early Medieval Hagiography in England, Leicester 1982; see also S. Hollis, ‘The Minster-in-Thanet foundation story’, ASE 27, 1998, 41–74. Vita S. Edithe, 39. See further B. A. E. Yorke, ‘The legitimacy of St. Edith’, HSJ 11, 1998 (2003), 97–113. M. Espositio, ‘La vie de Saint Wulfilda par Goscelin de Cantorbery’, Analecta Bollandiana 32, 1913, 10–26 (henceforth cited as Vita S. Wulfhilde). Vita S. Edithe, 292. Yorke, ‘Legitimacy of St Edith’. See below, p. 54, for discussion of Goscelin’s revision of an existing Life of St Mildrith. M. Lapidge, ‘The Saintly Life in Anglo-Saxon England’, in The Cambridge Companion to Old English Literature, ed. M. Godden and M. Lapidge, Cambridge 1991, 243–63; R. C. Love, ‘Hagiography’, in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al., Oxford 1999, 226–8. In Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, iv, 7, 356–9, we read that copies of the libellus with the miracles of the nuns of Barking were widely distributed and in the possession of many, yet none of these survive and this in spite of Barking having an apparently uninterrupted history as a religious community (though not necessarily as a nunnery) throughout the Anglo-Saxon period and beyond.

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once Old English had ceased to have such currency. The possibility of a lost earlier Life of Edith should be viewed alongside the strong case that Susan Ridyard has made for the twelfth-century Life of St Eadburga of Nunnaminster (Winchester) by Osbert of Clare being based on an earlier written account (which on this basis could also be admitted to the select group of Anglo-Saxon female Lives that have a biographical dimension).15 However, even if they had access to reliable memories or written records, these works still have to be viewed as hagiographies and as written within the conventions of the genre. Not only are some of the vitae under consideration written by the most accomplished hagiographers of their day, but the information that they drew upon, whatever the medium, would have been shaped by hagiographical convention. The miracles of the nuns of Barking, it would appear, were modelled on accounts of similar signa which were recorded in the Life of St Columbanus by Jonas for the nunnery of Faremoûtiers-en-Brie, a foundation with close contacts with many of the nunneries of southern England.16 Thus, an account of how a nun at Barking who was about to die asks those attending her to put out a light which only she can see, recalls the very similar request of the dying Eorcentrude at Faremoûtiers.17 In this case the nuns of Barking inspired by Jonas’s written model produced their own libellus that was extracted by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History. In contrast the precedent for the carefully stage-managed burial and translation of St Æthelthryth at Ely, which was probably also modelled closely on the practices of Faremoûtiers,18 is most likely to have been passed to them through personal contacts and to have been disseminated by word of mouth.19 Accounts passed orally were just as likely to have been shaped by the conventions of written saints’ lives as those transmitted by text, and provide a good example of the interdependence of written and oral traditions in religious houses in societies like that of the Anglo-Saxons where orality and literacy co-existed.20 Associations with surviving artefacts or buildings can be seen as an important way of preserving and transmitting memories in the Early Middle Ages.21

15

16 17

18

19 20

21

S. Ridyard, The Royal Saints of Anglo-Saxon England. A Study of West Saxon and East Anglian Cults, Cambridge 1988, 16–37, 253–308. See also L. Braswell, ‘St Edburga of Winchester: a study of her cult, 950–1500, with an edition of the fourteenth-century Middle English and Latin Lives’, Mediaeval Studies 33, 1971, 292–333. I. N. Wood, ‘The Vita Columbani and Merovingian hagiography’, Peritia 1, 1982, 68–9; B. A. E. Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, London 2003, 24–8, 50–1. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, iv, 8, and Ionas, Vitae Columbani Discipularumque eius, ed. B. Krusch, MGH Scriptores rerum Merovingicarum IV, Hanover 1902, ii, 13. Note the shared name element of Eorcentrude of Faremoûtiers and Eorcenwald, the founder of Barking and brother of its first abbess. A. Thacker, ‘The making of a local saint’, in Local Saints and Local Churches in the Early Medieval West, ed. A. Thacker and R. Sharpe, Oxford 2002, 45–74. Two abbesses of Faremoûtiers were sisters of Æthelthryth and her successor Seaxburh, and Seaxburh’s own daughter Eorcengota had been a nun at Faremoûtiers and subsequently culted there as a saint as recorded in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, iii, 8, 236–41. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, iv, 19, 390–7. M. Innes, ‘Memory, orality and literacy in an early medieval society’, Past and Present 158, 1998, 3–36. For an unusual example of the combination of secular oral tradition within a largely hagiographical text, see the account of the foundation of Minster-in-Thanet: Rollason, Mildrith Legend; Hollis, ‘The Minster-in-Thanet foundation story’, 41–74. Van Houts, Memory and Gender, 93–120.

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Goscelin’s Life of Edith contains several examples of traditions about Edith that had been attached to objects connected with her, such as the headband which a nun had unwisely tried to remove from her tomb.22 A rather more solid remembrance was the wooden chapel dedicated to St Denis that she had paid for.23 Edith had even left a portrayal of herself as the suppliant Mary kissing the feet of Christ on the alb she had embroidered with her own hands and decorated with gold, jewels and pearls.24 Leoba too was recalled through some of her possessions; the little cup she habitually used and the cowl which Boniface had left her, and which symbolised his delegation of authority to her.25 Such associations may often have been a way of preserving genuine traditions about saints, but sometimes we can also see that the way of remembering has been shaped by a literary tradition. There was, for instance, Edith’s clothes’ chest and its contents which were said to have miraculously survived being engulfed by flames.26 The account was attached to a real chest that was to be seen at Wilton in Goscelin’s day, but the transmission of the miracle had undoubtedly been influenced by a very common early medieval miracle-type that recalls, for instance, Bede’s account of the miraculous preservation of a wooden buttress against which Bishop Aidan of Lindisfarne had been leaning when he died.27 So even with these sources that have the potential to provide us with some biographical details of their subjects we have to confront the issue of how far aspects with a basis on reality had been affected by hagiographical convention. Historians’ opinions have varied on how great a problem they consider this to be. Julia Smith, for example, has questioned the value of Rudolf’s Life of St Leoba because some of his depictions of her have undoubtedly been influenced by earlier accounts of some of the male founders of western monasticism; as she argues, these were probably the only models available in ninth-century Fulda.28 The true Leoba has, she suggests, been ‘submerged . . . within a traditional male texture’.29 There has also been cause for concern about how far Goscelin may have reshaped the material with which he was presented. Goscelin undoubtedly had his own agenda and through Edith sought to promote a picture of humility and obedience that would serve as a model to other female religious.30 He had also been employed to present his Anglo-Saxon saints in ways that would make then fully acceptable to the new Norman establishment.31 Paul Hayward has suggested that

22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Vita S. Edithe, 271. Vita S. Edithe, 86–90. Vita S. Edithe, 79. Vita S. Leobae, 126, 129. Vita S. Edithe, 71–3. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, iii, 17, 262–7. J. Smith, ‘The problem of female sanctity in Carolingian Europe c. 780–920’, Past and Present 146, 1995, 3–37, at 10–18. Smith, ‘Problem of female sanctity’, 17. S. Millinger, ‘Humility and power: Anglo-Saxon nuns in Anglo-Norman hagiography’, in Medieval Religious Women 1: Distant Echoes, ed. J. Nichols and L. T. Shank, Kalamazoo 1984, 115–30. G. Whalen, ‘Patronage engendered: how Goscelin allayed the concerns of nuns’ discriminatory publics’, in Women, the Book and the Godly, ed. L. Smith and J. H. M. Taylor, Cambridge 1995, 123–35.

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this might have involved considerable rejigging of aspects of their cults so that Anglo-Saxon saints retrospectively acquired the correct type of liturgical commemoration following the translation of the body witnessed by the right kind of people.32 On the other hand, we can occasionally observe Goscelin’s methods of working. His version of the Life of St Mildrith of Minster-in-Thanet can be compared to several other versions in Latin and Old English, and although he wrote in a much more polished literary style and added in more commentary, moralising and learned comparisons, he seems to have worked with the basic facts that are common to all the accounts.33 His main additions relate to a contemporary dispute over the whereabouts of Mildrith’s bones and were no doubt included at the request of the community of St Augustine’s, by whom he was commissioned, and drew upon other material in their archives. Perusal of evidence of this type led Frank Barlow to conclude that Goscelin was an unusually accurate and conscientious hagiographer with a great respect for the authority of the evidence with which he was provided.34 Goscelin may have embellished his texts, but does not seem to have added factual details of his own invention. Such observations are supported by his Life of Wulfhild where no details are provided of her lengthy period of exile away from Barking; Goscelin left a major gap in her career rather than attempting to plug it with hagiographical platitudes.35 To better assess the biographical value of the written Lives we ideally need a means of comparing them with other depictions of their subjects. The fact that Anglo-Saxon women did not usually have public roles in either church or state means that references to them in written accounts of all types are fewer than for their male counterparts. There is less opportunity to construct an alternative biography for Edith in the way that Frank Barlow was able to do for her great-nephew Edward the Confessor in order to challenge the view that he was a ruler whose religious sensibilities left him little inclination to concern himself with the business of government. But where additional information does survive for some of our female saints, it can be of great value and, as we shall see, can support the view that their lives too were often lived in different ways from the models of saintly behaviour. For Leoba we are fortunate that other written sources of evidence do exist. In particular we have the letter she sent to Boniface from Wimborne in which she requested to join him in Germany, plus two letters from Boniface to her while she was in Germany and one from Lull.36 The letters confirm a number of facets of Rudolf’s Life, though there is no sign that they were known to him and they are not among the sources which he states that he used.37 The letters support

32 33 34 35 36 37

P. A. Hayward, ‘Translation-narratives in post-Conquest hagiography and English resistance to the Norman Conquest’, ANS 21, 1999, 67–93. Rollason, The Mildrith Legend, 60–68. Vita Ædwardi, 133–49. Yorke, ‘Legitimacy of St Edith’, 98–9. Die Briefe des heiligen Bonifatius und Lullus, ed. M. Tangl, MGH Epistolae selectae, i, Berlin 1916, nos. 29, 67, 96, 100. Boniface’s letters seem to have been preserved chiefly at Mainz, his archiepiscopal see, where one of the major manuscript versions still survives [Munich, Hof- und Staatsbibliothek, lat. 8112]. See Tangl, ‘Introduction’, Die Briefe, pp. vi–xxxi.

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aspects of Leoba’s life and character as they appear in Rudolf’s account. The one letter written by her, for instance, reveals her scholarship and command of Latin, and seems subsequently to have been used as an exemplar by others in the Boniface circle. But the letter also supplements Rudolf’s account on a significant point. Rudolf says that Boniface sent letters to her abbess asking for her to be allowed to join him in Germany, which no doubt did happen, but Leoba’s surviving letter reveals that it was she who had made the first move.38 Here we can see something of the strength of character that comes out in Rudolf’s account of her defying the storm or outfacing the accusations of immorality among the nuns when a dead baby was found in the nunnery’s stream.39 The letters also reveal the importance of her kinship with Boniface that is also referred to in Rudolf’s account, even though he tries to downplay it.40 Leoba’s main argument to Boniface for being allowed to join him was his obligations to her as a kinsman of her mother and friend of her father. It was probably because she was the closest kin he had in Germany that he delegated some of his authority to her both during his lifetime, when she provided the main religious authority in the area dependent on Tauberbischofsheim and had general oversight of the other female religious houses that he established, and after his death, when the monks of Fulda accepted her advice and rulings. Surviving evidence for Edith is of a rather different character. We do not have any of the wealthy objects with which she endowed the nunnery, but the means by which she was able to wield her patronage does survive in the form of her personal seal that was used as the conventual seal in the Middle Ages.41 The seal is an indication of the fact that Edith had personal property at her disposal, as Goscelin’s account implies, even if he does not spell it out. Her seal carries the unusual inscription regalis adelpha ‘royal sister’. Edith, in fact, seems to have been half-sister to the two sons of Edgar by different marriages who ruled after him successively, Edward the Martyr and Æthelred the Unready.42 The apparent desire to stress in this public object that she was the true sister of one or both of them can be seen to mirror the concern in the first section of Goscelin’s life to establish the legitimacy of the marriage of Edith’s mother Wulfthryth to King Edgar and the acknowledgement by Edgar and others of her status as his daughter while she was growing up at Wilton. Indicators of this concern are the accounts of the ceremonies surrounding her oblation, Edgar’s appointment of

38 39 40

41

42

Tangl, Die Briefe, no. 29. Vita S. Leobae, 127–8. Vita S. Leobae, 125; S. Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, Woodbridge 1992, 274–82. Rudolf says Boniface held Leoba ‘in great affection, not so much because she was related to him on his mother’s side as because he knew that by her holiness and wisdom she would confer many benefits by her word and example’; C. H. Talbot, The Anglo-Saxon Missionaries in Germany, London 1954, 214. Boniface’s earliest vita by Willibald does not refer to Leoba at all. F. Douce, ‘Some remarks on the original seal belonging to the abbey of Wilton’, Archaeologia 18, 1817, 40–54; T. A. Heslop, ‘English seals from the mid ninth century to 1100’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association 133, 1980, 4. However, see A. Williams, Æthelred the Unready. The Ill-Counselled King, London 2003, 2–6, for an argument that Wulfthryth may also have been the mother of Edward the Martyr.

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two foreign scholars as her tutors, her regular access to the king and her reception of visiting foreign dignitaries at Wilton on his behalf.43 Slight though these references are, they seem to confirm aspects present in the vitae written by Rudolf and Goscelin, but not stressed by them; rather both seek to deny, respectively, that the kinship of Leoba and Boniface was significant and that Edith’s model behaviour as a nun was compromised by her status as a princess. These cross-checkings with other sources of evidence encourage us to separate out authorial commentary from the biographical information with which the authors were provided. Although Rudolf and Goscelin both address female audiences (at least in part) and stress the models of good behaviour provided by their subjects, in fact they are unable to conceal completely that Leoba and Edith both lived lives that did not conform in entirety with contemporary legislation or monastic rules, and this can be seen as one of the most striking factors that supports a degree of biographical reliability in these accounts. Rudolf’s Leoba was in many ways a model nun and later leader of a monastic community, but, as has often been observed, she also strays into territory that was generally seen in the Early Middle Ages as the preserve of the male ecclesiastic. Thus, at a time when Carolingian legislation was urging stabilitas for nuns, Leoba travelled not only into the countryside around Tauberbischofsheim, but regularly to Fulda to visit Boniface and then his monks, and also to the royal court (even though Rudolf assures us she hated being there). At a time when miracles performed during the life of a saint were rare in Carolingian vitae and in the case of women were ‘exclusively conventual in setting and modest in scope’,44 Leoba was performing public miracles like her dramatic calming of the storm in the area around Tauberbischofsheim. Like Rudolf, Goscelin often seems to be battling against the tenor of his source material in order to present Edith as a model of humility and correct monastic behaviour.45 His problem was caused by the fact that, in spite of the adherence to the Benedictine Rule implied by the acceptance of the Regularis concordia by the major late Saxon religious communities, Anglo-Saxon nunneries of the late Saxon period had many features in common with the communities of canonesses of Germany and France that were not in accordance with the Benedictine Rule, including the retention of personal wealth and the recognition that women who had entered communities as young girls could leave in order to be married (as Edith’s mother Wulfthryth had done, and her aunt Wulfhild had been pressurised to do).46 Goscelin’s rhetoric cannot disguise the fact that Edith and Wulfthryth had large disposable incomes, and that Edith dressed as befitted a princess in elaborate dresses embroidered with gold and pearls. He tried his best with claims that she wore a hair shirt under her fine clothes,47 but the survival of the dresses themselves was eloquent testimony to the variation between Edith’s practice and

43 44 45 46 47

Vita S. Edithe, 39–69. For a fuller discussion see Yorke, ‘Legitimacy of St Edith’. Smith, ‘Female sanctity’, 31, and passim for Carolingian norms for female monasticism and vitae. Millinger, ‘Humility and power’. M. Parisse, ‘Les chanoinesses dans l’Empire germanique (ixe–xie siècles)’, Francia 6, 1978, 107–28; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, 85–9. Vita S. Edithe, 70–1.

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48

Benedictine norms. He was also much exercised by Edith’s private zoo of native and foreign animals given to her by visiting foreign dignitaries. In a long digression he tried to equate Edith’s love of hand-feeding her menagerie with the control over beasts given to various biblical personages, only to conclude that the care she lavished on them might not be entirely appropriate, but could be overlooked because of her many other fine qualities.49 Through Goscelin’s rhetoric we can glimpse some of the reality of Edith’s life as a princess growing up at Wilton and her mother’s effectiveness in running a large estate and community. Rudolf and Goscelin had assiduously acquired details of the lives of their saintly subjects and did their best to fit them into the pattern of their hagiographical models. One might speculate that they felt obliged to reproduce the biographical details with which they had been provided because they must contain important truths about their subjects whose saintliness had been demonstrated by appearance of the appropriate signa, and because their informants would naturally expect the details they had provided to appear. But it is becoming increasingly recognised that the contemporary vitae of male saints were not written simply because of the admiration and piety of the subjects’ followers, but for urgent practical reasons, often to safeguard the reputation of the deceased and the security of their communities,50 and we can suspect that this may be equally true of the impetus behind the composition of female vitae. The explosion of Merovingian male vitae in the seventh century can be linked to the tempestuous politics of the period in which many of the protagonists were involved,51 and such circumstances may also help to explain why the nuns of Barking felt the need to produce an account of miracles in their own community. The nunnery of Faremoûtiers which provided their model was drawn into the Merovingian conflicts and the machinations of Erchinoald, mayor of the palace of Neustria. Faremoûtiers had East Anglian princesses as abbesses, and their role in the Frankish nunnery can be presumed to be indicative of their family’s Frankish allegiances in which other dynasties in southern England seem also to have been involved.52 It has been suggested that the shared first name-element of Eorcenwald, the founder of Barking, and Erchinoald, mayor of Neustria, may indicate a connection between their families. If so, it may be relevant that towards the end of the seventh century the East Saxons came under the overlordship of the West Saxons whose recent bishops included Agilbert and his nephew Leuthere, who had

48 49 50 51

52

Vita S. Edithe, 71–2. Vita S. Edithe, 65–8. D. Rollason, ‘Hagiography and politics in early Northumbria’, in Holy Men and Holy Women: Old English Saints’ Lives and their Contexts, ed. P. Szarmach, Albany 1996, 95–114. P. Fouracre and R. A. Gerberding, Late Merovingian France. History and Hagiography 640–720, Manchester 1996; P. Fouracre, ‘The origins of the Carolingian attempt to regulate the cult of saints’, in The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Essays on the Contribution of Peter Brown, ed. J. Howard-Johnston and P. A. Hayward, Oxford 1999, 143–66. R. Le Jan, ‘Convents, violence and competition for power in seventh-century Francia’, in Topographies of Power in the Early Middle Ages, ed. M. de Jong and F. Theuws, with C van Rhijn, Brill 2001, 243–70, especially 254–5; Fouracre, ‘Origins’, 156–9.

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belonged to a faction in dispute with that of Erchinoald.53 Barking therefore may have experienced the same need as Faremoûtiers to protect itself by demonstrating the impeccable spiritual credentials of its nuns through instances of divine approval.54 The impetus for the composition of the vitae of Leoba and Rudolf can also be understood within a broader context. Rudolf’s Life of Leoba can take its place in the competition for the aura and legacy of Boniface.55 More specifically it can be seen as part of the rivalry between Fulda and Mainz for, in the first place, the body of Boniface, and then for other aspects of Boniface’s inheritance.56 The vita establishes that Leoba was Boniface’s heir, symbolised by his gift of his cowl to her, and that Fulda was heir of Leoba who, as Boniface had desired, was also buried within the monastery. Although she was not buried in the same tomb with him as he had requested, and was eventually translated to the Petersberg where she is still venerated, that does not mean that her presence and cult were not valued. The miracle reported by Rudolf as performed jointly by Boniface and Leoba suggests that their combined patronage, guaranteed by possession of both their bodies, was deemed significant.57 Leoba’s life provided validation for the type of work of Christianisation with which Fulda was much involved in the ninth century and which inevitably must have sometimes conflicted with the strict interpretation of monasticism found in Carolingian legislation. In her active role in the district around Tauberbischofsheim Rudolf’s Leoba provided a model of how a monastery could act as a spiritual centre and Christianising exemplar for its dependent district.58 Such an exemplar was also relevant to Hathumoda, the abbess of Gandersheim and daughter of the duke of Liudolf of Saxony to whom one manuscript of the work was dedicated, for in Saxony, as earlier in Anglo-Saxon England and in Hesse in the time of Leoba, nunneries could find themselves the dominant Christian community in regions that were still coming to terms with Christianity.59 Goscelin’s commission to commemorate Edith can be readily understood in the context of the Norman Conquest.60 Wilton was the richest of all the West Saxon nunneries and retained close connections with the old regime, for among those associated with it post-1066 were the dowager queen Edith, Gunnhild, the daughter of King Harold and Edith-Matilda, the niece of Edgar ætheling.61

53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

Fouracre, ‘Origins’, 158. Wilfrid, who was a major influence on King Caedwalla (685–88) who had an extensive overlordship in the south-east, was closely associated with Agilbert and Leuthere. Alternatively, see C. Stancliffe, ‘Jonas’s Life of Columbanus and his Disciples’, in Studies in Irish Hagiography. Saints and Scholars, Dublin 2001, 189–220, for the argument that the work was particularly concerned to counteract hostility to his communities, that had its origins in Columbanus’s Irish method of calculating Easter, among other issues. I. N. Wood, The Missionary Life. Saints and the Evangelisation of Europe 400–1050, Harlow 2001, 57–122. Hollis, Anglo-Saxon Women and the Church, 283–8. Vita S. Leobae, 130–1. Y. Hen, ‘Milites Christi utriusque sexus. Gender and the politics of conversion in the circle of Boniface’, Revue Bénédictine 109, 1999, 17–31. K. Leyser, Rule and Conflict in Early Medieval Society: Ottonian Saxony, London 1979, 49–73; Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, 123–7. Ridyard, Royal Saints, 171–5. Yorke, Nunneries and the Anglo-Saxon Royal Houses, 89–92.

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Wilton would have wanted to protect its position and the rights of its princessly occupants, and there would have been no better way to do this than through the reputation of its own house-saint. Goscelin produced a carefully nuanced Life, which managed to stress both Edith’s royalty and her chaste monastic life, with only occasional signs of strain from having to reconcile these two facets. His account of Edith’s post-mortem miracles stresses the effectiveness of the saint in defending her property.62 Behind Goscelin’s work lie carefully preserved traditions about Edith’s links with her father and the manifestations of her royal status that may have been initially assembled in the 970s or 980s in the rather different context of rivalry between the sons of Edgar and their supporters, with Edith’s mother Wulfthryth having separated from King Edgar and taken up the position of abbess of Wilton to allow him to marry Ælfthryth, the mother of Æthelred the Unready. In Wulfthryth’s version of events, which is presumably how Goscelin’s account can be interpreted, she both sought to protect the position of herself and Edith by stressing the legitimacy of her marriage to Edgar while at the same time providing evidence that could have adversely affected the position of Ælfthryth and Æthelred, for if her marriage was legitimate, and she had merely separated from Edgar, where did that leave the legitimacy of his marriage to Ælfthryth and the right of Æthelred to be recognised as his heir?63 By the late eleventh century these political controversies had lost their relevance, but the issue of the validity of the Anglo-Saxon custom of allowing women to withdraw from nunneries in order to marry received added impetus when many women sought sanctuary in nunneries in the immediate aftermath of 1066 and then desired to leave them again when the situation had calmed down. The histories of Wulfhild and Wulfthryth seem to have been carefully perused in this context by various late-eleventh- and early-twelfth-century historians, particularly when those who wished to withdraw included Gunnhild, the daughter of King Harold, and Malcolm Canmore’s daughter Edith-Matilda who was also of Anglo-Saxon royal descent.64 We undoubtedly have lost vitae of Anglo-Saxon female saints that once existed and for which tantalising traces survive. William of Malmesbury, for instance, provides hints of a possible Life of St Ælfgifu, wife of King Edmund, at Shaftesbury.65 Ælfgifu’s reputation rested on her good deeds while queen and recalls the contemporary vitae of Empress Matilda whose saintliness apparently stemmed from how she used her office and wealth as the consort of a ruler.66 These are tantalising fragments of a form of female hagiography that is otherwise unrepresented in Anglo-Saxon England, though there may be hints of it in the portrayal of Edith as both princess with worldly duties and nun. But though

62 63 64 65 66

Ridyard, Royal Saints, 148–54. Yorke, ‘Legitimacy of St Edith’. E. Searle, ‘Women and the succession at the Norman Conquest’, ANS 3, 1980, 159–70. One of the points at issue here was whether Gunnhild and Edith-Matilda had ever taken formal vows. D. Preest, trans., William of Malmesbury, Deeds of the Bishops of England, Woodbridge 2002, 124; De Gestis Pontificum, 186–7. P. Corbet, Les Saints ottoniens: sainteté dynastique, sainteté royale et sainteté féminine autour de l’an Mil, Beihefte von Francia 15, Sigmaringen 1986.

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there undoubtedly have been losses, the small number of women’s vitae compared to the number for men is likely to be a true reflection of what was produced and is comparable with the survival rate in other areas of western Europe.67 A relatively select group of women had accounts of their lives written sufficiently close to their lifetimes for accurate memories of their activities to be recorded. The pressure that ensured that their lives were recorded came not so much from their exceptional piety or saintliness, but because of who they were. It is no surprise in an early medieval context to find that it was to a large extent their family connections that gave Anglo-Saxon female saints their longer-term significance, for it had also provided them with the opportunities they exercised during their lifetimes.68 The importance of these female saints to their families may help to explain the almost complete absence of the woman-resisting-marriage motif in the contemporary Anglo-Saxon Lives.69 Marriages were so important for the interests of the family nexus that at least one contemporary hagiographer accepted them as a normal prelude to a female monastic career; Bede’s heroine Æthelthryth of Ely earned her fame for remaining chaste through two marriages, but he never suggests they should not have taken place nor offers criticism of her husbands or father for arranging them. Hagiographies can never be the same as biographies for they are not serving the same purpose.70 However, because the facts of how some religious women actually lived their lives were relevant to their post-mortem significance we can, particularly in the discernible gap between the reality of the women’s histories and hagiographic ideals, use them in part to reconstruct something of the biographies of a few of the privileged Anglo-Saxon women who were recognised as saints.

67 68 69

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Smith, ‘Female sanctity’, 6–10. Smith, ‘Female sanctity’, 25–8, suggests family interests and connections were equally important for Carolingian female saints. The exception is Goscelin’s Life of Wulfhild which contains a very unusual and circumstantial account of her escape from a lascivious King Edgar, but Goscelin was, of course, bringing a continental perspective to an Anglo-Saxon hagiographical tradition. ‘The saints’ Life is not strictly speaking a biographical genre so much as a “history” of this triangular relationship between a community, its saint and God’: Hayward, ‘Translation narratives’, 68.

4 Alfred and his Biographers: Images and Imagination RICHARD ABELS

Where now are the bones of the famous and wise goldsmith Weland?1

A

LFRED’S RHETORICAL question from his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy was meant to point up the transitory nature of human glory and fame. That we are still studying Alfred eleven hundred years later perhaps denies this assumption, but, looked at from a different perspective, the question is quite relevant to the survival of material and textual evidence for early medieval people, even one as famous as Alfred.2 Finding the bones of King Alfred the Great was, appropriately, the goal of the Hyde Community Archaeology Project’s well publicised and fruitless excavation of the Abbey in 1999.3 As dearly as historians would like to have Alfred’s remains to learn some personal details about the man, Alfred’s bones are probably no more recoverable than Weland’s. ‘Read no history’, a character in Disraeli’s novel Contarini Fleming exclaims. ‘Nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.’4 It is a good line, but I think 1

2 3

4

Alfred’s Old English Version of Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae, ed. W. J. Sedgefield, Oxford 1899, ch. 19, 46; trans. W. J. Sedgefield, King Alfred’s Version of the Consolations of Boethius Done into Modern English, Oxford 1900, 48. An extended version of this chapter was presented as a featured talk at the annual meeting of the Charles Homer Haskins Society in November 2003. I owe a debt of gratitude to my late friend and colleague, Patrick Wormald, for his wise comments and advice. I am also indebted to Paul Kershaw, David Bates, Paul Hyams, Ellen Harrison, Diane Korngiebel, Nancy Ellenberger, and my colleagues at the United States Naval Academy History Department’s works-inprogress seminar for their criticism, comments and encouragement. Above all I wish to thank Frank Barlow whose scholarly work on Anglo-Saxon and Norman England did so much to shape my views, and whose masterful biographies of Edward the Confessor, William Rufus, and Thomas Becket are models for all of us who aspire to write biographies of medieval people. Simon Keynes, ‘The cult of King Alfred the Great’, ASE 28, 1999, 225–356, is an invaluable guide to popular reception of Alfred from the twelfth through to the beginning of the twentieth century. ‘Summary of Hyde Community Archaeology Project’, Archaeological Services, Winchester City Council (www.winchester.gov.uk/arts_museums/archaeology/alfred_search.shtml), 29 June 2003. The researchers concluded that Alfred’s remains were lost when a town gaol was built in 1788 upon the site of his grave. The prisoners assigned to remove the rubble left by Henry VIII’s commissioners two and a half centuries before discovered Alfred’s coffin. For them the lead that encased the stone coffin was far more valuable than what lay within it. They shattered the coffin, scattered the bones, and sold the lead. Benjamin Disraeli, Contarini Fleming, part 1, ch. 23, quoted in The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations, ed. Robert Andrews, New York 1993, 91.

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completely mistaken. Biographers do not live the lives of their subjects; they create narratives of those lives through selection and analysis of evidence.5 For modern biographers this often entails selecting what they deem truly germane to the planned narrative from a plethora of information, much as security analysts separate out meaningful intelligence from the ‘noise’ surrounding it. For biographers of early medieval people the problem is dramatically different. The evidence is fragmentary, and the difficulty of writing about the ‘inner life’ of a person without the ‘tools of the biographer’s trade’ – diaries, private correspondence, memoirs and the memories of those who knew the subject – is self evident.6 The authenticity and meanings of the sources, moreover, are often questionable. None of the evidence is truly transparent. A historian ideally determines what is and is not authentic evidence through the application of objective, scientific principles, and then fashions a narrative through the ordering and interpretation of the validated sources, attempting to recover as well as possible the historical reality underlying those sources. In the case of ‘twice-told tales’ such as that of King Alfred, however, historians begin with received narratives and meta-narratives reflecting the broad consensus of the historical community. In each retelling, of course, the story is modified, as the historian reshapes it according to his or her interests, assumptions, and understanding of the historical record. How critical a historian is about a disputed source is, moreover, influenced to a degree by how well the information offered by that source accords with the other elements of the narrative he or she has fashioned. Both of these trends can be detected in the narratives of Alfred fashioned by the one contemporary and three modern biographers I have chosen to discuss in this chapter: Asser, Charles Plummer, Alfred Smyth and myself. I shall briefly review how each presented Alfred and his life, how the images of Alfred that they brought with them influenced their judgment on the authenticity of evidence (and vice versa), and how evidence and image combined to dictate the ‘story’ each constructed. I will conclude with my own views on what we can know about Alfred and what we cannot. Much of what we know about Asser comes from autobiographical asides in his Life of King Alfred. He was ‘raised, educated, tonsured and, eventually, ordained’ at St David’s, a monastery in Dyfed in the farthest reaches of southwestern Wales.7 A kinsman of a bishop of St David’s, Asser himself may have been the monastery’s bishop in 885 when King Alfred first summoned him to his

5

6

7

The essays in The History and Narrative Reader, ed. Geoffrey Roberts, London and New York 2001, and Murray G. Murphey, The Philosophical Foundations of Historical Knowledge, Albany 1994, 288–99, are good introductions to the philosophical debates over narrative and historical epistemology. Richard Abels, Alfred the Great: War, Kingship and Culture in Anglo-Saxon England, London and New York 1998, 9; Sarah Hamilton, ‘Review article: Early medieval rulers and their biographers’, EME 9, 2000, 247–60, esp. 248. For the difficulties faced by biographers of modern subjects in constructing their ‘interior reflections’ and ‘self’, see Nancy W. Ellenberger, ‘Constructing George Wyndham: narratives of aristocratic masculinity in fin-de-siècle England’, Journal of British Studies 39, 2000, 487–517, particularly 491–2 and notes. For reasons I have expressed elsewhere, I am not persuaded by Alfred P. Smyth’s vigorous attempts spanning two books to prove this work a forgery. I still believe it to be what it purports to be: a contemporary Life of the king written by one who knew him, the Welsh monk and bishop Asser.

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8

court. With the approval of his fellow monks, Asser agreed to serve in Alfred’s household for six months in each year. As presented by Asser, this arrangement was to benefit both parties: the monks were to gain a powerful lay protector against the depredations of the king of Dyfed, who had recently submitted to Alfred’s lordship, and Alfred was to profit from the learning of St David, in the person of Asser. Alfred also made it clear to the Welshman that he would find the king a most generous patron – and he did. Over the next few years, King Alfred bestowed upon Asser two monasteries in Somerset, Banwell and Congresbury, and, some time later, a far larger monastery in Exeter with its various dependencies in Cornwall and Devonshire. Some time between 892 and 900, Asser succeeded Bishop Wulfsige in the see of Sherborne. He survived into the reign of Alfred’s son, Edward the Elder, and died in 908 or 909. If Alfred rewarded Asser with ecclesiastical offices and land, Asser answered the king’s generosity with love and service. He read to the king from the Bible and other salutary Latin works and helped him acquire the competency in Latin that enabled Alfred – with the help of Asser, among others – to translate these works into his native tongue. The Life of King Alfred, written in 893 at a time of crisis when Alfred was fighting off a second viking invasion of his kingdom, was a manifestation of that love and service. Asser’s Life of King Alfred is an authentic and invaluable source, but it is also a problematic text that must be used critically.9 Alfred Smyth is quite right to remind us that no medieval manuscript, let alone a contemporary copy, of this work survives, and that all that we have are reconstructions based upon early modern transcripts of a lost manuscript. The Life’s loose organisation, repetitions, inconsistent use of verb tenses, and lack of conclusion, moreover, suggest a work in progress rather than a polished text. What we call the Life of King Alfred may be no more than an imperfect copy of an incomplete draft. But the greatest stumbling block to the historian is the nature of the work itself. The Life of King Alfred is not a biography in the modern sense. Asser did not strive for historical accuracy and objectivity. Rather, like Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, upon which it drew,10 the Vita Ælfredi was meant to be an encomium, a celebration of Alfred’s greatness for the edification of its multiple audiences: the monks of St David’s, the royal court, the king’s sons, and, first and foremost, Alfred

8

9 10

Asser’s Life of King Alfred together with the Annals of Saint Neots erroneously attributed to Asser, ed. W. H. Stevenson, Oxford 1904; Alfred the Great: Asser’s Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. with an introduction and notes by S. D. Keynes and M. Lapidge, London 1983, ch. 79. Alfred calls Asser his bishop in the preface to his translation of Pastoral Care, though Asser was not yet bishop of Sherborne. It is possible that Asser served as a suffragan bishop at Exeter under Bishop Wulfsige, but it is more likely that Asser’s episcopal office was in Wales. In ch. 79 of the Life, Asser associates himself with the bishops of St David’s expelled by King Hyfaidd of Dyfed in disputes with the monastery over jurisdiction. If one rejects Asser’s authorship of the Life, Asser becomes a far more shadowy character. Even the identification of him as a Welshman is called into doubt. See Alfred P. Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great. A Translation and Commentary on the Text Attributed to Asser, Houndsmills, Basingstoke and New York 2002, 115–17. On the question of authenticity, see Abels, Alfred the Great, 318–26. Asser, ch. 73, trans. Keynes and Lapidge, 88; Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, 54, 294. Cf. Eginhard, Vie de Charlemagne, ed. L. Halphen, 4th edn, Les Classiques de l’Histoire de France au Moyen Age, Paris 1967, 2.

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himself, to whom the work was dedicated.11 Asser’s ‘Alfred’ is a model ninthcentury Christian king: a lover of wisdom, truthful, patient, munificent in giftgiving, just, a defender of the poor and weak, incomparably affable, intimate with his friends, faithful to his God, and, to top it all off, a victorious warrior in a holy war.12 Underlying Asser’s image of Alfred are received models: biblical examplars of virtuous kingship, Solomon and David in particular; Carolingian mirrors for princes; and, most importantly, the teachings and personal example of Pope Gregory the Great.13 As is well known, Asser explicitly shaped his presentation of the king’s life, actions and character along the lines of Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne, just as Einhard modelled his biography on Suetonius’s Augustus. Even Asser’s personal reminiscences may have been influenced by a desire to follow a model. His reluctance to join Alfred’s court without the permission of his people and the gifts that Alfred gave him recall Alcuin’s entry in Charlemagne’s service as recounted in the anonymous Frankish Life of Alcuin, a comparison flattering to both author and patron.14 Although Asser used Carolingian models, much of what he added to the Life came from his own knowledge of Alfred and the court. He repeated the king’s favorite stories, such as the tale of the wicked Queen Eadburh and how she came to a wretched end, and wrote of Alfred’s love of learning and methods of governance from first-hand experience. Several of these stories are historically problematic, so much so that Alfred Smyth sees them as proof positive that the author of the Life could not have known the real Alfred. Though historical accuracy is of paramount concern to modern historians, it was less critical to Asser and his audience. As with Bede, Asser’s truth was moral rather than empirical, and his Life of Alfred provided for its subject a useable past. Although Alfred undoubtedly did suffer from life-long illness, possibly Crohn’s disease, for Asser what was important was the spiritual significance of the king’s suffering. His narrative of Alfred’s illness, as Paul Kershaw, Tony Scharer, and David Pratt have argued, was designed to legitimate the king’s rule at a time when it was being challenged by viking incursion and, possibly, the coming of age of Alfred’s nephews. The king’s haemorrhoids become a divine gift, a scourge of God intended to strengthen his devotion to chastity. When Alfred prays for a less agonising and visible condition that would still temper his carnal lusts, he is miraculously cured, only to be visited by another Godgiven ailment years later on his wedding night.15 Gregorian teaching about the

11

12 13

14 15

J. Campbell, ‘Asser’s Life of Alfred’, in The Inheritance of Historiography 350–900, ed. C. Holdsworth and T. Wiseman, Exeter 1986, 122–5; Anton Scharer, ‘The writing of history at King Alfred’s court’, EME 5, 1996, 185–206. Cf. D. P. Kirby, ‘Asser and his Life of King Alfred’, Studia Celtica 6, 1971, 12–35; Keynes and Lapidge, 56, and Simon Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the Mercians’, in Kings, Currency, and Alliances: The History and Coinage of Southern England, AD 840–900, ed. M. A. S. Blackburn and D. N. Dumville, Woodbridge 2002, 1–45, who argue for a principally Welsh audience. Asser, chs. 13, 42, 76, 80, 81, 88, 91, 99–106. See Scharer, ‘The writing of history’, 194–9. J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Early Germanic Kingship in England and on the Continent, Oxford 1971, 141, and, much more fully, Scharer, ‘The writing of history’, 188–200. Scharer emphasizes Asser’s debt to Sedulius’s Liber de rectoribus Christianis, a mirror for princes composed for King Charles the Bald around 870. Keynes and Lapidge, 265, n. 195. Cf. Alfred P. Smyth, King Alfred the Great, Oxford 1995, 225–7. Asser, ch. 74.

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salutary value of physical suffering to restrain sexual desire underlies Asser’s constructed narrative, as do Carolingian political ideas about humility and self restraint being (in Paul Kershaw’s words) ‘the sine qua non for the legitimate and propitious exercise of royal power’.16 Alfred’s ability to perform his duties as king despite the ravages of the flesh provides a moral counterpoint to the nobility’s duty to obey the king in all things necessary for the ‘common good’.17 Asser’s intention was not to remake Alfred into a saint, but to glorify him as a Christian king without blemish, a lord who deserved love and obedience. This was how Alfred himself wished to be perceived. The first biography of King Alfred was already a twice-told tale. Underlying Asser’s Life of King Alfred were two preexisting narratives, one historical and the other what a biblical exegete would call tropological. The latter was the story of King David. Alfred’s life as presented by Asser parallels David’s in a number of significant ways. Both were younger sons who rose to kingship. Just as Samuel had chosen the child David in preference to his brothers, so the child Alfred was anointed king by the pope – or at least that was how the story was told in 893. And just as David had to flee into the wilderness from his enemies, so Alfred had to retreat into the marshes of Somerset before he emerged as the triumphant king. David was, of course, provided the topos for christus rex in the early middle ages, and as such was, along with Solomon, the biblical persona favored by Carolingian rulers and their clerical supporters. But David’s story may have resonated with Alfred and Asser for other reasons, some personal and others topical. There were, after all, other ‘sons of Jesse’ who could claim the throne or at least succession to it. The other preexisting narrative was, of course, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. About half of the Life is a Latin translation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the years 851 to 887. From the Chronicle Asser inherited a narrative of Alfred’s heroic and lonely defence of his kingdom against a ‘great heathen army’, and of his improbable victory that not only saved his people but rescued the Mercians from Danish rule. The Chronicle enabled Asser to place Alfred within a historical context, so that his audience would appreciate Alfred’s providential rise to the West Saxon kingship, his victories over a heathen enemy who had destroyed the kingdoms of his neighbors, his founding of a new kingdom of ‘Angles’ and ‘Saxons’, and (with a touch of hyperbole) his triumphant emergence as ‘ruler’ (rector) of ‘all the Christians of the island of Britain’.18 The only thing missing from the story was that which could not be provided by a contemporary, an appreciation of Alfred’s place in the meta-narrative of England; that was to be the

16

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Paul Kershaw, ‘Illness, power and prayer in Asser’s Life of King Alfred’, EME 10, 2001, 220. See also Scharer, ‘The writing of history’, 177–206; and ‘Zu drei Themen in der Geschictschreibung der Zeit König Alfreds (871–899)’, in Ethnogese und Überlieferung angewandte Methoden der Frühmittelalterforschung, ed. K. Brunner and B. Merta, Vienna and Munich 1994, 200–08; Herrschaft und Repräsentation. Studien zur Hofkultur König Alfreds des Grossen, Vienna and Munich 2000, 66–76. Asser, ch. 91, ed. Stevenson, 79. David Pratt, ‘The illnesses of King Alfred the Great’, ASE 30, 2001, 83–90. I do not go as far as Pratt in seeing Asser (and Alfred) as having constructed a narrative in which the king’s ‘sexual sinfulness . . . implicated the king himself in the spiritual cause of the Danish attacks’ (p. 86). Asser, 1.

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contribution of St Albans’ great thirteenth-century historians, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris.19 That the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s presentation of history was conducive to Asser’s purposes is not surprising; both works emerged from the same milieu, Alfred’s court, and both were designed to propagate what might be thought of as the ‘official’ image of the king. Asser was an image-maker, to be sure, but the image he devised came ultimately from Alfred himself, and this image proved so compelling and seductive that it has shaped all subsequent portrayals of Alfred. A thousand years later, the Reverend Charles Plummer, Fellow and Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, published his The Life and Times of Alfred the Great, Being the Ford Lectures for 1901 in the midst of Alfred’s millenary celebration and in the shadow of the death of Queen Victoria.20 At the time he wrote, England was, in Plummer’s words, in the midst of ‘a “boom” in things Alfredian’. Plummer, who had recently made his mark on the study of AngloSaxon history with wonderfully annotated critical editions of Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (1896) and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (1892 and 1899), was the natural person to inaugurate Oxford University’s Ford Lectureship with a series of lectures on the suggested subject, King Alfred.21 Plummer was well aware that he stood in a long line of biographers of Alfred stretching back to Powell and Spelman in the seventeenth century, and accepted the honour with the caveat ‘that it was unlikely that on such a well-worked period of English history I should be able to offer anything very new or original’.22 All that he could aspire to, he said, was to remove ‘some of the difficulties and confusions which have gathered round the subject, and put in my own words, and arrange in my own way, what has been previously written by others or myself’. ‘But’, he added, ‘if I cannot tell you much that is very new, I hope that what I shall tell you may be approximately true.’23 Plummer’s goal was to prune away the many myths that had gathered around Alfred and to restore the historical person and celebrate his real accomplishments. Plummer was particularly interested in establishing the authenticity and reliability of the sources. The first two of his six lectures were devoted precisely to this, but his critical approach to texts marks the entire book. ‘We shall begin’, he announced

19 20

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Keynes, ‘Cult of King Alfred’, 231–2. The various activities of the millenary celebration are recorded in Alfred Bowker’s The King Alfred Millenary. A Record of the Proceedings of the National Commemoration, London 1902. W. H. Stevenson, who was to publish what is still the standard critical edition of Asser’s Life of King Alfred in 1904, protested, to no avail, against the misdating of the celebration by a national committee of government officials, educators, and prelates, W. H. Stevenson, ‘The date of King Alfred’s death’, EHR 13, 1898, 71–7. See P. S. Allen, F. M. Stenton, and R. I. Best, ‘Charles Plummer, 1851–1927’, PBA 15, 1929, 463–76, esp. 467–9, repr. (without bibliography of his writings) in Michael Lapidge, compiler, Interpreters of Early Medieval Britain, Oxford and New York 2002, 77–88. See also the appreciation by J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Bede and Plummer’, in Early Medieval History, Oxford 1975, repr. in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People: A Historical Commentary, OMT 1988, pp. xv–xxxv. Charles Plummer, The Life and Times of Alfred the Great, Being the Ford Lectures for 1901, Oxford 1902, repr. New York 1970, 5. Ibid., 5.

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with a critical survey of the materials at our disposal. We shall find them in many respects disappointingly scanty and incomplete. But we must not allow ourselves to supply the defects of the evidence by the luxuriance of a riotous imagination. The growth of legend is largely due to the unwillingness of men to acquiesce in inevitable ignorance, especially in the case of historical characters like Alfred, whom we rightly desire to honour and to love.24

As is perhaps natural for an editor, for Plummer ‘the material at our disposal’ was literary texts. Though he mentions in passing the archaeologist and topographer the Rev. C. S. Taylor and comments briefly on the surviving earthworks at Wareham and the Alfred Jewel, Plummer was largely uninterested in (and perhaps failed to see the relevance of) the evidence offered by material remains; nor was he interested in the technical disciplines of philology, diplomatic, or Old English law.25 For Plummer historical evidence meant texts, and the centerpiece of his discussion of Alfredian sources is a thirty-eight-page long (pp. 14–52) analysis of ‘the so-called life of Alfred which bears the name of Asser’. Working independently, Plummer came to the same conclusion as would W. H. Stevenson in his critical edition of Asser’s Life three years later: the Life is the authentic work of the Welsh bishop Asser but nonetheless must be ‘used with caution and criticism’ in part because of its textual history. ‘That there is a nucleus [in it] which is the genuine work of a single writer, a South Walian contemporary of Alfred, I feel tolerably sure’, Plummer announced, ‘and I know no reason why that South Walian contemporary should not be Asser.’26 What persuaded Plummer that his analysis was correct, or at the very least impartial, was that he had begun with ‘a strong prejudice against the authenticity of Asser’.27 The text was indeed authentic, but that did not mean that its testimony was historically reliable. Plummer, like V. H. Galbraith and Alfred Smyth later, was particularly disturbed by Asser’s story about Alfred’s illness. He found it ‘inconceivable that Alfred could possibly have accomplished what he did under the pressure of incapacitating illness’. But Plummer appreciated, as Galbraith and Smyth have sometimes not, ‘we must distinguish between what is historically doubtful and what is textually suspicious’.28 Despite the care with which he approached source criticism, Plummer brought a number of preconceptions to his analysis. Asser’s less credible statements, for instance, are attributed to the largeness of his ‘Celtic imagination’ and its characteristic ‘rebellion against facts’.29 Plummer found the story of Alfred’s illness not only muddled but distasteful, reeking of unpleasant religious morbidity unworthy of his Alfred.30 As a High Churchman, Plummer felt it proper to begin his book

24 25

26 27 28 29 30

Ibid., 9–10. Ibid., 6, 47, 100. Both Stenton and Wallace-Hadrill note his lack of interest in technical disciplines. Allen, Stenton, and Best, ‘Charles Plummer’, 469, and Wallace-Hadrill, ‘Bede and Plummer’, in Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, xvi. Plummer, Alfred the Great, 52. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 28. Ibid., 41, 52. Ibid., 27–8.

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with a eulogy for Bishop Stubbs and to end it with the sermon he had preached before the University of Oxford on the Sunday following the death of Queen Victoria, a sermon in which he noted how appropriate it was for the Queen to pass in the year of the millenary anniversary of the death of King Alfred, the greatest of her ancestors, and the one whom she most resembled in her adherence to duty, uncompromising honesty, and devotion to the good of her people.31 P. S. Allen remembered the Rev. Plummer as attending every Chapel service, reading the lessons on weekday evening services and playing the organ on Sundays.32 But Plummer’s piety was the High Anglicanism of the Victorian era. He accepted Alfred’s piety as ‘true and earnest’ but had little sympathy for the credulity of the ninth century which accepted miracle tales uncritically, transformed ‘the natural feeling of Christian reverence for the body . . . into an unhealthy passion for collecting dead men’s bones’, and reduced the prayers of saints to ‘a mere sort of lucky bag or wishing cap for the obtaining of anything that is wanted’.33 The nearest that Plummer comes to criticism of Alfred is when he labels him in terms of religion ‘the child of his century’. Plummer knew Alfred from his long study of the sources and he brought this knowledge to bear on assessing the authenticity of dubious texts such as the Life of St Neot and the Annals of St Neot. Plummer disposed, for instance, of ‘the silly story about the cakes, and the yet more silly story of the tyranny and callousness of Alfred in the early years of his reign’ by pronouncing them ‘utterly inconsistent . . . with the genuine history of the reign’.34 Similarly, he denounced the ‘abominable theory’ that Alfred’s father King Æthelwulf divorced his mother in order to marry the Carolingian child princess Judith. Plummer knew Osburh to be ‘noble in character as in race’ and Æthelwulf to be too honorable to act so disgracefully. Plummer protested: ‘No amount of chronological difficulties [in Asser’s story of Alfred’s childhood reading contest] would induce me to accept a moral impossibility like this.’35 How Plummer came to know Alfred so well is not at all clear from reading The Life and Times of Alfred the Great. Plummer’s biography offers little discussion or speculation about the ‘inner man’, not even in his summary and conclusion. The closest that Plummer comes is in his discussion of Alfred’s putative translation of Orosius, where he quotes approvingly a German scholar’s appreciation of Alfred: ‘We see Alfred here . . . simple, high-hearted, and earnest; full of warm appreciation for all that is good, and of scorn for all that is evil.’36 Plummer also identifies passages in the Boethius that he believed to be indicative of Alfred’s ‘soaring superiority to . . . “the wind of stern labours, and the rain of excessive anxiety” ’.37 But Plummer made such remarks cautiously, since he was well aware that many of these interpolations may have arisen from glosses that

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., 210. Allen, Stenton, and Best, ‘Charles Plummer’, 467. Plummer, Alfred the Great, 143–4. Ibid., 24, 54–8. Ibid., 84. Ibid., 165. Ibid., 182.

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Alfred and his circle of learned ‘friends’ used in the work of translation.38 Indeed, Plummer’s discussion of Alfred’s literary works focuses on source criticism. His main concern was to establish which works were actually translated by Alfred, and he devoted much of his effort, ironically, to a spirited defence of the king’s authorship of the Old English Orosius and Bede, texts that are no longer included in the Alfredian canon.39 Even stripped of the myths that had grown around him, Plummer’s historical Alfred still looks remarkably like the Alfred of tradition. Gone were picturesque stories about burnt cakes, encounters with saints, and Alfred’s visit to the Danish camp disguised as a minstrel.40 Gone also were his invention of England’s tithings, hundreds and shires, his founding – or better, refounding – of Oxford University, and even his fatherhood of the English navy. What remained was an Alfred who ‘holds in real history the place which romance assigns to Arthur’, an English Christian king whose victory at Edington was ‘a turning point in the history, not only of England, but of Western Europe’.41 Plummer’s ‘real’ Alfred remained England’s ‘Darling’. Alfred, Plummer admits, won Edington in part because he spent his time at Athelney organising victory rather than burning cakes.42 But the greatest cause of his success, according to Plummer, was his personality and character which inspired love among his subjects. Plummer, ever the textual scholar, cited the authority of the Chronicle, for it tells us that when Alfred met his assembled troops at Egbert’s Stone, they rejoiced to see him.43 Plummer’s Alfred also made good use of the peace he won. He reorganised the army and his civil administration, built forts at strategic points, issued law, restored justice, and, after weathering the second viking storm, fostered education and personally took the lead in a royal program of translation of those Latin books ‘most necessary for all men to know’.44 In Plummer’s judgment Alfred was history’s most perfect king, just as England was its finest nation.45 Alfred P. Smyth’s King Alfred the Great, published by Oxford University Press in 1995, was the first full-scale scholarly biography of Alfred since Plummer’s. Plummer had declared that there was nothing new to be said on the subject; Smyth set out to prove him wrong. Alfred Smyth had previously earned a reputation as an iconoclast by defending the historical value of eleventh-century skaldic verse and thirteenth-century sagas for Scandinavian military and political activities in ninth- and tenth-century Britain. Now he was to add to that reputation by claiming to have uncovered an academic conspiracy of silence concerning ‘a thousand years of deceit’.46 For Smyth had discovered the truth about

38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

Ibid., 180–1. Ibid., 156–75. Cf. Janet Bately, ed. and commentary, The Old English Orosius, Early English Text Society, suppl. ser. 6, Oxford 1980, pp. lxxiv–lxxv; D. Whitelock, ‘The Old English Bede’, PBA 48, 1962, 57–90. Plummer, Alfred the Great, 6–7, 24, 56–9, 62–8. Ibid., 104, 105, 210. Ibid., 105–6. Ibid., 102, 107, quoting ASC s.a. 878. Plummer, Alfred the Great, 139–96. Ibid., 199–202. Alfred Smyth, King Alfred the Great, Oxford 1995, pp. ix–xii, 1, 149–70, in particular 153–4.

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Asser’s Life of King Alfred, namely that it was a forgery composed around the year 1000 by Byrhtferth of Ramsey. Given that about a third of Smyth’s 602 dense pages is given over to arguing his case against Asser, the book might have been more accurately entitled, ‘King Alfred the Great and the Case of the Fraudulent and Incompetent Life attributed to Asser’. With some exceptions, the scholarly community was not persuaded, either on linguistic or historical grounds. Some of the critical reviews, in fact, were quite harsh.47 Smyth himself acknowledges that his views ‘are still those of a dissenting minority’, and has answered his critics with a new translation of what he now terms the ‘Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great’ and a full commentary in which he reiterated and, in some places, expanded upon his thesis of deceit.48 I am not going to rehearse here the arguments for and against the authenticity of Asser.49 I am more interested in the impact that Smyth’s conviction had upon his handling of other source materials and on the portrait that he drew of Alfred. As Simon Keynes observed in an extended review article, Smyth was intent upon proving that the ‘Pseudo-Asser’ offers nothing of original historical value. Given this premise, it was necessary for him, as Simon Keynes put it, to ‘debunk as forgeries’ ‘any surviving texts or documents which seem to corroborate the Life in one respect or another, and which are not likely to have been available to the (supposed) forger’.50 This is quite apparent in his discussion of Alfred’s charters in Chapter Fourteen, where he begins by challenging the idea that charters offer ‘some superior form of historical testimony’.51 As Smyth points out, we have only eighteen charters that are purported to have been issued in Alfred’s name and six others in which he only witnesses.52 Of these only three, Sawyer nos. 344, 350, and 1203, survive in their original form or as an early copy. The others are either medieval copies of originals (some with monastic improvements) or forgeries. Charter criticism is a highly technical, but hardly exact, science and, as Smyth points out, specialists have pronounced contradictory assessments upon virtually every charter that has survived only in later form. Though Smyth’s general caveat is valid, when it comes to his actual analyses of the charters attributed to Alfred, Smyth shows remarkably little interest in the traditional methods of authentication. Rather, he seems to regard as spurious any charter that might offer support for the authenticity of Asser.53 Typical of his

47

48 49 50 51 52 53

See, e.g., M. Lapidge, ‘A king or monkish fable?’, The Times Higher Education Supplement, 8 March 1996, 20; D. R. Howlett, review of Smyth, King Alfred the Great, EHR 112, 1997, 942–4; S. D. Keynes, ‘On the authenticity of Asser’s Life of King Alfred’, JEH 47, 1996, 529–51; James Campbell, ‘Alfred’s Lives’, Times Literary Supplement, 26 July 1996, 30, is more positive but still rejects the thesis of forgery; M. Altschull’s review in American Historical Review 102, 1997, 1463–4. Smyth, The Medieval Life of King Alfred the Great, p. xvii. For my views, see Abels, Alfred the Great, 318–26. Keynes, ‘Authenticity’, 534. Smyth, King Alfred, 374. The title of the chapter is a rhetorical question: ‘The charters of King Alfred: a higher order of scholarship or speculation?’ S342a–357 (issued in Alfred’s name); S217, 218, 223, 1441, 1442 (Mercian charters attested by Alfred); S1203. Keynes, ‘Authenticity’, 540.

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approach, Smyth rejects as forgeries, without analysis of their formulae, those charters whose witness lists have the ætheling Alfred attesting in conjunction with his brother Æthelred because ‘it is obvious that Æthelred’s name was used by forgers as a mere adjunct to that of his younger brother – prompted by the Chronicle’s harping on the formula “King Æthelred and his brother Alfred” ’.54 Smyth’s suspicions about charters surviving in late copies evaporate, however, when he turns in the very next chapter to Alfred’s Will, a document preserved in an early eleventh-century copy in the archives of the New Minster in Winchester.55 Because the Will provides needed details for his account, and because at points it seems to be at odds with ‘Pseudo-Asser’, Smyth accepts it without question or reservation. While Smyth contests virtually all the information contained in the Life,56 he is far more accepting of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle as a source, albeit as a misleading and tendentious one. Smyth accepts, contra Stenton, Plummer’s contention that Alfred was the guiding spirit behind the composition of the Chronicle. Alfred, he argues, commissioned and supervised a team of scholars to write a chronicle designed to anchor West Saxon history and the accomplishments of Alfred’s royal house in a Roman and Christian past, and to preserve Alfred’s own glory for posterity.57 Though Smyth rejects R. H. C. Davis’s term ‘propaganda’, he embraces whole-heartedly, as I do, the idea that the Chronicle’s narrative is carefully fashioned to reflect Alfred’s own ‘spin’ on English history and, in particular, on events during his own reign.58 Smyth’s narrative of military events, covering the book’s first one hundred and forty-six pages, shows a healthy scepticism about the Chronicle’s reporting, and he critiques it by referring to the fuller narratives of contemporary Carolingian and Irish chronicles. In line with the work of his mentor, the late J. M. WallaceHadrill, and contemporaries such as Janet Nelson and Patrick Wormald, Smyth places his story of Alfred within a wider European setting. Viking activity in ninth-century England, Alfred’s response to the threat, and the king’s literary program – discussed ably, if provocatively, at the book’s end – are considered in relation to happenings in Francia and Ireland. But perhaps what most characterises Smyth’s narrative is its pugnacity. He seems intent upon challenging virtually all the traditional assessments, especially those made by Stenton and Whitelock, who for him represent the ‘Establishment’ par excellence. I find some of his revisionist analysis persuasive – because I came to the same conclusions independently – and much of it not.59 Though he dismisses harshly the ‘preposterous chain(s) of supposition and guesswork’ used by Stenton and others to confirm historical information contained in the Life,60 Smyth asserts on the basis of equally, if not more, suspect reasoning, and even less evidence, that Æthelred’s 54 55 56 57 58 59 60

Smyth, King Alfred, 377. Keynes and Lapidge, Alfred the Great, 313; S1507. Smyth, King Alfred, 1–8, 527–8, 544–8. See the detailed responses by Keynes, ‘Authenticity’. Ibid., 523, 529–30, 586. Ibid., 39, 71, 75, 91, 95. E.g. Smyth’s suggestion that Guthrum regarded arrival of a viking band at Fulham in 878 as a threat. Smyth, King Alfred, 87. Cf. Abels, Alfred the Great, 163. Smyth, King Alfred, 27.

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and Alfred’s mother was not the same woman who gave birth to their elder siblings, and the even more remarkable conclusion that Alfred never went to Rome as a child and, for reasons that were not clear to me, deliberately lied in the Chronicle about having done so.61 And though Smyth does end up agreeing with Plummer and Whitelock about the significance of Edington, his scepticism is such that the gifts that Alfred gave Guthrum at his baptism become ‘dangegeld’ (!) rather than the more likely symbol of Alfred’s hard-won overlordship.62 If the Chronicle brings us into the presence of Alfred the ‘spin doctor’, Alfred’s translations serve Smyth as a more transparent window into the mind of the king. Smyth’s discussion of Alfred’s literary efforts in Chapter Nineteen, tellingly entitled ‘The Genuine Alfred’, is, in fact, sensitive and insightful. He, like myself, assumes that the translations represent the thoughts of Alfred rather than those of his teachers. Smyth was persuaded of this by his conception of Alfred as a learned scholar and philosopher. Moreover, having rejected Asser, he needed the Chronicle and the translations to be reliable sources for his subject. For without them, no biography at all would have been possible. The elevation of the Chronicle and Alfred’s translations, then, was the necessary, if unconscious, consequence of rejecting the authority of Asser. So what does Alfred look like if, following Smyth, we strip away the accretions of ‘Pseudo-Asser’ and finally do justice to the man? Actually, remarkably like Plummer’s Alfred, since Plummer regarded many of the stories related in the Life as Celtic tall tales and was just as unaccepting of the idea of Alfred the invalid king.63 Smyth’s Alfred is still the warrior-king and scholar. If anything, Smyth’s Alfred, whose love of study is now revealed as a childhood as well as adult passion, is a more devoted and precocious intellectual than in any earlier presentation, with the possible exception of William of Malmesbury’s.64 Although Alfred was a concrete thinker unable fully ‘to cope with Boethian and Augustinian arguments’, he was nonetheless a mature scholar whose ‘intellectual achievement compares well with that of Gregory the Great’.65 Smyth’s Alfred also remains the astute military leader, albeit one who, like George Washington, triumphed despite having lost the majority of his battles. He is appreciated, once again, for his strategy of fortress building that secured his kingdom and paved the way to the establishment of an even greater one. He is now an astute, if cynical, student of politics, who grasped (in Smyth’s words) the ‘need to be wary of his closest and his most powerful thegns, and to penetrate beyond outward appearances to unmask resentment or hidden ambition’.66 Smyth’s Alfred, moreover, is ever ‘economical with the truth, in order to glorify

61 62 63

64 65 66

Ibid., 11, 17. Ibid., 91. Plummer, Life and Times, 28. In a note (2) Plummer added that it was even more inconceivable that Alfred should have accomplished what he did if the illness were, as some have thought, epilepsy. Apparently Plummer forgot about Julius Caesar. Gesta Regum, i, 188–95, 240–1; John Gillingham, ‘Civilizing the English? The English histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume’, Historical Research 74, 2001, 31–3, 35. Smyth, King Alfred, 581–2, 582. Ibid., 589.

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his own achievement’, giving the lie to ‘Pseudo-Asser’s’ characterisation of the king as veredicus, the ‘truth-teller’.68 And, restored to health, he is also William of Malmesbury’s brave and fearsome warrior who, as Smyth puts it, thought nothing of ‘treading on the entrails of the dying’.69 And what of my Alfred? When I signed the contract to write my book back in 1988, I, like Smyth, had planned to say something new on the subject, to be, in George W. Bush’s words, ‘a revisionist historian’. My prospectus announced that I intended to strip the Victorian veneer from the portrait of Alfred and rediscover the face of an early medieval barbarian king. My starting point would be the story told by the medieval monks of Abingdon about the ‘Judas’ who plundered their Church and the letter of Pope John VIII that chastised the rapacious king for his encroachments on the landed endowments of Canterbury. I was going to drag Alfred off his pedestal at Winchester as surely as American soldiers and freed Iraqis were to pull down the statue of Saddam Hussein. I would ignore previous historians – and not even read Smyth’s new book – until after I had written my narrative – and would tell a new story, one in which Alfred would become a West Saxon Charles Martel. And I failed. For years I found myself incapable of writing a narrative, so I wrote instead analytical essays on Alfred’s conception of kingship, his military reforms, and his governance, the sort of historical writing with which I had experience. Part of my problem, I discovered, was that the sources did not support a narrative based upon my initial conception of Alfred. Asser’s Life, which I believed and still believe to be an authentic, though problematic, source, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and Alfred’s own writings forced me to write what turned out to be a very traditional biography. To paraphrase Plummer, I found myself putting the received story into my own words, and ‘arranging in my own way, what has been previously written by others or myself’. I flatter myself to think that I added to and modified the story, paying greater attention, for example to numismatic evidence, though, to his credit Smyth has interesting things to say on this topic, and reinterpreting the viking threat and Alfred’s military response. I was only able to write my narrative once I had a sense of who my subject was, and this came, oddly enough, from reading a chapter in Asser’s Life which described Alfred lecturing his dog-keepers on the finer points of their trade. Despite my own thorough-going secularism, Alfred’s own writings persuaded me that, underlying all that he did, were his religious beliefs, and that stories such as that of his childhood anointing were not ‘propaganda’ or ‘lies’ but a retrospective conviction that, like King David, Alfred was chosen by God to save his people. So my Alfred became a pious and earnest micromanager who lectured his dog keepers, his ealdormen, his reeves, and undoubtedly even the learned clerics with whom he surrounded himself on the finer points of their professions. He was an ingenious problem-solver, a systematiser, a lover of wisdom, both theoretical and practical, who read the Bible as a handbook on governance as

67 68 69

Ibid., 552. Stevenson, Asser’s Life of King Alfred, ch. 13. Smyth, King Alfred, 600.

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well as a guide to spiritual life, and a king who believed firmly in the Providence that had elevated him so improbably to the throne. He was, in other words, a warrior-king and pious scholar who understood the two aspects of his life as complementary, both grounded in his Christian duty as a man and as a ruler. What struck me most when I was writing Alfred was how disputable all the evidence was. Constantly I had to make decisions about authenticity and interpretation, and often felt as though I was strolling through an academic minefield. This was particularly true for fields that require technical specialisation, such as numismatics and semantic analyses. Material remains such as coins are no more transparent than written texts. Take the case of Alfred’s and Ceolwulf II’s joint issue of the Cross-and-Lozenge penny. In 1998 the numismatist Mark Blackburn and historian Simon Keynes, working in tandem, published essays that pushed back the chronology of Alfred’s coin issues, with profound historical implications for Alfred’s and Ceolwulf’s reigns.70 The numismatic evidence as they presented it seemed to indicate that Alfred alone was recognised as king of Mercia in London c. 875, at least by the London moneyers, and that Ceolwulf II did not achieve such recognition there until the last years of his brief reign. But in the same year that Blackburn and Keynes published their papers a new Ceolwulf II Cross-and-Lozenge coin appeared on the market that suggested Ceolwulf’s London coinage was as early as Alfred’s, forcing Keynes and Blackburn to reconsider this historical scenario, or at least Ceolwulf II’s position in it.71 This is a lot of historical weight for fifty-odd coins to bear, especially given the vagaries of coin finds. As nerve-wracking as it is for historians who rely upon it, numismatics is as imprecise a science as charter criticism. Numismatists assure us that moneyers struck millions of pennies in Alfred’s name, but this is simply an inference based on an assumption that a die would have been used until it was no longer functional. We actually possess from Alfred’s reign only 348 coins.72 Archaeological evidence is no easier to interpret and no more certain. Like other sources, artefacts must be interpreted and are susceptible to different constructions. If we had Alfred’s bones they would probably generate as much historical controversy as they would add to our objective knowledge. At this point one might ask, what is that ‘objective knowledge’? The answer, I am afraid, is not much. That Alfred lived and reigned are facts. But even such basic points as when he was born, or when he died, have been the subjects of controversy. And if the basic facts of Alfred’s life are subject to speculation, then what are we to do with his ‘self’? Those of us who have used ‘Alfred’s’ translations as evidence for the inner man have wrestled with whether they actually reveal the thoughts and feeling of an individual or the consensus of

70 71 72

Keynes, ‘King Alfred and the Mercians’, and Mark Blackburn, ‘The London Mint during the reign of Alfred’, both in Kings, Currency and Alliances, ed. Blackburn and Dumville, 1–45 and 105–23. M. A. S. Blackburn, ‘Alfred’s coinage reforms in context’, in Alfred the Great: Papers from the Eleventh Century Conference, ed. T. Reuter and D. Hinton, Aldershot 2003, 199–215. ‘Corpus of Early Medieval Coin Finds/Sylloge of Coins of the British Isles’, devised by S. M. Miller for the Fitzwilliam Museum (www-cm.fitzmuseum.ac.uk/emc), 5 July 2003.

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a committee, or perhaps only the extent of the literary materials available to that committee. What makes this conclusion all the more disturbing is we have more ‘evidence’ for the life and reign of Alfred the Great than for any other AngloSaxon person. Although profoundly different in detail, the accounts of King Alfred’s life and reign by Charles Plummer, Alfred Smyth and myself share the same underlying narrative, that of a warrior-scholar king who preserved his kingdom against invasion, promoted learning, and began a process that would culminate in the creation of the kingdom of England. What truly separates the stories has less to do with their narratives, or even the sources that underlie those narratives, than with the sensibility and imagination that each historian used to create a coherent story and plausible personality out of fragmentary evidence, and the reason that he chose to tell that story. The narratives told by these very different historians are, when all is said and done, remarkably similar. This, I believe, is because the narrative is common to the sources that underlie all three historical accounts, sources that ultimately derive from Alfred’s court. These are the stories that Alfred himself wanted told to preserve his ‘memory in good works’. In other words, the underlying narrative which has seduced so many historians, including me, is Alfred’s own narrative – the story and image that he and his courtiers shaped to make sense of his life. This, of course, is not to say that this story and image are historical truth, only that it is the closest to historical truth that the surviving sources will permit us to get – and the closest, I believe, that Alfred wanted us to get.

5 Re-Reading King Æthelred the Unready SIMON KEYNES

T

HERE ARE several Anglo-Saxon kings who warrant and could sustain the full-scale biographical treatment: Alfred, of course; Æthelstan and Edgar, if one were not to be pressed too hard for the personal dimension; and Æthelred, Cnut, and Edward the Confessor, all allowing plenty of scope for the exercise of a fecund historical imagination. It would be only fair to add Queen Emma, as another figure of exceptional interest and importance. In most of these cases, there is just about enough material to draw together, and then to play with, and even a hint of the subject’s personality. Of course we have to accept the limitations of the exercise, imposed upon us by the lack of adequate source material, and we must heed the words of one of the most renowned practitioners of the genre of medieval biography. As Professor Barlow said in connection with King Edward the Confessor, ‘we have to scrape the barrel with care: every scrap of information is precious’; and, as he went on to say, the historian ‘has to steer between bland assurance, for which he has no warrant, and complete scepticism, which denies his craft’.1 I marked that passage as an undergraduate; and it remains the craft in which I am most interested. I shall speak mainly from the recent experience of having written an account of Edward’s father, King Æthelred the Unready, for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.2 Much scope remains for opening up new avenues of approach in the study of Æthelred’s reign; and one can but stress that it is more interesting, and more complex, than a tale which can be reduced to a matter of one man’s competence, or otherwise, as a ruler.3 There is certainly a lot to play for. After all, it was during Æthelred’s reign that the kingdom of the English, not unified to most intents and purposes until the 960s, first came under the threat or the reality of external attack. It is important to see how laymen and ecclesiastics alike were affected at different levels of their respective hierarchies, and from one part of the country to

1 2 3

F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, London 1970, p. xxvii. S. Keynes, ‘Æthelred II’, Oxford DNB, i, 409–19. There have been two recent biographies of Æthelred: R. Lavelle, Aethelred II: King of the English 978–1016, Stroud 2002, and A. Williams, Æthelred the Unready: the Ill-Counselled King, London 2003; see also N. J. Higham, The Death of Anglo-Saxon England, Stroud 1997, 1–71, and I. Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions and the Danish Conquest of England, 991–1017, Woodbridge 2003.

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another; how the English in general rose to the challenge and responded to the threat; whether the institutions and practices of royal and local government continued to function effectively under the pressure; and whether the effect was to draw people together in the face of a common enemy or drive them apart in the instinctive defence of personal, factional or regional interests. Much would depend on a proper understanding of the kingdom’s resources, and on the significance of economic factors as driving forces; and one has to bear in mind, in this connection, that it was during this period that London came into its own, as not only the economic but also the political centre of the newly unified kingdom. And of course the reign of Æthelred provides the historical context in which so much creative and scholarly work took place, both in Latin and in Old English, represented by the poetic codices, by the works of Ælfric of Cerne (and Eynsham), Wulfstan of Winchester, Byrhtferth of Ramsey, and Wulfstan of York, and by the work of numerous scribes, artists, and craftsmen not known to us by name. It seems to be a paradox that there should have been so much activity of this kind in a period which in other respects was so calamitous; or perhaps it is not a paradox at all. The re-assessment of a king’s reign is presented below as a process involving five stages. The first stage involves the study of the development of a king’s posthumous reputation, or the deconstruction of received tradition; and the purpose of the exercise is to clear the ground for reconstruction from new foundations. It is so often the tradition which determines the assumptions we make about a king, and the questions we ask of the evidence; and in this way it continues to influence modern interpretations of a given reign. Frank Barlow showed most effectively how this is true of King Edward the Confessor. In the case of Æthelred the Unready, the story unfolds from the eleventh century to the present day: the despair of a contemporary chronicler; the contempt of Anglo-Norman historians active in the first half of the twelfth century (Eadmer of Canterbury, William of Malmesbury, et al.); the harsh verdict of Victorian and Edwardian historians, so wonderfully parodied in 1066 and All That; and Stenton’s damning indictment of Æthelred, as a king ‘of singular incompetence’.4 Of course, modern historians have long sensed that the truth might have been different. As Frank Barlow put it: ‘Although Æthelred has little claim to a good reputation, it is clear that posterity, which treated his father [Edgar] so favourably, treated him with less than justice.’5 So we set the tradition respectfully to one side, and return to first principles.6 The second stage is basic source criticism: assessing the testimony of the ‘literary’ (as opposed to the ‘documentary’) sources, in ways calculated to make us aware of their strengths and limitations, and never with the presumption that they

4 5 6

F. M. Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 3rd edn, Oxford 1971, 372–93 and 394–6. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 4. Cf. F. Barlow, The Godwins, Harlow 2002, 19–21. S. Keynes, ‘The Declining Reputation of King Æthelred the Unready’, Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. D. Hill, BAR British Series 59, Oxford 1978, 227–53, revised in and cited from Anglo-Saxon History: Basic Readings, ed. D. Pelteret, Basic Readings in Anglo-Saxon England 6, New York and London 2000, 157–90; S. Keynes, The Diplomas of King Æthelred ‘the Unready’ 978–1016: a Study in their Use as Historical Evidence, Cambridge 1980 (reprinted 2005), 154–231.

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tell anything approximating to the whole truth. One might wish to assume that the annals for Æthelred’s reign in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle constitute ‘a full and contemporary’ narrative, set down year by year;7 but it has long been recognised that such an assumption is untenable.8 The dangers are illustrated all too well by juxtaposing the variant accounts of the year 1001 (which has the added attraction of relating to the viking attack on Exeter, just over a thousand years ago).9 The annal in MS A (in the conventional scheme), also known as the ‘Parker Chronicle’, is strictly contemporary, written at Winchester in the year 1001. The annal in MSS CDE forms part of the ‘main’ account of Æthelred’s reign, written elsewhere, possibly in London, perhaps fifteen or twenty years later. The differences between them are disturbing, to say the least. The contemporary chronicler reports a local raid in Hampshire, which, disconcertingly if not all that surprisingly, is not mentioned at all by the later chronicler; and the contemporary chronicler then tells how the army sailed westwards to the mouth of the Exe. The later chronicler begins with what seems to be a reference to an attack on Exeter itself (‘the borough’); but there was no hint of this in the more detailed and earlier account, which makes one wonder whether the attack on Exeter, in 1001, ever took place.10 Both chroniclers give accounts of a battle at Pinhoe; yet what reads in the contemporary account as a relatively minor engagement, followed by some localised trauma, seems to have been transformed by the later chronicler into a major battle, followed by widespread ravaging. A subsequent raid from the Isle of Wight into Hampshire is represented by the contemporary (and again local) chronicler as a morning’s work, and by the later chronicler as something generically and eternally catastrophic. The differences are of course all the more disturbing because this happens to be the one and only year for which it is possible to judge the tone of the main chronicler by setting his slightly later account against a more strictly contemporary account; the point being that for the rest of the reign we are almost entirely dependent on the word of this ‘main’ chronicler. There is little that can be done about this, beyond registering the fact; but it means, quite plainly, that the main account of the reign in the AngloSaxon Chronicle is very far from being the balanced, judicious and dispassionate record that we should so like it to be. It is a striking piece of narrative prose, which is full of literary interest and quite obviously of the greatest historical importance. Yet it was written not year by year, as might be assumed at first sight, but by someone looking back from his vantage point after the end of the reign. It is infused with all the defeatism of one who knew that worse was to come, and articulated with all the hyperbole of one committed to his own analysis of events.

7 8

9 10

Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England, 394; see also 383, where the account of events in 1010 is attributed to a chronicler writing ‘in the following year’. S. Körner, The Battle of Hastings, England, and Europe 1035–1066, Bibliotheca Historica Lundensis 14, Lund 1964, 7–10; Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 4–5; C. Clark, ‘The Narrative Mode of The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle before the Conquest’, England Before the Conquest: Studies in Primary Sources presented to Dorothy Whitelock, ed. P. Clemoes and K. Hughes, Cambridge 1971, 215–35, at 224–30; Keynes, ‘Declining Reputation’, 158–68; S. Keynes, ‘A Tale of Two Kings: Alfred the Great and Æthelred the Unready’, TRHS 5th ser. 36, 1986, 201–3. The most conveniently accessible translations are: EHD, i, 237–8; ASC, 85–6; Swanton, ASC, 132–3. Cf. Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions, 57–9.

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The Chronicle does, however, help considerably to establish the pattern of events in Æthelred’s reign; and while this may sound basic, it is as well to determine the shape of the wood before inspecting the trees more closely. The prevailing impression has long been of an unbroken sequence of raids, getting worse and worse as the years passed; and it is difficult to see where one raid stops and the next one begins.11 It is arguable, however, that a pattern can be discerned which helps to make sense of the unfolding course of events in the reign as a whole:12 • The resumption of viking activity in England is represented by an initial phase of sporadic raids, in the 980s, which may have seemed more important in retrospect than it had seemed at the time.13 • The years from 991 to 1005 should be treated as a single period, and deserve special attention as such; for we appear to be dealing in this second phase not with the activities of successive raiding armies, coming and going every year across the North Sea, but with the activities of a single army, active in and around England for many years, though with leaders who came and went.14 The arrival of a viking fleet at Folkestone in 991 represented a significant escalation, prompting new counter-measures. An event which occurred in the earliest stages of its extended campaign in England was immortalised by the poem on the battle of Maldon, and the policy of paying gafol to the Danes originated at the same time. It was seemingly the same fleet or army which remained hostile for the next three years, in northern and eastern parts of the kingdom; but in 994, after threatening London, its leaders entered into a formal agreement with the English, whereby the bulk of the army was allowed to remain in southern England, based probably on the Isle of Wight, in order to protect the country against the threat of further attack from Normandy or from Scandinavia.15 It was the same mercenary force which in 997 resumed its hostile operations in England, and which maintained this threat for the next eight years. One significant event during this period was the Anglo-Norman alliance, represented by King Æthelred’s marriage to Emma of Normandy in 1002; 11

12

13 14

15

Each of the raids of the 980s and of the period 991–4 was regarded by Stenton as ‘the work of a separate group of ship’s companies, which had dispersed as soon as the expedition had produced an adequate return’ (Anglo-Saxon England, 378–9); but he saw a new phase beginning in 997, when an army arrived which was ‘prepared to devote a number of consecutive years to a systematic plundering of coastal Wessex’ (p. 379). S. Keynes, ‘The Historical Context of the Battle of Maldon’, The Battle of Maldon AD 991, ed. D. Scragg, Oxford 1991, 81–113, at 84–98; ‘The Vikings in England, c. 790–1016’, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Vikings, ed. P. Sawyer, Oxford 1997, 48–82, at 73–82; ‘Æthelred II’. The successive phases were represented at the symposium in 2003 by a series of maps, on three A4 pages; the maps in question are published in S. Keynes, Anglo-Saxon England: a Bibliographical Handbook for Students of Anglo-Saxon History, 7th edn, ASNC Guides, Texts, and Studies 1, Cambridge 2006. Keynes, ‘Historical Context’, 85–6; Lavelle, Aethelred II, 47–52; Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 43–4. Keynes, ‘Historical Context’, 88–95, with map, p. 86; Lavelle, Aethelred II, 65–108; Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 44–67; Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions, 31–71, represented as Swein’s ‘first’ and ‘second’ invasions. Keynes, ‘Historical Context’, 91–2 and 103–7 (II Æthelred). A connection between the army which ravaged Kent after attacking London in 994, and the army which had ravaged Kent in 991, is suggested by a charter (S, no. 882), which appears to indicate that a promise of gafol made in 991 was delivered in 994. The location of the base on the Isle of Wight makes good sense if there was assumed to be a threat in the mid-990s from raiding forces based in Normandy; no archaeological evidence has yet been found of a sustained Scandinavian presence on the Isle of Wight, but perhaps it is only a matter of time before the base is identified.

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another was the so-called ‘Massacre of St Brice’s Day’, also in 1002. In the event, the viking army was forced by ‘the great famine’ to return to Denmark in 1005. • The third phase of viking activity comprises two successive raids on a scale and of a degree of ferocity not seen before: first the raid which took place in 1006–7 (led seemingly by Tostig), and then the raid which took place in 1009–12 (led by Thorkell the Tall).16 These two raids were responsible, in combination, and perhaps more than anything else, for destroying both the will and the capacity of the English to withstand the viking onslaught; yet at the same time they generated an interesting variety of counter-measures.17 • The fourth and final phase of viking activity comprises the two successive large-scale invasions of England: the first led by Swein Forkbeard, in 1013, and the second by his son Cnut, in 1015.18 Again, these invasions represent something quite different from what had gone before; and it is during this period that we see how English resistance was being ever more seriously undermined by dissension among their own leaders.19 The point of this schematic analysis of the viking raids is to create a sense of progression through the reign: not just a relentless series of raids, leading ultimately to conquest, but a far more complex process, involving different kinds of threat, and different responses, at different times. Yet while the overall pattern of events is clear, or arguably clear, our understanding of many of the details also remains a matter for debate. I have in mind events such as the murder of Edward the Martyr in 978, the ravaging of Rochester in 986, the blinding of Ælfgar of 993, and the massacre of St Brice’s Day in 1002, all too easily grouped together as acts of ‘spasmodic violence’. There is also scope for detailed reconsideration of some of the decisions or policies which are held to be characteristic of Æthelred’s regime, such as the making of payments to the viking armies, or the employment of vikings as mercenaries. Problems of interpretation are no less acute as we move forward into the last decade of the reign: how to assess the domestic upheavals in 1005–6,20 the appointment of Eadric Streona as ealdorman of Mercia in 1007, his

16

17

18 19 20

Keynes, ‘Historical Context’, 95–8; Lavelle, Aethelred II, 108–24; Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 69–110; Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions, 72–98. Howard (p. 77) suggests that the raiding army of 1006–7 and Thorkell’s army in 1009 were not, in fact, two separate forces (albeit with members common to both), but a single force which had stayed over on the Isle of Wight in 1007–9. This is not how I would see it, for all manner of reasons; but it serves as a good illustration of the basic historical issues which are still, and rightly, at stake. S. Keynes, ‘ “God Help Us, Amen”: Thorkell’s Army in England (1009–12)’, ASE 35, 2006, forthcoming (a paper originally given at the Wulfstan of York conference in 2002). For a contemporary response, in a charter dated 1012, see S, no. 925: A. R. Rumble, Property and Piety in Early Medieval Winchester, Winchester Studies 4, The Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester 3, Oxford 2002, 215–19. Keynes, ‘Historical Context’, 95–8; Lavelle, Aethelred II, 125–34; Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 111–50; Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions, 99–123 and 124–43. S. Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’, People and Places in Northern Europe 500–1600, ed. I. Wood and N. Lund, Woodbridge 1991, 80–1. E. L. Boyle, ‘A Welsh Record of an Anglo-Saxon Political Mutilation’, forthcoming in ASE 35, 2006, draws attention to an entry in the Welsh annals recording the blinding of two men called ‘Gwlfach’ and ‘Ubiad’, in the early eleventh century, and suggests that these men were very probably none other than the two thegns of King Æthelred, Wulfheah and Ufegeat (sons of Ealdorman Ælfhelm), who were blinded in 1006 (ASC). The record seems to be independent of English or Anglo-Norman sources; and one wonders why the mutilation of these two thegns was of such interest to the Welsh. Whatever the

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emergence as the leading ealdorman some time between 1009 and 1012, and the significance of the death of the ætheling Æthelstan, on 25 June 1014. Every assumption should be questioned; and little or nothing can be taken for granted. Stage three of the process of re-assessment involves consideration of the record of royal government, using charters, law-codes, coins, and any other available forms of evidence, always respecting each form of evidence on its own terms before attempting to make any use of it. I cannot pursue the matter here; but the point is that, sooner or later, historians of this period will be able to bring all of this evidence together, in a meaningful whole, and will then have to ask themselves whether the overall impression is not so much one of great ‘sophistication’ as one of the degree of variation permitted under central control. A variety of arrangements existed for the production of written documents, and seems never to have excluded the use of royal and other agents for transmitting information and instructions from the centre to the localities (whether in written form or orally). It seems to me wholesome, realistic, and even politically correct, that our assessment, at the end of the day, may not be so much a matter of standing back and congratulating the English on devising such wonderfully elaborate and effective methods of government, as far more a matter of understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the whole system, and appreciating the scope within it for variation, flexibility, improvisation, and change. The fourth and perhaps the crucial stage in the process is to break out of the ‘biographical’ mould, and to look for the alternative or complementary perspectives which might help to put things in a different light. The temptation is to succumb to the assumption that kings were necessarily the mainsprings of action; and, by the same token, that the places where the king held his councils, or which featured in the account of the Danish raids, were all that mattered. So the question is whether packaging history in the form of a royal biography is necessarily the best or the only way to present a study of the period, when so much might have depended on factors extraneous to the person of the king himself. It has, for example, become axiomatic among historians of this period that England in the tenth and eleventh centuries was a ‘nation-state’;21 and one also detects a concomitant tendency to boast about the great antiquity and sophistication of the ‘late Anglo-Saxon state’, as if we were in competition with other European countries, namely France and Germany, to claim a prize for being so much more advanced than our neighbours. The west Frankish kingdom (France) was still but a shadow of its former self; so that while the first two Capetian kings – Hugh Capet (987–96) and Robert the Pious (996–1031) – enjoyed royal status, they remained in a weak position relative to the territorial princes by whom they were

21

case, their removal seems to have paved the way for Eadric’s appointment as ealdorman of Mercia in 1007. I am most grateful to Ms Boyle for a sight of her article in advance of its publication. See especially Campbell, Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, 155–89, and idem, The Anglo-Saxon State, London 2000, 1–53, 201–25, and 247–68; P. Wormald, Legal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience, London 1999, 333–55, at 354, and 359–82; and Wormald, Making of English Law, 483. The theme was to have been pursued by Patrick Wormald in The Making of English Law, II: From God’s Law to Common Law, esp. ch. 14: the ‘Common Law’ generally associated with Henry II and his successors ‘was inconceivable without the structures built by their Old English predecessors’, and the legal history of England is unique because England ‘is the oldest continuouslyfunctioning state in the world’.

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surrounded.22 This is generally supposed to have been a period of disorder across large parts of France, giving rise to the ‘Peace of God’ movement, marked by peace councils, the active promotion of the cults of saints, and much else besides;23 and in the Capetian heartland, the gradual increase in the number of royal acta with multiple attestations is held to reflect the decline of royal power.24 The east Frankish kingdom (Germany) was a different matter, and its history by this stage was far more closely connected with England.25 Married several years before his accession to King Æthelstan’s half-sister Edith, Otto the Great (936–73) had risen from strength to strength, and by the early 960s had his eyes and mind set on even higher things.26 He celebrated his success in great assemblies held in March 973, at Magdeburg and Quedlinburg; and since there were English ambassadors present, one does wonder what they might have reported back to King Edgar.27 As sole ruler, Otto’s son Otto II (973–83), who had been crowned king in 961 and had married the Byzantine princess Theophanu in 972, faced some initial difficulties, but his confidence soon increased. Curiously, the serious reversal which Otto suffered on his military expedition to southern Italy, in July 982, was reported in the AngloSaxon Chronicle, and represented as a German victory, as if the English would take comfort from his conquests so far afield.28 The Danes took advantage of Otto’s weakness in 983, by securing their position on their southern border with Germany, and for whatever reason appear to have decided thereafter to focus their attention on England.29 22

23

24

25 26

27

28 29

E. M. Hallam, Capetian France 987–1328, London 1980, 64 and 67–72; 2nd edn, London 2001, 83 and 87–95; complemented by the relevant entries in Medieval France: an Encyclopedia, ed. W. W. Kibler and G. A. Zinn, New York 1995. A rather different impression is created by the religious culture of the period: La France romane au temps des premiers Capétiens (987–1152), ed. D. Gaborit-Chopin, Exhibition catalogue, Paris 2005. H. E. J. Cowdrey, ‘The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century’, Past and Present 46, 1970, 42–67; The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. T. Head and R. Landes, Ithaca NY 1992. For a revisionist view, see D. Barthélemy, L’an mil et la paix de Dieu. La France chrétienne et féodale 980–1060, Paris 1999. J.-F. Lemarignier, Le Gouvernement royal aux premiers temps capétiens (987–1108), Paris 1965, esp. 42–3 and 44–7; Hallam, Capetian France, 91–2 (2nd edn, 119–20). The principle would not apply in England, where the number of witnesses reflects the grandeur of the occasion. T. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages c. 800–1056, London 1991; complemented by the relevant entries in Medieval Germany: an Encyclopedia, ed. J. M. Jeep, New York 2001. Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, esp. pp. 170–1; see also Otto der Grosse: Magdeburg und Europa, ed. M. Puhle, Exhibition catalogue, 2 vols., Mainz 2001. The question arises to what extent King Edgar was influenced in the later 960s and early 970s by his awareness of Otto’s grandeur. King Edgar’s ‘golden’ charter for the New Minster, Winchester, and the (lost) ‘golden’ charter for Abingdon, were not in the same league as the Ottonianum (962), on which see Reuter, 170, and B. H. Hill, Medieval Monarchy in Action: the German Empire from Henry I to Henry IV, London 1972, 149–52 (no. 8); but perhaps the idea was the same. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, II, chs. 30–1, in D. A. Warner, Ottonian Germany: the ‘Chronicon’ of Thietmar of Merseburg, Manchester 2001, 114–15; Annales Quedlingburgenses, ed. G. Pertz, MGH SS 3, 62. The English ambassadors are mentioned by Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 175. J. Campbell, ‘England, France, Flanders and Germany’, Ethelred the Unready, ed. Hill, 255–70, reprinted in his Essays in Anglo-Saxon History, London 1986, 191–207, at 194, n. 19. Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon, III, ch. 24 (Warner, Ottonian Germany, 146). See also P. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings, 2nd edn, London 1971, 197–9, and Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 236 and 255. The incidence of viking activity on the continent in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries requires further study: see J. Jesch, ‘Vikings on the European Continent in the Late Viking Age’, Scandinavia and Europe 800–1300: Contact, Conflict, and Coexistence, ed. J. Adams and K. Holman, Turnhout 2004, 255–68, esp. 258–9 (Frisia).

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It was probably at about this time, in the mid-980s, that Ealdorman Æthelweard was in contact with his kinswoman Matilda, abbess of Essen, and produced a Latin version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in order to bring her up to date with their family history.30 One suspects, however, that King Æthelred would have been rather more hard pressed to keep up with Otto III (983–1002) and Henry II (1002–24).31 Like Æthelred, Otto III came to the throne as a minor, but on coming of age he set about his renewal of Charlemagne’s empire.32 There are many similarities between the world of the Emperor Henry II and that of King Æthelred the Unready, just as there are respects in which we might see such connections if only we had anything like the same quality of evidence for Æthelred the Unready which exists for Henry II.33 Perusal of the chronicle of Thietmar of Merseburg suggests just how much we lack for England in the tenth and early eleventh centuries; for Thietmar’s account of all the intrigue, ritual, and ceremonial in Germany makes one wonder what lies hidden beneath the surface of recorded events in Æthelredian England. Yet the point of the continental analogy is also to explore the differences. Perusal of Henry II’s charters, issued between 1002 and 1024, is indeed a salutary experience.34 One is struck by the sheer quantity of them (often as many as twenty or thirty surviving from any one year), albeit that they cover a much larger area; by the fact that such a large proportion of them survive in their original form, on single sheets of parchment, preserved in the archives of their largely ecclesiastical beneficiaries;35 by the fact that the standard diplomatic form has no provision for anything approximating to a list of witnesses; and by the (related) fact that they were produced by a royal chancellor, with date and place of issue, authenticated by an impression of the king’s seal. The picture derived from these charters is of the German emperor and his

30

31

32

33 34

35

The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell, London 1962. Æthelweard wrote as if he were consciously reaffirming a relationship, and before the resumption of viking raids had made much impression: see S. Keynes, ‘Apocalypse Then: England AD 1000’, Europe around the Year 1000, ed. P. Urbanczyk, Warsaw 2001, 247–70, at 247–8. For an image of Otto III in Majesty, from the Gospel Book of Otto III (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibl., Clm. 4453), see H. Mayr-Harting, Ottonian Book Illumination: an Historical Study, 2nd edn, London 1999, 157–78, with Col. Pl. XXI. For an image of Henry II and Kunigunde crowned by Christ, from the Pericopes Book of Henry II (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibl., Clm. 4452), see 179–201, with Col. Pl. XXVI. G. Althoff, Otto III, Darmstadt 1996, translated by P. G. Jestice, University Park PA 2003. Otto was all of three years old when he was consecrated king, at Aachen, in 983. From 985 his mother, the Empress Theophanu, acted as regent, until her death in 991, whereupon the regency passed to Otto’s grandmother Adelheid. It is assumed that Otto formally came of age in 994, aged fourteen. There appears to be no evidence of a specific ceremony; it may be simply that he began to act more independently in that year. For Henry II, see Kaiser Heinrich II. 1002–1024, ed. J. Kirmeier et al., Exhibition catalogue, Augsburg 2002; see also Medieval Germany: an Encyclopedia, ed. Jeep, 341–2 (art). Die Urkunden der deutschen Könige und Kaiser, III: Die Urkunden Heinrichs II und Arduins, ed. H. Bresslau, MGH, Diplomata Regum et Imperatorum Germaniae 3, Hanover 1900–3, 1–692 (nos. 1–534). For a small selection in translation, see Hill, Medieval Monarchy in Action, 183–92 (nos. 26–30). For images of two charters of Henry II (ed. Bresslau, nos. 34 and 38), both issued in 1003, see Kaiser Heinrich II, ed. Kirmeier, 185–8 (nos. 58–9); for images of two royal seals, see 189–90 (nos. 60–1). For an image of a charter confirming Henry’s foundation of the bishopric of Bamberg (Synod of Frankfurt, 1 November 1007), with what appear to be autograph crosses added to the episcopal attestations, see 38 and 199 (no. 65); ed. Bresslau, no. 143, trans. Hill, no. 27.

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entourage itinerating from one place or part of his realm to another, issuing charters along the way and from time to time conducting business and dispensing justice at assemblies.36 King Æthelred’s charters are quite different: written in book hand, as opposed to diplomatic minuscule; dated by year, but very rarely by the exact day and place of issue; bearing no outward signs of authentication, such as a notarial subscription, or seal; but dignified with long lists of witnesses. Unlike his continental counterparts, Æthelred was not able to issue Latin diplomas except at meetings of the king’s councillors, held at irregular intervals perhaps three or four times during the course of a year; one presumes, however, that he would have been able to issue vernacular writs as and when the need arose. Not better, or worse; just very different. The danger lies in being carried away by enthusiasm for the ‘Anglo-Saxon state’: by the ideologies and aspirations which determined its sense of identity; by the appearances which gave it unity of form and purpose; by the ‘institutions’ which gave it structure; by the resources which fuelled its pretensions; and by the oaths and pledges which bound it all together. It was indeed an extraordinary and precocious construct, but if we indulge this enthusiasm we risk losing touch with reality at ground level. It would be dangerous to imagine that fanciful notions about the unity of the kingdom of the English, or (by the end of the tenth century) about the kingdom of England, reached from the minds of the likes of Archbishop Wulfstan deep into the fabric of the shires and the hundreds. For all the hype and hyperbole, the kingdom of the English, first brought into existence by King Æthelstan in 927, did not come of age until the reign of King Edgar, in the 960s, and even then and thereafter was never quite as secure as one might like to believe, except in the minds of those at the centre. The point is that we cannot judge Æthelred’s predicament in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries without acknowledging that what he presided over was not the most ‘sophisticated’ nation-state of its day, but a kingdom which was barely ten or twenty years old at the time of his accession. We are impressed, quite rightly, by the tangible products of royal government (charters, law-codes, and coins), and by the degree to which evidence of unity (in language, religious custom, and so on) represents a deliberate and conscious advance on what had gone before. Yet too much talk of unity and ‘sophistication’ threatens to conceal the fact that so much still depended on the ties of kinship, lordship and friendship which bound the people to each other, and on the oaths which bound the people to the king. We indulge in all these fantasies about the late Anglo-Saxon state, and perhaps in so doing we establish an unreasonable expectation that the kingdom was inherently strong enough to withstand the Danish onslaught, and that it was therefore Æthelred’s weakness which made the difference. The pursuit of the alternative perspective also has ‘local’ and ‘personal’ dimensions; for, quite obviously, there were many other ways of seeing things than from the centre, or from the king’s point of view. While maps of Anglo-Saxon England have only a few places marked on them, for reasons of space, it is as well to bear

36

For an excellent sketch of royal government in Germany in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, see Reuter, Germany in the Early Middle Ages, 208–20.

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in mind that much of the country was occupied, in an interconnected world of major boroughs, smaller towns, religious houses, and rural estates.37 Almost all of these regional or local perspectives are irretrievably lost; and in general the best that can be done (by a historian) is to assemble all of the material that bears in one way or another on the history of religious houses throughout the land, and to absorb as much as there is to absorb from other forms of evidence about a given place. The spotlight falls naturally on Canterbury, York, London, and the other bishoprics, but of course it should be trained at the same time on as many religious houses as possible: Abingdon; St Augustine’s, Canterbury; Ely; Glastonbury; St Albans; the New Minster, Winchester; Wolverhampton; and so on.38 All due allowance has to be made for the fact that the available evidence is very uneven, for reasons which may have arisen in the Anglo-Saxon period or which may not have arisen until the twelfth century or later. It is often the case, however, that lessons learnt from one house help to illuminate the darkness surrounding another, so one needs to keep an eye on them all. For example, the place of a religious house in the context of local society is best understood at Ely;39 the role of the cult of a local saint in drawing people to the saint’s resting-place is best understood at the Old Minster, Winchester;40 the significance of a building programme is attested at the New Minster, Winchester;41 the trials and tribulations of an abbey as its privileges were abused in the 980s and restored in the 990s is well understood at Abingdon;42 the way in which certain houses sought to secure their position is illustrated at St Albans,43 while the process by which houses were founded, empowered and endowed is attested at Burton and Eynsham;44 and the quality and extent of manuscript production at a well-managed scriptorium (at times of great external threat) is illustrated most effectively at Christ Church, Canterbury.45 The importance of seeing events not only from the king’s point of view, but also from all other available or even imagined points of view is an extension of exactly the same point, and it must suffice for present purposes to advertise the field. There is no danger of overlooking those who are known to us from their literary output: Ealdorman Æthelweard, who produced his Latin version of the

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

R. Fleming, ‘Rural Elites and Urban Communities in Late-Saxon England’, Past and Present 141, 1993, 3–37. For a selective bibliography of histories and records of religious houses, see Keynes, Bibliographical Handbook, section B (III), 20–36. S. Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey 672–1109’, A History of Ely Cathedral, ed. P. Meadows and N. Ramsay, Woodbridge 2003, 3–58. M. Lapidge, The Cult of St Swithun, Winchester Studies 4: Anglo-Saxon Minsters of Winchester 2, Oxford 2003. Liber Vitae, ed. Keynes, 29–34; and for two imaginative drawings, see Lavelle, Aethelred II, pls. 7–8. See further below, pp. 90–3. Charters of St Albans Abbey, ed. J. Crick (forthcoming); S. Keynes, ‘A Lost Cartulary of St Albans Abbey’, ASE 22, 1993, 253–79, at 273–4. S, nos. 906 (Burton) and 911 (Eynsham); see also nos. 838 (Tavistock), 876 (Abingdon), 880 (Bishopric of Cornwall), 884 (Muchelney), 895 (Sherborne), 904 (Wherwell), and 909 (St Frideswide’s), as well as the several charters which restore lands to religious houses. N. Brooks, The Early History of the Church of Canterbury: Christ Church from 597 to 1066, Leicester 1984, 255–78; N. Brooks, ‘The Anglo-Saxon Cathedral Community, 597–1070’, A History of Canterbury Cathedral, Oxford 1995, 26–8.

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Anglo-Saxon Chronicle in the mid-980s;46 Ælfric of Cerne (later abbot of Eynsham), Wulfstan of Winchester, Byrhtferth of Ramsey, and Wulfstan of York; not to mention the anonymous author of the poem on the battle of Maldon.47 Among other ecclesiastics, however, attention needs to be given to the second generation of those brought up in the period of monastic reform. The great triumvirate of the monastic reformers, comprising Æthelwold, Dunstan, and Oswald, died and were buried between 984 and 992, and by the end of that decade had been elevated into the company of saints. Their places in deliberations of the great and the good were taken by less well-known but perhaps no less effective men, such as Archbishop Sigeric, Archbishop Ælfric, Archbishop Ælfheah, and Bishop Wulfsige.48 Nor should one overlook the abbots: Ælfweard of Glastonbury; Ælfsige of the New Minster, Winchester; Wulfgar of Abingdon; Ælfsige of Ely; and others.49 Among laymen and women, there are several who command our particular attention: Queen Ælfthryth, Queen Emma (Ælfgifu), Ordulf of Tavistock, Æthelmær of Cerne and Eynsham, Wulfric Spot of Burton, and so on.50 And when one tires of the virtuous defenders of propriety, a very different kind of political animal awaits in the form of Eadric Streona.51 The recorded or imagined interaction between men and women such as these animates the prosopography of Æthelred’s reign, as each pressed their cause of the day at meetings of the royal court, the borough courts, the shire courts and the hundred courts, or, more probably, in dark corners, reminding us all the time that there was so much more to the reign of Æthelred than Æthelred the Unready. The pursuit of the alternative perspective should be extended further by making a conscious attempt to understand the viking invasions from the viewpoint of those who organized and participated in them. A historian of this period is well advised to stand beside the runestone raised by Harold Bluetooth at Jelling, which advertises his claim to have ‘won Denmark all, and Norway, and made the Danes Christian’;52 to walk around the circular fortresses at Trelleborg and Fyrkat (by which Harold had made good the first of his claims);53 to see the replicas of the Skuldelev

46

47

48

49 50 51

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Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. Campbell. For Æthelweard’s view of the Danes, see R. I. Page, ‘A Most Vile People’: Early English Historians on the Vikings, Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture 1986, London 1987, 3 and 11–14; and Keynes, ‘Apocalypse Then’, 247–8. See entries in The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England, ed. M. Lapidge et al., Oxford 1999, and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. For Wulfstan, see most especially Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, ed. M. Townend, Studies in the Early Middle Ages 10, Turnhout 2004. Keynes, ‘Apocalypse Then’, 260–1, and ‘Æthelred II’, 414–15. For Wulfsige, see S. Keynes, ‘Wulfsige, Monk of Glastonbury, Abbot of Westminster (c. 990–3), and Bishop of Sherborne (993–1002)’, St Wulfsige and Sherborne: Essays in Celebration of the Millennium of the Benedictine Abbey 998–1998, ed. K. Barker, et al., Oxford 2005, 53–94. For Ælfsige of the New Minster, see Liber Vitae, ed. Keynes, 32–3; for Wulfgar of Abingdon, see below, pp. 90–3; for Ælfsige of Ely, see Keynes, ‘Ely Abbey 672–1109’, 28–33. Keynes, ‘Apocalypse Then’, 261–3, and ‘Wulfsige, Bishop of Sherborne’, 60. Stafford, ‘The Reign of Æthelred II’, 36–7; C. Insley, ‘Politics, Conflict and Kinship in Early Eleventh-Century Mercia’, Midland History 25, 2000, 28–42; S. Keynes, ‘Eadric Streona’, Oxford DNB, xvii, 535–8, and Deerhurst, A.D. 1016: Eadric Streona and the Danish Conquest of England, Deerhurst Lecture 2004 (forthcoming). S. Hvass, De kongelige monumenter i Jelling: deres historie, forvaltning og formidling, Jelling 2000. S. W. Andersen, The Viking Fortress of Trelleborg, Slagelse 1996.

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ships (especially Skuldelev 2, launched in 2004) riding at anchor in the Roskilde fjord;54 to contemplate the runic inscriptions in Denmark and Sweden which boast of ‘gelds’ taken in England;55 and to admire the necklace made up of silver pennies of King Æthelred, found in formerly Danish territory in Sweden.56 He or she would also be well advised to read the skaldic verse generated in connection with the raids in the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and in connection with Cnut’s conquest of England in 1016.57 The viking raiders left relatively little archaeological trace of their activities in England, although there is a fair chance that the weapons found on the Thames, in the vicinity of Old London Bridge, will be joined in time by further evidence of the same or a similar kind.58 Useful information may yet be gained, moreover, from more detailed analysis of the vast quantity of English coinage taken back to Scandinavia during this period, and subsequently circulated, until deposited in the bank of Mother Earth. Special interest attaches to hoards of English coins which would appear to have been deposited quite soon after their arrival in Scandinavia. Analysis of hoards containing Crux and Long Cross pennies, in particular, throws light on the circumstances in which the proceeds of viking activity were acquired and then taken back to Scandinavia in the period 991–1005, whether as shares in the payment of gafol (in 991 and 994, during the currency of Crux; or in 1002, during the currency of Long Cross) or as shares in whatever payments were made to mercenaries during this period. There are relatively few such hoards; but one, known as the Store Frigård II hoard (1998), composed almost entirely of Crux type, is thought to have left England c. 995, and to have been deposited a year or two later on the (Danish) island of Bornholm, in the Baltic; the composition of the hoard shows a greater proportion than might be expected of coinage minted in London.59

54 55 56

57

58

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The Skuldelev Ships I: Topography, Archaeology, History, Conservation and Display, ed. O. CrumlinPedersen and O. Olsen, Ships and Boats of the North 4.1, Roskilde 2002, esp. 141–94. M. Syrett, The Vikings in England: the Evidence of Runic Inscriptions, ASNC Guides, Texts and Studies 4, Cambridge 2002. J. Graham-Campbell and D. Kidd, The Vikings, London 1980, 106–7 (showing obverses), and J. Graham-Campbell, Viking Artefacts: a Select Catalogue, London 1980, 45–6 (no. 156), with p. 226 (showing reverses); cf. Keynes, ‘Vikings in England’, 63, caption (with illustration of the wrong necklace). The coins are of Æthelred’s Long Cross, Helmet and Last Small Cross types. A. Campbell, Scaldic Verse and Anglo-Saxon History, Dorothea Coke Memorial Lecture 1970 (1971); R. G. Poole, Viking Poems on War and Death, Toronto Medieval Texts and Translations 8, Toronto 1991; J. Jesch, ‘Skaldic Verse in Scandinavian England’, Vikings and the Danelaw, ed. J. GrahamCampbell et al., Oxford 2001, 313–25. For viking finds from London, including the famous assemblage of axes and spear-heads, with firetongs and grappling-iron, found near the north end of Old London Bridge, see R. E. M. Wheeler, London and the Vikings, London 1927, 13–16 and 18–23, and Viking Antiquities in Great Britain and Ireland, IV: Viking Antiquities in England, ed. H. Shetelig, Oslo 1940, 77–92, with Fig. 44 (79). See also B. Watson, et al., London Bridge: 2000 Years of a River Crossing, MoLAS Monograph 8, London 2001, esp. 56–7 and 232–3; and B. Watson, Old London Bridge Lost and Found, London 2004, 22–3. There are several swords from the Thames in I. G. Peirce, Swords of the Viking Age, Woodbridge 2002, esp. 80–1. J. C. Moesgaard, ‘The Import of English Coins to the Northern Lands: Some Remarks on Coin Circulation in the Viking Age Based on New Evidence from Denmark’ (forthcoming). I am very grateful to Mr Moesgaard (Royal Coin Cabinet, National Museum, Copenhagen) for enabling me to read his typescript in advance of its publication.

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Alternative perspectives come in other forms, some of which have not yet even have entered into the historian’s mind. To set out a few of them in this way must seem to constitute an absurdly ambitious programme, but anything short of this is unlikely to deliver much more than a variation on the all-too-familiar tale of King Æthelred the Unready. We come finally to the fifth and most challenging stage in the process: how best to relate one thing to another, and then string it all together in the form of a properly ‘integrated’ study of the king’s reign. The methods deployed in the study of Anglo-Saxon history have moved a long way forward in the past fifty years; so much so that the importance of integrating information derived from many different forms of evidence is taken for granted. The challenge for the royal biographer, and in this context the essence therefore of what Frank Barlow has described as the historian’s craft, is how to understand each aspect of the reign in relation to the others: how to make the connections which animate the whole. Historians have a certain fondness for dividing passages of time into shorter periods, mainly for the sake of convenience although also in the interests of clarity. Writing in the 1120s, William of Malmesbury remarked of King Æthelred: ‘His life is said to have been cruel at the outset, pitiable in mid-course, and disgraceful in its ending.’60 For the purposes of a PhD thesis submitted in 1977, and as part of an attempt to establish a chronology of Æthelred’s reign based essentially on the evidence of his charters, I divided the reign into four periods: a ‘Period of Tutelage’ (when the king was aged around 12–18), extending from his accession in 978 to the death of Bishop Æthelwold in 984; a ‘Period of Youthful Indiscretions’ (when the king was aged around 18–27), extending from Æthelwold’s death in 984 to an indeterminable point (c. 993) by which the king had come to recognize the errors of his ways; the ‘Years of Maturity’ (when the king was aged around 27–40), extending from that point (c. 993) to a moment of domestic upheaval in 1006; and the ‘Closing Decade’ (when the king was aged around 40–50), from that upheaval in 1006 to the king’s death on 23 April 1016. It would have to be acknowledged, in a proper biography of Æthelred, that there was an earlier period, between his birth (c. 966) and his accession in 978, when much might have been determined by political faction and personal loyalties, and when the role of Æthelred’s mother, Queen Ælfthryth, and her preferred associates, would have been of special importance. Yet if this analysis had anything to recommend it, it was to make clear a distinction between the very distinctive period of wrongdoing in the later 980s, the ‘Years of Maturity’ in the 990s and early 1000s, and the chaos of the closing years, in an attempt to create a sense of perspective and an impression of change. The periodisation also remains useful as a basic framework in which to consider the relationship between domestic affairs and the chronicler’s tale of the Danish invasions, and in which to approach the serious business of integration. I shall here focus my attention on the ‘Years of Maturity’ (c. 993–1006), though for reasons which were mentioned above and which will become apparent, I would now be inclined to mark the beginning of this period with the arrival of a viking 60

Gesta Regum, ii. 164–6 and 176–80, at 164 (i, 268–78 and 300–20 at 268).

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army in 991, and its end with the army’s departure in 1005.61 The charter by which King Æthelred reaffirmed the ancient ‘liberty’ of Abingdon Abbey, dated 993, is potentially of special importance in this connection, because it reveals so much about attitudes which had come to prevail at court in the early 990s.62 The most recent editor of this charter has argued, however, that it was drawn up at Abingdon on the initiative of Abbot Wulfgar, in order to satisfy a particular need of the Abingdon community, using an earlier authentic charter of King Edgar as a model and concocting a witness-list from other sources.63 The effect is to undermine the status of this charter as a document emanating from ‘royal’ circles; so it has to be approached with caution. The charter is extant in what appears to be its original single-sheet form, and is ostensibly the product of ceremonial which extended over a period of six weeks, first in a ‘synodal council’ held at Winchester on 4 June 993, and then in a seemingly more intimate gathering at Gillingham (probably in Dorset) on 17 July. The case for the authenticity of the charter depends in part on examination of the single sheet itself; for certain features of it are most readily compatible with its use in ceremonial of some kind.64 The case depends also, however, on the occurrence of certain significant turns of phrase in this charter and in a number of other charters issued in the mid-990s, suggesting that the draftsman of the Abingdon charter was operating as part of the diplomatic mainstream, and that the charter is not likely, therefore, to have been the work of a monk of Abingdon operating in isolation, for the gratification of the abbey’s institutional selfesteem.65 The case for authenticity depends otherwise on an understanding of the relationship between King Æthelred’s charter and a group of purportedly ‘earlier’ texts, including charters in the names of King Eadwig and King Edgar for Abingdon, dated 959.66 If these two charters are genuine, it would follow that King Æthelred’s charter is most likely to be an in-house production, still of the late tenth century but obviously of uncertain authority as a record of royal action.67 My own view remains, however, that King Æthelred’s charter is authentic, and the charters of Eadwig and Edgar are forgeries, fabricated at Abingdon as part of the process whereby Abbot Wulfgar began, in the early 990s, to reformulate the history of the

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Keynes, ‘Æthelred II’, 412–15. For other accounts of this period, see Lavelle, Aethelred II, 65–107; Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 43–67; and Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions, 31–71. See above, pp. 80–1. S, no. 876. Text: Charters of Abingdon Abbey, ed. S. Kelly, 2 vols., Anglo-Saxon Charters 7–8, London 2000–1, ii, 477–83 (no. 124). Charters of Abingdon, ed. Kelly, i, pp. cxi–cxv. See also S. Hamilton, ‘Remedies for “Great Transgressions”: Penance and Excommunication in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Pastoral Care in Late Anglo-Saxon England, ed. F. Tinti, Woodbridge 2005, 83–105, at 101–2. BL, Cotton Augustus ii. 38. A digital facsimile is available on the ‘Kemble’ website, www.trin.cam.ac.uk/kemble. For further discussion, see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, p. 101, n. 54 (autograph crosses; cf. above, n. 35); Charters of Abingdon, ed. Kelly, i. pp. xlii and cxi; and Keynes, ‘Wulfsige, Bishop of Sherborne’, pp. 61–2 (attestation of Wulfsige). E.g. S, no. 880, a grant of privileges for Ealdred, bishop of Cornwall, dated 994. Text: Charters of Crediton and Exeter, ed. C. Insley, Anglo-Saxon Charters (forthcoming). A facsimile of the original single sheet (Exeter, DC, 2070) is available on the ‘Kemble’ website. For discussion, see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 100–1. S, no. 658 (Eadwig) and 673 (Edgar). Text: Charters of Abingdon, ed. Kelly, ii, 337–41 (no. 83) and 341–8 (no. 84). Kelly, Charters of Abingdon, ed. Kelly, i, pp. lxxxiv–cxv.

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abbey in order to recover what had been lost;68 so, to my mind, King Æthelred’s charter is admissable as evidence of views current in high circles at this time. As we have seen, King Æthelred’s charter for Abingdon was drawn up in the summer of 993, at a time when the viking army was active in the north-east and perhaps helping to concentrate the collective mind. It is, in fact, one of a group of four charters issued between 993 and 998 (one from Abingdon, two from Rochester, and one from Winchester) in which the king imputes blame for recent abuses of church privileges, and the appropriation of church property, to the wicked councillors who (in their greed) had misled him (in the ignorance of his youth).69 It is impossible not to see a common denominator behind these charters, and a common train of thought between them;70 so while it is important to emphasise, at one level, that the charters in which the king is said to complain about his councillors have this very specific context,71 their significance at another level is to provide an insight into the response in high circles to the unfolding troubles. To judge from the Abingdon charter, there were men at court (perhaps especially Abbot Wulfgar) who regarded the death of Bishop Æthelwold (1 August 984) as a significant point in the reign, for two reasons. In the first place, Æthelwold’s death had deprived the country of one who had the interests of all people at heart; and secondly, it seemed (in retrospect) to have been in 984, in the seventh year of Æthelred’s reign, and thereafter, that the king and his people began to suffer various (unspecified) afflictions (angustiae), dangers (pericula) or misfortunes (infortunia). Æthelwold’s death was certainly a great loss, and one can well imagine that Æthelred himself soon allowed himself to be led astray. Yet what of the ‘afflictions’? Viking raids had resumed in the early 980s; but more to the point, perhaps, was the first occurrence of a recurrent cattle-plague, in 986, and, above all, the invasion of a large viking army in 991.72 Sooner or later, the king began to reflect on the likely causes of the ‘dangers’; and it is in this context that he (or rather the draftsman, on his behalf) makes an extraordinary admission. As he saw it, the ‘misfortunes’ happened in part because of the ignorance of his youth, and in part

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Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 98–102. For further discussion, see S. Keynes, ‘Wulfgar, Abbot of Abingdon (990–1016)’ (forthcoming). S, nos. 876, 885, 893, and 891. For discussion, see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 176–81 (death of Bishop Æthelwold, the abuses at Abingdon, youthful indiscretions). It is arguable that King Æthelred’s charter for Tavistock abbey, dated 981 (S, no. 838), should be added to the group; see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 180, n. 101. For text and translation of this charter, see C. Holdsworth, ‘Tavistock Abbey in its Late Tenth Century Context’, Report and Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science 135, 2003, 31–58. Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 101 and 177–80; and note that the idiom common to S, nos. 876 and 885, echoes the first sentence of the Regularis Concordia, with reference to King Edgar. For further and very effective discussion of these charters, see P. Stafford, ‘Political Ideas in Late TenthCentury England: Charters as Evidence’, Law, Laity and Solidarities: Essays in Honour of Susan Reynolds, ed. P. Stafford et al., Manchester 2001, 68–82; see also C. Insley, ‘Assemblies and Charters in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, Political Assemblies in the Earlier Middle Ages, ed. P. Barnwell and M. Mostert, Turnhout 2003, 53–4. Keynes, Diplomas, 186; see also Keynes, ‘Crime and Punishment’, 77. It was not so much a question of the king’s youthfulness leading to wrongdoing, i.e. afflictions, from 984 (Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 177, n. 89), as a question of youthfulness leading to wrongdoing leading to divine punishment in the form of afflictions from 984.

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because of the abhorrent greed (philagiria) of men who ought to have known that it was their duty to dispense good counsel. He confesses, in this connection, that he had accepted payment from Ealdorman Ælfric in return for appointing Ælfric’s brother Eadwine as abbot of Abingdon (985–90), and in this respect had violated the abbey’s ‘liberty’73 which Bishop Æthelwold had acquired for Abingdon from King Eadred, King Eadwig, and King Edgar.74 In other words, the king had come to realize that in 985 he had incurred God’s displeasure by violating the abbey’s ‘liberty’, and that thereafter he was under anathema (implicitly as threatened in the charter which had been thus ignored). The king swore before the synodal council at Winchester, at Pentecost (4 June) 993, that he would cleanse himself of his earlier misdeeds (retroactas ad purum cohercere neglegentias), and restore the ‘old chirograph of liberty’ (priscum libertatis cyrographum).75 So, at Gillingham on 17 July 993, during the course of mass, the king granted and strengthened the ‘liberty’, and then, after the completion of mass, confirmed it, in the presence of three witnesses. The monks of Abingdon had said 1500 masses and sung 1200 psalters for the eternal redemption of Æthelred’s soul; and in return they recovered their ‘liberty’. When the time should come, the community were to choose a successor to the incumbent abbot (Wulfgar) from among their own number; no outsider (extraneorum quispiam) was to interfere in their affairs; and the monastery was to be free from every worldly burden, as set out in the old charter obtained by Abbot Hræthhun from Coenwulf, king of the Mercians (796–821), and Pope Leo III (795–816). Moreover, the (unspecified) lands which had been granted to the abbey in recent and in distant times were to be restored; and reference is made, in particular, to the land at Abingdon itself, which had been granted to the abbey by Cædwalla, king of the West Saxons (685–8), and which later kings had taken over for themselves.76 The king remarks how some of the lands now restored to the abbey (in 993) had been ‘unjustly taken’ from the church, and how unscrupulous men had stolen the old charters and got new ones for themselves (presumably from the king); so the king repudiates the ‘new’ charters, and reaffirms the old privilege. 73

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J. Crick, ‘Pristina Libertas: Liberty and the Anglo-Saxons Revisited’, TRHS 6th ser. 14, 2004, 58–67 and 69–71; but note that the Abingdon charter is included in ‘Table 2’ (p. 70) but not in ‘Table 1’ (p. 69). If only to judge from Wulfstan of Winchester’s circumstantial account of the foundation of Abingdon, the abbey did not receive a foundation charter until the mid-960s, during the reign of King Edgar: Wulfstan, Vita S. Æthelwoldi, chs. 11–21 (Wulfstan of Winchester: Life of Æthelwold, ed. M. Lapidge and M. Winterbottom, Oxford 1991, 18–36). According to Wulfstan, the charter was still preserved at Abingdon at the time of writing (in the late 990s). In her paper on ‘The Politics of Remorse: Penance and Ritual in the Reign of Æthelred the Unready’ (ISAS Munich August 2005), C. Cubitt suggested that the council of Winchester, convened at Pentecost in 993, was the occasion for an act of public penance; and certainly there are analogies to be drawn with the acts of public penance familiar from the reign of Louis the Pious (M. de Jong, ‘Power and Humility in Carolingian Society: the Public Penance of Louis the Pious’, EME 1, 1992, 29–52). The charter of 993 implies that the king undertook, at Winchester, to make amends, and that he did so a few weeks later in the more intimate service at Gillingham; so at this stage, or in this context, the king is setting a personal example. A significant development breaks surface in 1009, when Archbishop Wulfstan produced ‘VII Æthelred’, in which the viking invasions of that period are represented as divine punishment for the sins of the English people in general; see Keynes, ‘ “God Help Us, Amen”: Thorkell’s Army in England (1009–12)’. An unpublished charter from the archives of Barking abbey (below, n. 96) reveals that King Eadred issued a charter from the royal estate at Abingdon in 950.

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It is striking that in 993 the newly appointed abbot of the recently reformed abbey of Abingdon should have seen the history and privileges of his house reaching all the way back to the golden age of the seventh century, and that it was the violation of its ancient (early ninth-century) ‘liberty’ which, from this perspective in the early 990s, had caused all the troubles which had begun in the later 980s. The charter shows, in other words, that by 993 the penny had dropped: the violation of church privileges was a sure way of incurring God’s displeasure, which would soon find expression in various forms of divine punishment, notably viking invasions; and the way to gain God’s favour was to make amends for earlier wrongdoing, and to restore the ancient liberties of the church. The king excused his own complicity in this abuse of Abingdon’s ‘liberty’ by blaming men who had taken advantage of his youth, in pursuit of their own ends; and although he was at the time in his mid- to late teens, and so by the normal reckoning still in his adolescentia,77 the use of the term iuventus in this charter (as in the other charters of the same group) suggests that the draftsman was using a terminology of his own.78 His line was that greater age had brought greater discernment, enabling the king to break free from the influence of those who had led him astray; but the charter suggests at the same time that the king had been brought to his senses by the realisation that the troubles now endured by the English people were indicative of God’s displeasure. In short, the charter leads us to the innermost (if entirely conventional) thoughts of those in high circles in the 990s, and provides the basis for a dimension of understanding which is wholly absent from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle; and it shows how the king and his councillors were beginning to respond at this time to the escalating viking threat, in much the same way as Alfred had responded in the 880s. It is tempting to give Abbot Wulfgar a significant part of the credit for bringing the king round, for there is no mistaking the significance of his own role in drafting the charter of 993;79 and it may be that the sheer size and grandeur of the charter, with its distinctively elaborate witness-list, was intended by him to reflect an act of reform and renewal.80 Appropriately, Wulfgar himself maintained a high place at court from 993 until his death in September 1016.81

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The conventional distinction between the successive ages of man, involving passage through boyhood (pueritia, age seven to fourteen), adolescence (adolescentia, age fourteen to twenty-eight), and manhood (iuventus, age twenty-eight to fifty), was deeply embedded in the literature. See J. A. Burrow, The Ages of Man: a Study in Medieval Writing and Thought, Oxford 1986, 80–6 and 98–102; and E. Sears, The Ages of Man: Medieval Interpretations of the Life Cycle, Princeton 1986, 33–5 (Byrhtferth). Cf. Stafford, ‘Political Ideas in Late Tenth-Century England’, 81. Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 121, with n. 124; see also Charters of Abingdon, ed. Kelly, i, pp. cxiv and ccxv. There is perhaps an analogy here with the magnificent ‘Æthelstan A’ diplomas of the period 928–35, for which see S. Keynes, The Charters of King Æthelstan and the Making of the Kingdom of the English, Toller Lecture 2001 (forthcoming). For the witness-list (and notably the treatment of the abbots), see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, Tables 4–5, superseded by S. Keynes, An Atlas of Attestations in Anglo-Saxon Charters c. 670–1066, I: Tables, ASNC Guides, Texts and Studies 5 (Cambridge, 2002), Table LXI. Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 191. An early eleventh-century manuscript of the Excerptiones de Prisciano (N. R. Ker, Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, Oxford 1957, 1–3 (no. 2)) contains 98 lines of elegiac verse from a French priest Herbert to Wulfgar, asking for warm clothes. For further discussion, see D. W. Porter, ‘The Earliest Texts with English and French’, ASE 28, 106–7.

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If we accept the Abingdon charter as evidence of the response in court circles to the viking invasion of 991, we see an obvious linkage between viking activity and domestic affairs which then provides the background for so much else in these most interesting central years of King Æthelred’s reign.82 If it was the impact of the invasion which prompted the king himself to mend the errors of his ways, we have only to look at the king’s charters in order to form an impression of those who were among the king’s principal advisors during this period. The crucial point, however, is that the viking threat was sustained throughout the period from 991 to 1005, and can never have been far from the collective mind. On the face of it, the English responded to the threat in a variety of different ways: some ineffective military activity, but also some dogged resistance, personified initially by Ealdorman Byrhtnoth and latterly by Ulfcetel of East Anglia; the payments of gafol, instituted in 991, and implemented again in 994 and 1002;83 the complex negotiations of 994, involving different arrangements with different leaders and resulting at the same time in the employment of the remaining bulk of the viking army as mercenaries, based probably on the Isle of Wight; dealings with Normandy, involving an abortive invasion on Æthelred’s part but culminating with Æthelred’s marriage to Emma early in 1002; and no doubt some desperate measures, culminating with the ‘Massacre of St Brice’s Day’ on 13 November 1002.84 Yet there was more to it than that. Ælfric of Cerne was highly active throughout this period, producing his two series of Catholic Homilies in the early 990s (before the death of Archbishop Sigeric on 28 October 994), followed in the mid- to later 990s by his Lives of the Saints and by a variety of other writings; and from this output one can form an impression of Ælfric’s own analysis of recent events and the current predicament.85 Indeed, Ælfric’s train of thought in De oratione Moysi (Lives of the Saints, ch. xiii) is so utterly appropriate to the conditions which obtained at this time that it is almost as if he had been reading Æthelred’s charter of 993 and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: if men scorn God’s ways [as at Abingdon in 985], He will punish them first with pestilence and famine [as in 986]; if they persist, He will send in hostile forces [as in 991], and put cowardice in their hearts [as in 992–3]; so men should learn from various examples, drawn from the Old Testament, that wickedness is punished, and all should mend their ways while there is still time to do so (before the end of this world [perhaps although not necessarily with reference to the impending

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For general assessments of this period, see Keynes, ‘Æthelred II’, 412–15, and ‘Apocalypse Then’, 263–4. On the payments of gafol, see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 202–3; and for more recent discussion, see J. E. Damon, ‘Advisors for Peace in the Reign of Æthelred Unræd’, Peace and Negotiation: Strategies for Coexistence in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. D. Wolfthal, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 4, Turnhout 2000, 57–78. For the Massacre of St Brice’s Day, see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 203–5; J. W. Earl, ‘Violence and Non-Violence in Anglo-Saxon England: Ælfric’s “Passion of St. Edmund” ’, Philological Quarterly 78, 1999, 125–7; Lavelle, Aethelred II, 99–102; Williams, Æthelred the Unready, 52–4; Howard, Swein Forkbeard’s Invasions, 61–2; and S. Keynes, ‘The Massacre of St Brice’s Day’, University of Nottingham, 13 November 2002. M. Godden, ‘Apocalypse and Invasion in Late Anglo-Saxon England’, From Anglo-Saxon to Early Middle English: Studies presented to E. G. Stanley, ed. M. Godden et al., Oxford 1994, 130–62, esp. 131–42; cf. Earl, ‘Violence and Non-Violence’, for Ælfric’s ‘restraint’. See also Keynes, ‘Wulfsige, Bishop of Sherborne’, 66–7.

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millennium]).86 Conventional the train of thought may be; but it was no less powerful for that, and there are clear indications that in the 990s the king and his advisors became deeply conscious of their need to propitiate a wrathful God, leading to a significant intensification of a natural inclination to do whatever would be pleasing in His sight. One sees it, for example, in the apparently systematic promotion of the cults of saints in the period 995–1005: represented not only by Ælfric’s Lives of the Saints, but also by the several ceremonial translations of saints’ relics, and by the fact that the Lives of Dunstan, Æthelwold and Oswald were all written c. 1000.87 One sees it also in the active promotion of the cause of monastic life during the same period, represented most obviously by the production of some highly significant charters,88 but more generally by the activities of the second generation of monastic reformers. No doubt it is also significant that there appears to have been so much activity in manuscript production during these years,89 and perhaps in other aspects of the religious life (such as church building). It was apparently in the spring of 997, and so at a time when the Danish army was still in ‘mercenary’ mode, that the king and his councillors promulgated some important legislation to bring order to the ‘English’ and ‘Danish’ parts of the kingdom. Feelings may have been heightened in the 990s by apprehension about the impending millennium; but there was no relief once the year 1000 had passed, so the end of the world remained a potent threat.90 What the viking mercenary force might have made of all this activity in the mid-990s is far from clear. For whatever reason, the army reactivated itself in 997, with a ferocious raid to the south-west, culminating with the destruction of Ordulf’s monastery at Tavistock (striking hard at one who by all accounts was especially close to the king at precisely this time).91 Further fighting followed in 998–1004; but in the event it was the ‘great famine’ of 1005 which occasioned the army’s departure for Denmark.92 Unfortunately, in the words of the chronicler, the Danish fleet ‘let little time elapse before it came back’. We can but guess how the English might have felt, after fifteen years of sustained threat. It is

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Ælfric, De oratione Moysi, in Ælfric’s Lives of Saints, ed. W. W. Skeat, 4 pts., Early English Text Society, nos. 76, 82, 94 and 114, Oxford 1881–1900, repr. 2 vols., London 1966, i, 282–307; see also EHD, 927 (no. 239 (f)), and Godden, ‘Apocalypse and Invasion’, 134–5. For a similar phenomenon across the Channel, see Campbell, ‘England, France, Flanders and Germany’, 193–4. S. Keynes, ‘King Æthelred’s Charter for Sherborne Abbey, 998’, St Wulfsige and Sherborne, ed. Barker et al., 10–14. H. Gneuss, Handlist of Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts: a List of Manuscripts and Manuscript Fragments Written or Owned in England up to 1100, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 241, Tempe AZ 2001, has entries for about 1350 manuscripts, of which about 1000 relate to books written before the Norman Conquest. Of these, about 220, or over a fifth, are dated to the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, and are candidates, therefore, for production during the reign of King Æthelred the Unready. Keynes, ‘Apocalypse Then’, 264–8; Lavelle, Aethelred II, 91–4. For Ordulf (the king’s uncle), see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 188 (origins in the 980s), 192 (significance in the 990s), and 209 (retirement in 1005). Ordulf and another man (?Æthelmær) are said by Goscelin to have been instrumental in the translation of St Edith at Wilton, c. 997: see Writing the Wilton Women, ed. S. Hollis, Turnhout 2004, 69. The effects of this famine were felt widely, and deserve further investigation; see K. J. Leyser, ‘The Tenth-Century Condition’, in his Medieval Germany and its Neighbours 900–1250, London 1982, 1–9.

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appropriate, however, that the end of the period should be marked by a charter, dated 1005, cast in terms which reflect the prevailing state of mind among the English. In the proem, the king acknowledges that the wrath of God is upon them, and relates how he wished to please God ‘with a continual display of good works’. He continues: ‘And in as much as in our times we endure the fires of war, and the pillaging of our wealth, and also on account of the most savage assault of the rampaging barbarous enemies, and on account of the manifold oppression of heathen peoples, and of those afflicting us almost to the point of extinction, we perceive that we live in perilous times; so it is very fitting that we, on whom the ends of the world are come, should look with diligent care to the needs of our souls.’ The charter confirms Ealdorman Æthelmær’s foundation of a monastery at Eynsham; and it reveals that Æthelmær himself chose this moment to retire from the world, and to live in common with the community, presumably in company with Abbot Ælfric.93 Ordulf, uncle of King Æthelred and Æthelmær’s close associate since the early 990s, retired soon afterwards. * Historians can never resist comparing one king with another, and judging them to be good, bad, or indifferent, presumably to expedite matters at the Last Judgement. Æthelred compares unfavourably with all of them, and was accordingly dismissed by Freeman as the ‘only ruler of the line of Ecgberht whom we can unhesitatingly set down as a bad man and a bad King’.94 Or, as Sir Charles Oman put it, Æthelred eventually ‘did England the only good service that was in his power, by dying on April 23rd 1016’.95 It is a verdict so deeply embedded in English historiography that it will always prove difficult if not impossible to dislodge. It is no big deal to say now, what Professor Barlow said over thirty years ago, that posterity treated Æthelred with less than justice. It is more surprising that one can still find plenty of accounts of Æthelred based uncritically on the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, with the spin derived from the Anglo-Norman historians who made him the personification of all that was rotten in the state of England and all that needed to be cleansed.

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S, no. 911. For its formulation, see Keynes, Diplomas of King Æthelred, 114, n. 102; cf. Charters of Malmesbury Abbey, ed. S. Kelly, Anglo-Saxon Charters 11, Oxford 2005, 84, for the view that the poem was borrowed from a so-called ‘First Decimation’ charter of King Æthelwulf, which she regards (against the odds) as a genuine product of the mid-ninth century. For the abbey itself, see E. Gordon, Eynsham Abbey, Chichester 1990; C. A. Jones, Ælfric’s Letter to the Monks of Eynsham, Cambridge 1998, 5–17; A. Hardy et al., Ælfric’s Abbey: Excavations at Eynsham Abbey, Oxfordshire, 1989–92, Oxford 2003, 9–10, 64–80 and 486–92; and A. Hardy, Eynsham: a Village and its Abbey, London 2003, with reconstruction drawings. E. A. Freeman, A History of the Norman Conquest of England, 6 vols., Oxford 1867–79, i, 2nd edn, Oxford 1870, 258–9, with more (much more) to the same effect; cf. Keynes, ‘Æthelred II’, 419. He comments further: ‘On the whole the materials for this period are ample, and, as regards England, they are fully trustworthy’ (259, note). C. Oman, England before the Norman Conquest, London 1910, 9th edn, London 1949, 578. The remark is almost as nasty as that of S. Turner, The History of the Anglo-Saxons, 4 vols., London 1799–1806, 7th edn, 3 vols., London 1852, ii, 277: ‘At this crisis [in 1016], the death of Ethelred released England from its greatest enemy.’

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It is not likely, alas, that understanding of the reign of King Æthelred will be transformed in the foreseeable future by the discovery of new literary or documentary evidence; but if Fate is tempted by that statement, then so much the better. It would be quite satisfactory to find a seventeenth- or early-eighteenth-century transcript of the ‘lost’ lawcode of King Æthelred, in Cotton Otho A. x, a manuscript largely destroyed by fire in 1731. It may be that we shall have to make do with the two hitherto unrecorded charters of King Æthelred, derived ultimately from the archives of Barking abbey, which came to light in the mid-1980s: dated 18 April 1013 and 20 April 1013, recording grants of land in Essex to Sigered (evidently the well-known thegn of that name), and contributing usefully to our knowledge of the period between the dispersal of Thorkell’s army in 1012 and Swein Forkbeard’s invasion of England in August 1013.96 There is perhaps a better prospect that our knowledge of the period will be transformed by discoveries of a different kind: a hoard of gold and silver, deposited in the 990s, or archaeological traces of a viking base on the Isle of Wight, or of the port of Sandwich (used by every self-respecting ‘Danish’ fleet from 1006 to 1015),97 or of Swein Forkbeard’s base at Gainsborough. The fact remains, however, that what the historian really needs, if anything is to make any difference to our understanding of King Æthelred, is a lead chest stuffed to its brim with a representative selection of the whole range of documentation generated by central and local government, with some letters and other records of a more personal kind, with a hitherto unknown version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and an unfinished draft of the king’s memoirs, all wrapped up in the hanging which depicted the deeds of Ealdorman Byrhtnoth. It is not going to happen; but this should not prevent us from wondering how different things might look if it did.

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The texts are preserved in the sixteenth-century cartulary of Ilford Hospital (Essex), at Hatfield House: see H. H. Lockwood, ‘One Thing Leads to Another – The Discovery of Additional Charters of Barking Abbey’, Essex Journal 25, Spring 1990, 11–13. Provisional texts are accessible on ‘Kemble’ (above, n. 64). ASC, s.a. 1006, 1009, 1013, 1015. The importance of Sandwich is mentioned in the Encomium Emmae, ii.5: Encomium Emmae Reginae, ed. A. Campbell, London 1949, 20–1. See also J. PullenAppleby, English Sea Power c. 871 to 1100, Hockwold-cum-Wilton 2005, 115–16.

6 Writing the Biography of Eleventh-Century Queens PAULINE STAFFORD

F

OR A BIOGRAPHER of eleventh-century English queens, the work of Frank Barlow must be a constant point of reference. His writing on the eleventh century, and in particular his biographies of eleventh-century rulers, is the essential starting point for anyone assessing English politics at this date. His view that early medieval biography was both possible and useful has acted as a stimulus to all of us who followed him along that difficult path. His biography of Edward the Confessor was not only a personal guide, but also a spur to my own attempt to produce a similar work on Edward’s wife and queen, Edith. His fundamental edition of a text closely associated with Edith, the contemporary Life of King Edward, is the basis on which any study of Edith has to be built, and both he and his edition were constant intellectual companions in my own efforts to recreate Edith’s life. An academic career pursued in Exeter may have stimulated his own interest in Edith: Exeter was part of the eleventh-century queen’s dower.1 The location certainly added an extra piquancy to the challenge of writing about the writing of queens’ biographies. This essay is thus offered as a tribute to Frank Barlow and his work, by way of a reflection on my own practice. What follows is not a new insight into early medieval queens and their lives, but a ‘theory of practice’, or rather a ‘theory of past practice’. It will raise questions about sources, but especially about structures and agency, and thus about the value of writing biography which by definition concentrates on the individual and assumes his/her significance. It applies these questions in particular to the writing of the lives of women, secular royal women, though with a comparative eye on the writing of lives of secular men. Practice here comprised two works which were, in their different ways, biographies of medieval queens. First, in the early 1980s, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: the King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages;2 second, in 1997, Queen Emma and Queen Edith, Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century 1 2

Domesday Book, i, fol. 100r. Pauline Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers: the King’s Wife in the Early Middle Ages, Athens GA 1983, reprinted with new Preface, London 1998.

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England.3 The first covered royal women over much of western Europe between the sixth and eleventh centuries. It was overtly a work of synthesis and comparison.4 I might now describe it by one of Levi’s terms as ‘prosopographical biography’ or ‘biographie modale’:5 that is as biography which sees the individual as representative of a group or category, which places more emphasis on social structures than on individuals and which implies that individuals are largely determined by those structures, using individual lives or aspects of them to exemplify these structures. This approach is clear from the chapter titles of the book: ‘Bride-to-be’, ‘King’s wife’, ‘Mistress of the household’, ‘Queen’ and ‘Queen-mother’. Each of these is a role, or social script, which in turn refers to, in some sense is written by, deeper structures – of ‘household’, ‘kinship and inheritance’, ‘marriage’, ‘rule’. The book’s premise was that individuals could fruitfully be treated as groups, whose experience could in important respects be generalised, and understood through that generalisation. Their lives were susceptible to this treatment precisely because of the extent to which they were all constrained by the roles and structures common to their society. The organisation also reflected a perception of the female life-cycle. Those roles were conceived as stages in the female life-cycle: bride, wife, mother, widow, though some of these clearly overlapped – ‘wife and mother’, ‘mother and widow’, ‘mistress of the household and wife and mother’ – and one – queen – was only loosely a life-cycle stage, and certainly not one common to all women. The life-cycle is in some senses an obvious way to tackle a human life, one which simultaneously recognises its biological unfolding and the social construction of that biology. Each society’s view of what it is to be a wife or mother, for example, constructs the experience of the sexual fertile woman. An emphasis on it in the case of women, however, suggests how far it is a cycle with particular relevance for understanding women at this date. The life-cycle presented here was peculiar to women, whose lives were seen as in most respects constrained by the roles allotted to them by family and especially marriage. This is not to deny the significance of life-cycle for early medieval men. Youth, and perhaps especially age, as distinct stages in the lives of men as well as women are not always studied as much as they should be. And family and marriage are important stages in male life.6 But life-cycle is arguably not as dominant in shaping men’s lives, given the other opportunities open to them even at this period. It is significant for example that Michael Clanchy’s excellent biography of Abelard includes

3 4 5

6

Pauline Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith: Queenship and Women’s Power in Eleventh-Century England, Oxford 1997. Stafford, Queens, Concubines and Dowagers, pp. ix and xii. Giovanni Levi, ‘Les usages de la biographie’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 44, 6, 1989, 1325–36, at 1328–30. For Levi, such biography is less concerned with the individual as unique than with the individual who concentrates all the characteristics of a group. It begins with structures, norms and rules – familial etc., and then uses ‘modaux’, examples, as a form of empirical proof. My method loosely fitted this. As recognised, for example, by G. Duby, ‘Dans la France du Nord-Ouest. Au XIIe siècle: les “jeunes” dans la société aristocratique’, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations 19, 1964, 835–46, and W. M. Aird, ‘Frustrated Masculinity: the Relationship between William the Conqueror and his Eldest Son’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley, London 1999, 39–55.

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chapters on roles which, although they are attached to some extent to stages of the life-cycle, offer a range of choices at those stages and are less determined by the body’s own development than those of ‘wife’ or ‘mother’. Abelard, of course, lived at precisely the time when roles were opening, at least for some men.7 Clanchy’s chapters underline an approach to biography through roles and structures, if not simply through life-cycle. Queen Emma and Queen Edith was rather different. It was an attempt at a more truly biographical study, in the sense that biography is the story of an individual life, here two such lives. Its focus was two English queens: first, the Norman-born Emma, wife and widow consecutively of Æthelred II and the Danish conqueror Cnut, mother of Harthacnut and Edward the Confessor, and second, Edith, daughter of one of the greatest English nobles of the eleventh century, Earl Godwine, and wife and widow of Edward the Confessor. The book was still very concerned with social structures and roles. The longest section, Part II, ‘The Structures’, considered these in the context of tenth- and eleventh-century England. So the ‘Faces of the Queen’ – her roles as bride, wife, mother – were now set firmly in time and place, here for example within the kinship structures and practice of English (and to a lesser extent Danish) royal families. Whereas the earlier book had used the individual largely to illuminate the common roles, this one was a reconstruction of the individual lives, putting structures and roles to work to do this. They were used, for instance, to help interpret often laconic sources. What would the writer of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle have understood when he described Emma in 1017 as ‘the Lady’ or ‘Æthelred’s widow’?8 They were used to help interpret the judgements and assessments in these sources. The history of tenth- and eleventh-century queenship, for example, was the necessary context which brought out, for example, the enormity of the fall of a queen which the ‘E’ chronicler noted when Edith was sent from court in 1051.9 They were used to help recover some of the ideas and ideals which these women themselves might have internalised. This implied, of course, that the self would be perceived to some extent as a series of more or less stereotypical roles. But it also allowed some very tentative move from public/exterior lives to interior, permitting informed speculation about how, for instance, Emma might have seen her role as a mother in the crisis of the 1030s. This study of structures in relation to an attempt to write individual lives was also designed to do something else: to uncover some of the contradictions in roles like that of motherhood, the incoherence or impossibility in practice of norms like those of inheritance. This raises the vexed question of agency, one of the central questions of biography. It is a point to which I shall return. Both books faced problems of sources and their interpretations. Both identified and utilised structures and roles, or identities – the individualised acceptance of

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8 9

On this and the impact of it on our – possibly erroneous and anachronistic – views of the twelfthcentury individual, see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, first published JEH 31, 1980, 1–17, expanded in her Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1982, 82–109. ASC, C, D and E, 1017. ASC, E, s.a. 1048, recte 1051, and cf. Stafford, Emma and Edith, 11.

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roles, more so here the second than the first.10 But in the second book I struggled much more with the problems of biography, the utilisation of all this to understand the individual, and especially of agency. In the course of writing it I became even more convinced of the importance and utility of biography as an historical genre.11 In the rest of this paper I want to pursue two things in particular: some issues concerning sources, and the question of determinism and agency. In relation to the latter, in particular, I shall also argue for the significance of biography as a way of approaching and understanding the past. Sources and the problems they, or rather the lack of them, pose are an obvious problem for the medieval biographer, exaggerating those which face all biographers.12 Some of these have already emerged: the problems of reading them with contemporary meanings in mind, which is no more than the problem which faces all of us approaching the past, but also of reading exiguous and laconic ones. This latter is more specifically a problem for the medievalist, and a particular one for the medieval biographer. Early medieval sources are rarely interested in, or useful for, some of the key concerns of the biographer, including the facts necessary to what we would consider the basic reconstruction of a life. Births are a case in point. The sources are rarely explicit here. The years of Emma’s and Edith’s births are matters for speculation and reconstruction, as are the dates of birth of Emma’s children. Both women enter the story and the sources not at the point of biological birth, but at a life-cycle transition – at marriage.13 The biographer of medieval women must, however, learn to make the most out of exiguous sources, and even to turn their brevity to advantage. The very fact of the mention of Emma’s marriage is significant in itself. Emma’s marriage to Æthelred in 1002 is only the fourth or fifth royal marriage noted in tenth- and eleventh-century English chronicles.14 She is the only wife of Æthelred whom 10 11

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For some basic discussion of all these see, for example, Questioning Identity: Gender, Class, Nation, ed. K. Woodward, London 2000. There might be an autobiography to be told here, of the hesitant and partial conversion from an Annaliste/structuralist youth, spent (some would no doubt say mis-spent) pursuing the insights of the social sciences and anthropology, to a mature humanism of middle age. Like all autobiography it is a slippery, partial and context specific story, one emphasised by the need to discuss a practice of biographical writing. It is only a partial conversion, as will be apparent. And it is a cautionary tale for would-be writers of biography, since that path, if I trod it, was not a consciously chosen one, and it is one, it will be seen, which a lot of other people had been treading. There were some structures drawing the road map! On sources as a major limitation on the early medieval biographer, see Roger Collins, Charlemagne, London 1998, p. viii, ‘It is not really possible to write a biography of Charlemagne in the sense of a work that uncovers its subject’s personal hopes, fears . . . and tries to explain what he thought, rather than something of what he did.’ Cf. p. 2 for questions about whether Einhard intended to provide a detailed narrative of his subject’s life or time, but see the perceptive critique of this in Sarah Hamilton, ‘Early Medieval Rulers and their Modern Biographers’, EME 9, 2000, 249–52, and Jinty Nelson in this volume. I am more interested in biography and agency than Collins, and thus in the question of the existence of the truly ‘individual’ and his/her impact, and the value of studying them. However, structures can, I will argue, provide some insight into a person’s hopes, fears, thoughts and aspirations. So Emma in ASC, C, D and E, 1002; Edith, ASC, C, 1044; E, 1043, recte 1045. Others are those of Ælfgifu and Edmund – only retrospectively, not dated, and in relation to her sons and sanctity; Æthelflæd of Damerham; Ælfgifu and Eadwig; Ælfthryth – and possibly Æthelflæd, though technically her marriage belongs to the late ninth century and is not recorded there. D is the manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which contains most of these women. I hope to return to these marriages and the notice of them in his chronicle in a future article.

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the chroniclers note. The record may have been contemporary, but it became part of a story written as late as c. 1016 at the end of Æthelred’s reign, after the Danish conquest, certainly after the involvement of the Norman Emma’s compatriots in Danish raiding and the exile in Normandy of Æthelred, perhaps even after Emma’s marriage to the Danish conqueror Cnut.15 It is as part of this story that it has been preserved, if indeed that story has not determined the fact that it was recorded at all. This brief but unusual mention may thus have something to tell us not just of the importance of the marriage in 1002, but of its significance c. 1016. The significance and meaning it would have had in either of those contexts must also inform our assessment of what it might have meant for Emma herself, meanings which changed over her lifetime. Her death too is mentioned in 1052, an even rarer occurrence, this time a more contemporary record. She was variously described as ‘the Lady’, ‘widow of King Æthelred and Cnut’, ‘Mother of King Edward and Harthacnut’.16 As in most biography, medieval or otherwise, the significance of a life is summed up at death. In this case that summing up presents her life as an accumulation of roles, vindicating an emphasis on these and encouraging exploration of them to understand her. Nor is it, of course, a simple summary of her life, but one relevant to context; not a guide to the whole life, but useful for the historian seeking its final meaning in the eyes of contemporaries. All this is standard source criticism. We need to be sensitive not only to what we are being told, by whom and in the context of what story, but to the fact that we are being told it at all. Presence in the sources takes on meaning against absence. And since women are so often omitted, this sort of reading is especially relevant to them. Writing the biography of eleventh-century women, which compounds the problem of scarce sources, also sends us in quest of less usual material. Disadvantage may again lead to additional insight. Names and name changes, and what we can make of them, are not an obvious source, but in eleventh-century context proved useful. Emma underwent a name change at marriage, as, more speculatively, did Edith.17 Name change underlines the significance of marriage in women’s lives, adding weight to the chroniclers’ records of their marriages. It suggests that life-cycle transition, and marriage in particular, may have been more important, even sharper, for women than for men at this date. This is a point of interest in itself to the biographer. Such sharp transitions and the marking of them by a change of name, with all its connotations of identity, may also pose questions about the coherence of an individual or personality across a life. This is a question raised for men as well as women on entry into religious life, which is again sometimes accompanied by a name change, symbolising an attempt, variously thorough and successful, at the annihilation of a previous life.

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On the date of this section of the Chronicles see S. Keynes, ‘The Declining Reputation of King Æthelred the Unready’, Ethelred the Unready: Papers from the Millenary Conference, ed. D. Hill, BAR, British Series 59, Oxford 1978, 227–53. Thus, for example, ASC, D and E, 1052. Stafford, Emma and Edith, at, for example, 8, 9, 11–12 and 61 n. 30; for Edith, 257.

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Sources as a limitation on the medieval biographer, and how we might overcome that, are a constant theme of this volume. Its essays offer a range of insights and new readings. I want to highlight only one more, one which is central to the practice of biography, and to the questions of agency which this paper will address. It is what could be termed the ‘overpersonalisation’ of actions in some early medieval sources, resulting in a danger of overemphasising the impact of the individual at the expense of context and structure, of, for example, economic and social factors.18 Edith, for example, was often blamed for interference in ecclesiastical affairs: for taking land from Peterborough Abbey; for taking money in connection with ecclesiastical appointments; for taking treasures from Evesham after 1066. Emma, by contrast, is presented as a generous patron, either alongside Cnut or alone, as when she competed with Bishop Ælfwine to adorn the church of St Swithun.19 Both praise and blame are in simple black and white terms. Far from being constrained by structures, these are actors presented virtually without context. They could almost be caricatured as ‘super-agents’ whose actions often appear arbitrary, almost motiveless. Or at best their motives can be reduced to simple stereotypes, which we in turn may read as character: Emma the pious and bountiful: Edith the predatory and greedy. There are a number of factors at work here. Flattery and scapegoating are certainly at play, and in both of these the individuals concerned are viewed from the perspective of clerical authors with their own agenda and, equally important, their own models of male and female behaviour. Hiding the face and activity of others, in the case of these women especially that of the king behind his wife, may be occurring. There is in some measure an unsympathetic view of secular politics, a lack of understanding of them, even more fatally a lack of a language to describe political complexity and ambiguity itself. There are ways of dealing with this. Contextualisation is essential. That involves turning back again to structures: asking about the likelihood of a woman being in a position to act in this way; seeing Edith, for example, as an English queen in the eleventh century, controlling, along with her husband, remoter areas of the kingdom through estates in the north-east Midlands which marched with those of Peterborough; seeing her as a laywoman, with arguably different ideas and ideals of property and gifts to the church from those of the monastic, even reforming, sources which recorded her actions. It involves looking at the context of action and record, placing both queen and laywomen in the post-1066 world governed by the needs of the surviving English nobility and of increasingly unsympathetic commentary on their activity. We can, as a result, reinterpret Edith: turning greed, perhaps, into defensible lay activity; reducing her individual role to that of a queen, involved in royal strategy more generally and alongside her husband; repoliticising her actions, which may have been debatable in eleventhcentury lay political terms, but which certainly made sense within them. Perhaps in the process we lose some of the individual agency; if so that is only a salutary

18 19

See, for example, Emma Mason, ‘William Rufus: Myth and Reality’, JMH 3, 1977, 3, and cf. V. H. Galbraith, ‘Good Kings and Bad Kings in Medieval English History’, History 30, 1945, 121. Discussions and full referencing are in Stafford, Emma and Edith, 143–57.

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reminder of the latter’s limitations. We certainly forfeit those actions as an easy route to an assessment of her character, though that is only truly comprehensible when placed within the appropriate political parameters. It is one of the ironies of medieval biography that, faced with sources which assert precisely the agency for which a biographer is often seeking, we may feel impelled to ask sharp questions. And it is a double irony in the case of the biography of women, where the desire to question a casting of women as passive victims might lead us to latch precisely on to such accounts of action. Rewriting Edith in this way means seeing her as an eleventh-century English king’s wife. Politicising her activity in this capacity is a reminder of one of the results of writing these women into history and telling their lives. It draws attention to the familial dimensions of early medieval politics in general. It reminds us of the need to write this not merely into the lives of queens and women, but also of kings and men. These source questions raise the issue of agency, an issue which has lurked behind much of this discussion and which no early twenty-first-century consideration of biographical writing can evade. It has been a central question in the theory which has cast doubt on the value of biography and, more recently, defended it. A number of trends in twentieth-century historiography questioned both the value of studying an individual human life and the possibility of doing it. My own approach to biography, emphasising structures and roles, has been much influenced by one of these, namely the impact of the social sciences on history. This is associated especially with the so-called Annaliste school but in practice has had a much wider influence. At its most extreme this approach can result in a view of individuals as largely if not entirely determined, with little or no impact on history and historical change. Thus, for Braudel, Charles V had to be, deep structures created him;20 the occasional individuals of the sixteenth century were irrelevant rebels, escaping into the maquis of liberty.21 Rather less strongly, but in the same vein, Marc Bloch’s men were less the sons of their fathers, than of their times.22 This social determinism, far wider than the Annalistes, was joined in the later twentieth century by a linguistic variety, a postmodernist world in which discourses ruled and the language spoke people rather than vice versa. And for historians of women, patriarchy combined social structures and discourses into a

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Thus, for Braudel, Charles V was ‘un hazard calculé, preparé, voulu d’Espagne’, Europe would not have escaped an imperial experience, the construction of a vast state, F. Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, Paris 1949, 519. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 1098–9, responding to the suggestion that men choose freely in the faultlines of constraining realities, the ill-made joints Braudel notes as the ‘zones entre determinismes où l’on puisse prendre le maquis de la liberté’. Such places are not common, nor are men numerous there. Those who make it find their magnificent effort extinguished, without lasting result. For discussion of this, Derek Beales, ‘History and Biography: an Inaugural Lecture (delivered 20 November, 1980)’, in History and Biography, ed. T. C. W. Blanning and D. Cannadine, Cambridge 1996, 266–83. M. Bloch, Apologie pour l’histoire ou métier d’historien, Paris 1952, 9, quoting a wise Arab proverb; cited J. Le Goff, St Louis, Paris 1996, 24, to which Le Goff himself adds ‘of their times and of the times of their fathers’. Bloch’s own ideas on this subject were nuanced, see, for example, his comments on generations or groups formed by circumstances, and the elasticity and complexity of such generations, Apologie, 94–5.

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prison from which there sometimes appeared no escape other than into a feminist wilderness of women-made societies or language, a telling parallel to Braudel’s maquis.23 Individuals become little more than epiphenomena of social or linguistic structures. Can they be studied? And is there any point in doing so? Such views still leave biography defensible. It may, for example, be a way of providing the human face of the past. But they destroy the agency of human beings and thus the impact of the individual on history which might be felt to be a major justification of biography. These positions have, however, come under significant fire. Bourdieu, for one, has criticised the rigid structuralism of many anthropologists and the rigid opposition of ‘individual’ and ‘society’ which lies behind them. He prefers to see the individual existing in a web of social relations.24 It is the diversity of these relations, their lack of internal and combined coherence, which leaves room for ‘play’, for a strategy, whether conscious or not. Bourdieu cautions us, for example, to speak less of ‘kinship structures’, determining and coherent, more of ‘marriage/inheritance strategies’, where outcomes are less predictable. Here choices, however constrained, must be made by actors who make judgements based on previous experience, but which are nonetheless choices in a game where there are rules but also manoeuvres and play.25 Critics of the determinism of some linguistic structuralism, like Kim Worthington, have made similar points about the ‘web of social structures [which] offers a wide range of potentially transgressive communicative sites’.26 And the importance of all this for biography has been developed – in the journal Annales, no less – by Levi, for whom ‘biography constitutes . . . the ideal place to test the interstitial but nonetheless important character of the liberty of agents . . . for observing the fashion in which normative systems function concretely, systems which are never exempt from contradictions’.27 The keywords in all this are ‘interstitial’, ‘systems never exempt from contradictions’, ‘webs’ of social relations and structures. What is critical is their diversity, both internally and in combination, the range of possibilities they offer. Rigid determinism is replaced by the metaphor of the game within which there can be strategy and play. And ‘play’ is a very significant word – indicating both the action and also the degree of looseness, albeit limited, that permits that action; a play is possible because there is play in the system. Attention is being drawn to the diversity and incoherence of norms, roles and structures, their failure to fit any situation perfectly, their combination in specific context in ways which open out space, however limited, for individual choice and action. Ambiguities, conflicting answers and possibilities are there. The individual human life is lived out within this web. It is precisely here that the diversity, incoherence, contradictions and play can be explored.

23 24 25 26 27

I have borrowed this telling analysis from Kim Worthington, Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction, Oxford 1996, 11. See, for example, P. Bourdieu, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’, in In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. M. A. Adamson, Oxford 1990, 3–33. Bourdieu, ‘Fieldwork in Philosophy’, 9–10. Worthington, Self as Narrative, 10. Levi, ‘Les usages’, passim, but esp. 1333–4.

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Which is where biographers come back in, and where I want to return to the individual lives about which I wrote, those of Emma and Edith. The challenge, the opportunity and the necessity for the biographer are to explore the norms and scripts and their importance, whilst recognising the room they leave, and where, for individual agency. In order to do this, I will take a particular crux of Emma’s life, the events which followed the death of Cnut in 1035. This was a crisis in the succession to the throne, which involved all Emma’s sons – and Emma herself.28 It followed the death of her second husband, the Danish conqueror of her first. It opened questions of the claims on the throne of all her sons, by both husbands, both of whom had ruled England. She herself was a participant – as a widow, queen and mother – and arguably an actor. The norms, practices and scripts of tenth- and eleventh-century England were critically important here. They placed Emma as a potential actor in these events, legitimised her and equipped her with the means of action. She was Cnut’s queen, one who had been prominent during his reign, and an English queen with the lands and followers of that position. She was Cnut’s widow, with claims which had if anything been strengthened in the wake of the ecclesiastical reform movement. And above all she was a mother. All this provided a basis for action, but it also left, even created, room for agency. Motherhood is the place to start.29 Most societies have views on motherhood, a role which expresses some of the ‘structure of kinship’, articulated and transmitted through, for example, inheritance. It could be argued that the life of a woman with children is determined by that role, as her society writes it. It is a social script she merely acts out. But how far does such a powerful script fit circumstances so well that it can determine action? We should certainly expect Emma to be deeply affected by the eleventh-century English norms of motherhood. That would not necessarily entail the personal nurturing expected at other times and places, but it would entail the need to pursue the best interests of all her children. That would, in turn, involve a judgement of ‘best interests’, which themselves would be defined within, for example, practices and norms of inheritance: so, for example, the interests of an older son might not be the same as those of a younger. We are still concerned with norms and roles in the most general sense, but already there is a potential tension in the script as motherhood meets inheritance – at the point where ‘best interest’ must be defined. The tension was heightened in the specific family situation after 1035. In 1035, when Cnut, her second husband, died, Emma found herself in a complicated position. She was the widow of not one but two consecutive English kings, with sons by each of them, all of whom had a claim to the English throne. Which one was she to support? How was she to judge all of their best interests? The script was no simple guide here. The context included previous decisions on the succession, made, for example, by Æthelred and Cnut, perhaps at the time of marriage. These decisions would themselves have been guided by norms of inheritance, and could help define ‘best interests’. But since such decisions could

28 29

For detailed discussion of what follows see Stafford, Emma and Edith, 35–40, 189–90, 236–48. See discussion in Stafford, Emma and Edith, 75–81.

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be and were changed and superseded, they were at best a rough guide, not a hard and fast pecking order. Emma had also to calculate in a situation which included a rival stepson, also a claimant in some views of inheritance, one son absent in Denmark, and two others ready and waiting across the Channel. Motherhood’s script was one of the things which placed Emma to act, and when she had acted, it provided the language in which she had to justify that action; hence the stress in the Encomium Emmae on the extent to which she had looked to the interests of all her sons. And we would be wise to assume that it formed a part of Emma’s own mental framework, her interior life in so far as we can now get access to that. But although it guided and judged, internally and externally, motherhood did not and could not simply write her response. Structures, norms and roles were important in 1035 and after. This was a crisis in structures of family and inheritance played out by ‘wives’, ‘widows’, ‘mothers’ and ‘sons’. But it was also a particularly complicated family situation involving step-relations and serial monogamy. It followed the tenth-century unification of England and foreign conquest, both significant for queens, and a movement for moral reform with an impact on marriage and widowhood. And it involved not only rival candidates, but accidents of timing, following an abortive attempt on Edward’s part to return to England in 1033 and its repercussions, as well as the delays which kept Harthacnut in Denmark. The calculations and decisions which were made in 1035 and thereafter had to be made in these uncertain circumstances. They were fraught with ambiguity. The situation in 1035 was susceptible to no single uncontested definition in contemporary political discourse. Did the death of Cnut usher in an interregnum, where no-one was king and the issue of the succession remained to be resolved? Did it produce a succession of Harold, contested by Emma; or a succession of Harthacnut, frustrated by a tyrannical Harold? There was room for doubt and debate. In such complexity there can be no scripts which determine action. There are ones which constrain it, but there were also points of choice, like the fateful one when Emma’s sons were summoned from Normandy in 1036. The result of that was the death of the younger son, Alfred. It was a choice with repercussions which could be felt over the next three decades, through to the events of 1066.30 For the biographer, an understanding of all this is essential. The structures, norms, roles, scripts are basic. Emma would not have been in a position to act without them. Like any individual she was an accumulation of such roles, which overlapped and combined in different ways at different stages of life and in varying circumstances. These accumulations underline the complexity of individuals, as the point at which so many social structures meet and become historical, and meet, as in 1035, in very specific situations. As Bourdieu has cautioned, and as Frank

30

The crisis of 1035 was, of course, peculiarly complex. It was not unique in the eleventh century, though it is one of the few where a woman and her activity can be studied in sufficient detail to ask questions about agency which provide answers sufficiently detailed for a paper on this topic. But in the eleventh century pre-1066 one could also study, for example: 1014/15 – loyal sons, king-to-be, inheritance tensions, exile/abdication, step-relations; 1051–2 – marriage and its definitions, succession, the power of Godwine; not to mention the whole story of Edward’s arrangements for succession – where no hard and fast rules could have applied.

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Barlow himself argued,31 we must be aware of all the possibilities in such situations. The task of the biographer, as of all historians, is to unthink teleology; it is his/her special task to reconstruct the range of what was possible, choosable, and to grasp the ambiguities within which individuals make their choices and act. It might be argued that a crisis like that of 1035 is extreme, unusual, tests the scripts and norms to their limit and beyond, that its very atypicality makes it a poor example. It may, of course, be only in such circumstances that individual agency is possible. That is a question that only the informed practice of biography can answer. Such an informed practice must start both from the norms and scripts and from an alertness to their potential conflicts and incoherences. In conclusion, I have argued throughout this paper for a practice of biography which begins from a study of structures and roles, within which all individual lives are lived, and which are thus fundamental to an understanding of those lives, but in a formulation more atuned to their individual enactment and potential problems as would be norms and scripts. Such a practice provides many benefits. It supplies ways of reading the limited sources available to the early medieval biographer, especially the early medieval biographer of women, even ways of supplying some of the interior self, or more correctly the internalised roles.32 An approach through roles and structures but also through their acting out in complex situations may be a liberation from the alleged limitations of medieval sources for the biographer, since it is not dependent on the sort of personal sources often felt to be essential to biography. It may be felt that this approach destroys individuals, breaking people down into a series of overlapping and accumulating roles, in the case of married women in particular, ones which change across the life-cycle, denying coherence to the ‘self’, and certainly compromising any notion of agency. But ironically that breaking down provides the great vindication of studying the individual: because it is only in an individual life that all these roles and structures are lived out. Structures and roles do not in that sense determine and write the individual, they become effective through the individual, and through the uniqueness of each life. And it is in that uniqueness that their possibilities, ambiguities and contradictions become apparent. Biography may not only be desirable, the human face of the past, but one of the most important historical genres, making clear the room for choice, however limited, that is also a motor of historical change. Medieval biography, of women and men, is difficult, but both possible and important. 31 32

F. Barlow, Edward the Confessor, London 1970, p. xxvii. The question of ‘the self’ is a huge one which I have been concerned to broach as little as possible. A fundamental work on this is M. Mauss, ‘Une catégorie de l’ésprit humain: la notion de la personne, celle de “moi” ’, in his Sociologie et Anthropologie, Intro. C. Lévi-Strauss, Paris 1950, 331–62, first printed as the Huxley Lecture in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 68, 1938. A huge relevant literature includes, for the eleventh and twelfth centuries in particular, C. Morris, The Discovery of the Individual, 1050–1200, London 1972; A. Gurevich, Historical Anthropology of the Middle Ages, Oxford 1992, especially ‘Perceptions of the Individual and the Hereafter in the Middle Ages’, 65–81; J. Benton, ‘Consciousness of Self and Perceptions of Individuality’, in Culture, Power and Personality in Medieval France, ed. J. Benton and T. N. Bisson, London and Rio Grande 1991, 327–65, and more specifically S. Bagge, ‘The Autobiography of Abelard and Medieval Individualism’, JMH 19, 1993, 327–50. My own position is, as is probably apparent, closest to C. Walker Bynum, ‘Did the Twelfth Century Discover the Individual?’, above, n. 7.

7 The Flemish Contribution to Biographical Writing in England in the Eleventh Century ELISABETH VAN HOUTS

A

S IS WELL KNOWN, there was an apparent dearth of indigenous literary talent in England in the first half of the eleventh century, when relatively little by way of historical or hagiographical work was produced in Latin. The gap is particularly striking when compared with the flourishing centres of Canterbury, Winchester, Ramsey and around Wulfstan of York and Ælfric at the turn of the millennium, and the growing interest in the past witnessed in the early twelfth century.1 The political upheavals of the eleventh century, in the form of foreign occupation by the Danes and Normans, could easily be blamed for the lack of written records. Interestingly, it was another group of foreigners, the Flemish, who filled the vacuum left by the unproductive English. The Flemish biographers had relatively little impact on what we now might call the formal art of the written portrait, which after all had been well practised all over western Europe. Yet what made the Flemish immigrants in England stand out in the Latin tradition was their remarkable degree of sympathy for women (and in particular queens), lay and ecclesiastical, alive and dead. Moreover, we can add to this their linguistic expertise, narrative style and eye for detail. From among the many Flemish authors of the eleventh century I will concentrate on four or five of them: the anonymous author of the Encomium Emmae reginae (active between 1026 and 1041, d. after 1041),2

1

2

M. Lapidge and R. C. Love, ‘The Latin Hagiography of England and Wales (600–1550)’, Hagiographies, ed. G. Philippart, 3, Turnhout 2001, 216–17, where the reawakening of the school in England is credited to foreign clerks c. 950. No such comment is made for the period c. 1050, see 222–3. A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England c. 550 – c. 1307, London 1974, ignores the gap in the early and mid-eleventh century. For a comment on the gap as far as historical writing is concerned, see E. van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. C. Harper-Bill and E. van Houts, Woodbridge 2003, 103–121, at 103. Encomium Emmae reginae, ed. A. Campbell, with supplementary introduction by S. Keynes, Camden Classic Reprints 4, Cambridge 1998, pp. xix–xxiii for the author as either a monk or canon of SaintOmer, and entirely convincingly [pp. xxxix–xli] for the conclusion that he was a monk at Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer. W. Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil im lateinischen Mittelalter, Band XII/1, iv: Ottonischer Biographie. Das Hohe Mittelalter 920–1220 n. Chr. Erster Halfband 920–1070 n. Ch, Stuttgart 1999, 260–1. For Queen Emma as patron, see P. Stafford, Queen Emma and Queen Edith. Queenship and Womens’ Power in Eleventh-Century England, Oxford 1997, 28–40.

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Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen (d. between 1084 and 1098),3 as well as Folcard (d. after 1085)4 and Goscelin (d. c. 1107),5 both monks of Saint-Bertin, each of whom is also a candidate for the anononymous authorship of Vita Ædwardi Regis, written in 1065–7.6 But before dealing with the Flemish contribution to biographical writing in England I would like to consider two aspects of literary production in Flanders which have a bearing on our topic: the relative lack of Flemish lay patronage and the role of bishops as patrons. Considering the success of Flemish historians and hagiographers with queens in England, the relative lack of lay patronage in Flanders is remarkable. There is no chronicle, set of annals or biography written at the request of a Flemish lay patron in the eleventh century, while the number of historical narratives resulting from secular eccesiastical patronage is very small. All we have are two lay women’s requests for information on particular saints. There is the response of Abbot Othelbold of Saint-Bavo at Gent (1019–34) to Countess Ogiva (d. 1030), wife of Baldwin IV (988–1035), who was curious for details on St Bavo venerated at Gent,7 and a similar letter from Archbishop Gervase of Reims (1055–67) in reply to a request from Countess Adela and her husband Baldwin V (1035–67) for information about St Donatian, the patron saint of the Bruges chapter [BHL 2281].8 The latter is most revealing about Baldwin’s intellectual curiosity, perhaps inspired by that of his mother Ogiva, and especially the literacy and learning of his (royal) wife, described as sister of King Henry I [of France]. The bishop explains how he had to reach far and wide for information, but that what he needed had fortunately been readily available in the archives and library of Reims. Interestingly, he added that there was not much he could find in Flanders itself. The letters therefore are revealing in two respects. They suggest a lack of literary resources for saints venerated within the county, and some modest interest on the part of the ruling family to fill the gap by encouraging research into the origins of indigenous saints. The sparse evidence for lay patronage stands in stark contrast to the impressive amount of local monastic historiography and hagiography that was produced in Flanders.9 Monks would write saints’ lives, miracle stories and translation

3

4

5 6 7

8 9

N. Huyghebaert, ‘Un moine hagiographe: Drogon de Bergues’, Sacris Erudiri. Jaarboek voor Godsdienstwetenschappen 20, 1971, 191–256, and Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil, Erster Halfband, 262–3. Vita Ædwardi, pp. lii–lix; R. Sharpe, A Handlist of the Latin Writers of Great Britain and Ireland before 1540, Publications of the Journal of Medieval Latin 1, Turnhout 1997, no. 300, 116–17; Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil, Zweiter Halfband, 354–5. Vita Ædwardi, pp. xlvi–lii; Sharpe, Handlist, no. 355, 151–3; Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil, Zweiter Halfband, 353–4. Vita Ædwardi, pp. xliv–lix; Berschin, Biographie und Epochenstil, Erster Halfband, 261. For Queen Edith as patron, see Stafford, Emma and Edith, 40–8. Othelbodi abbatis epistola ad Otgivam Flandriae comitissam, PL cxli, cols. 1337–42. Othelbold’s reply contains information about the nine most important Flemish saints, headed by St Bavo, and a list of lost and recovered estates of Saint-Bavo’s around the time of the viking invasions. Ex miraculis S. Donatiani Brugensibus, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, 854–6. Gervase had been bishop of Le Mans (1036–55). An indispensable research tool is the database Narrative Sources. The Narrative Sources from the Medieval Low Countries, Gent, Leuven and Groningen 1996–2004, http://www.narrative-sources.be/; I. van ’t Spijker, ‘Gallia du nord et de l’Ouest. Les provinces ecclésiastiques de Tours, Rouen, Reims

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narratives, annals and other records for home consumption, usually at the request of their fellow monks. Their production was fuelled by a desire to record what was known about the monastery’s patron saint and early history, its rights and property, and their whereabouts as a result of the church reforms of the late ninth and tenth centuries. Disputed ownership of lands or of relics was a forceful incentive to put contemporary claims into writing and backdate them with the help of historical or fictional records. Rivalry between monasteries, too, generated a stream of documents, as for example at Gent where the communities of St Peter and St Bavo competed with one another.10 The lack of secular backing for securing settlement of disputes itself resulted in the production of narratives known as circumlaciones, the propaganda journeys during which relics were put on display.11 They were organised by monks to reclaim outlying property that had been lost. The display of saints was meant to show the saint’s healing power, which usually grew stronger near to lost property, and which became even more efficacious once the property had been restored by the secular lord. It is clear that writing was seen as an effective tool of monks to prompt the laity into action. Yet the narratives also put the secular lords to shame because if they had done their job properly in the first place, by mediating in disputes, and punishing thieves of lands and relics, there would have been no need for the narratives. Good examples are the journey of the relics of St Lewinna through northern Flanders and Zeeland just after their arrival in Bergues in 1058 [BHL 4902], written by Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen,12 that of St Urmer organised by the monks of Lobbes in Flanders in 1060 [BHL 8425],13 one at Saint-Amand in 1066 [BHL 345],14 one for the relics of St Gerulf at Tronchiennes near Gent in 1088,15 and one of St Amand through Brabant in 1107 written by Gunther [BHL 346].16 The relative lack of lay patronage in Flanders may be a reflection of the ecclesiastical despair over the powerlessness of the lay aristocracy to curb crime and violence. If secular lords were so weak as to allow the development of disputes of which monks were the victims, monks cannot be expected to have written eulogies. In fact, several authors are directly critical of the laxness of the counts of Flanders. In his account of miracles of St Winnoc [BHL 8956], Drogo pointedly

10 11

12 13

14 15 16

(950–1130)’, Hagiographies, ed. G. Philippart, 2, Turnhout 1996, 239–90; B. de Gaiffier, ‘L’historiographie dans le marquisat de Flandre et le duché de Basse-Lotharinghe au XIe siècle’, Etudes critiques d’hagiographie et iconologie, Subsidia hagiographica 43, Brussels 1967, 415–507; K. Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders, Woodbridge 2005. Van ’t Spijker, ‘Gallia du nord’, 264–70. P. Héliot and M–L. Chastang, ‘Quêtes et voyages de reliques au profit des églises françaises du moyen âge’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 59, 1964, 789–822, and 60, 1965, 5–32; P. A. Sigal, ‘Les voyages de reliques au XIe et XIIe siècles’, Voyage, quête, pèlerinage dans la littérature et la civilisation médiévale, Actes du colloque organisé par le C.U.E.R.M.A., Aix-en-Provence 1976, 75–104. Ex Drogonis Translatio s. Lewinnae, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, 783–89 last section only. Miracula S. Ursmari in itinere per Flandriam facta, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, 837–42; G. Koziol, trans., ‘The Miracles of St Ursmer on his journey through Flanders’, Medieval Hagiography. An Anthology, ed. T. Head, New York and London 2000, 341–58. Ex miraculis in itinere Gallio factis auctore Gilleberto, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, 849–51; Van ’t Spijker, ‘Gallia du Nord’, 272, n. 130. Cf. Van ’t Spijker, ‘Gallia du Nord’, 268. Ex miraculis in itinere Bragbantino factis, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, 852–3; Van ’t Spijker, ‘Gallia du Nord’, 272, n. 130.

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recounts a story critical of Count Baldwin V as told to him by Abbot Malbodus of Saint-Amand.17 The abbot had gone to the count in order to receive redress for the loss of one of his abbey’s allods. Baldwin V, attempting to keep both the abbot and the alleged usurper happy, refrained from action. When the abbot exclaimed that this showed that it was better to rely on the Lord than on princes, quoting Psalm 117, St Winnoc came to his support by appearing to the abbot in a vision and promising a judgement. The abbot visited the count’s court, told him the vision and the allod was promptly restored. Further on in the same text, Drogo describes how Count Baldwin entered the abbey church of Saint-Winnoc, where a carpenter had just survived a fall through the roof. Told of the accident, the count remarked laconically that it was all God’s will.18 Elsewhere, in his Life of Godelieve [BHL 3592] Drogo pictures the count as equally ineffectively circumventing Godelieve’s complaint about her husband by passing it on to the local bishop.19 It is against this background of perceived comital failure in keeping law and order that we have to place the circumlatio narratives, which occasionally show the counts restoring property to the abbey, for example at Whitsun 1060 when Count Baldwin V in the presence of his court restored lands to Lobbes.20 It has been pointed out, convincingly, that these public journeys and displays of relics were part of the Peace and Truce of God movements initiated and promoted by bishops in an attempt to persuade the secular rulers to actively oppose breaches of the peace.21 The key role of the bishops is reflected in what acts of patronage we can find. In the eyes of the hagiographers, bishops and to lesser extent abbots deserve the praise which is withheld from the counts and other lay men and women.22 In particular, Bishop Radbod II of Noyon (1068–98), Bishop Drogo of Thérouanne (1030–78) and further afield the archbishops of Reims, Guy of Châtillon (1033–55) and Gervase (1055–67), are singled out for eulogies. They were clearly seen as an alternative political force to put pressure on the secular authority. More importantly for literary patronage, bishops possessed the means to promote monks and clerks, by rewards in cash, posts, or land in return for writing prose and poetry.23 In fact, it was precisely the bishops who were in an excellent position to facilitate

17 18 19

20 21

22 23

Ex vita et miraculis s. Winnoci auct. Drogone, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, 780. Vita et miraculi s. Winnoci, 782. M. Coens, ‘La vie ancienne de sainte Godelive de Ghistelles par Drogon de Bergues’, Analecta Bollandiana 44, 1926, 102–37, text at 125–37; B. Venarde, trans., ‘Drogo of Saint-Winoksbergen, Life of St Godelieve’, Medieval Hagiography, ed. Head, 359–73, at 366. For St Godelieve (d. 1070), see R. Nip, ‘Godelieve of Gistel and Ida of Boulogne’, Sanctity and Motherhood. Essays on Holy Mothers in the Middle Ages, ed. A. Mulder-Bakker, New York and London 1995, 191–209. Koziol, ‘The Miracles’, 349. G. Koziol, ‘Monks, Feuds and the Making of Peace in Eleventh-Century Flanders’, The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response in France around the Year 1000, ed. T. Head and R. Landes, Ithaca 1992, 239–58. Occasionally we find that individual abbots are named, for example Abbot Romboldus asked Drogo to write the story of the theft of the relics of St Lewinna, Ex Drogonis Translatio S. Lewinnae, 783. For Germany in the Central Middle Ages, see the important study by S. Haarländer, Vitae episcoporum. Eine Quellengattung zwischen Hagiographie und Historiographie untersucht an Lebensbeschreibungen von Bischöfen des Regnum Teutonicum im Zeitalter der Ottonen und Salier, Stuttgart 2000. There are thirty-six (out of approximately eight hundred), bishops whose biographies were written, with some having more than one. Amongst the authors, thirty-two were monks and twelve or fourteen episcopal clerks.

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the route by which monks and clerks could transfer from one place to the next and who, crucially, could introduce them to new venues where they might find refuge. Monastic rivalry frequently resulted in monks being ejected from their monasteries and having to find new homes. In the case of Flanders, it was not only Flemish bishops who fulfilled the role of saviour and patron but also English bishops en route to and from the Continent. A well-known case is that of Drogo’s contemporary, Goscelin of Saint-Bertin, who, having met Herman of Ramsbury (1047–58), of Sherborne (1062–75) and Salisbury (1075–8) while in exile (1055–8) at Saint-Omer, appeared in the bishop’s entourage in England.24 Another, less known, case is that of Folcard, who probably had left Flanders in 1050–2, having fallen out with his abbot Bovo (1043–65) over the handling of the case of the discovery of relics of St Bertin.25 Their disagreement can be reconstructed on the basis of the narratives Bovo and Folcard composed, respectively BHL 1296 and 1293.26 Driven from Saint-Bertin, Folcard may have followed in the footsteps of his older contemporary, the anonymous author of the Encomium Emmae reginae, by directly appealing to the aging queen mother Emma (d. 1052) in England, or by finding shelter with the Godwines, in exile in Flanders in 1051.27 It may have been the Godwines who introduced Folcard to Queen Edith (d. 1075), who in turn, as Folcard tells us himself in his Life of St John of Beverley (d. 721), introduced him to Ealdred of Worcester (1047–61) and York (1061–9).28 Folcard and Goscelin, as far as we can establish, remained in England, fiercely loyal to their English patrons and somewhat ambiguous in their

24

25

26

27

28

The dates for Goscelin’s arrival in England are given as 1058 (Vita Ædwardi, 133), as 1061, or between 1061 and 1064 (Vita Ædwardi, p. 134). It depends whether Goscelin went back with Herman as bishop of Ramsbury, in which case 1058 is fine. If, however, he joined Herman at Sherborne, as he recalled himself c. 1080 (‘The Liber confortatorius of Goscelin of Saint Bertin’, ed. C. H. Talbot, Studia Anselmiana 37, 1955, 102) he cannot have arrived much before 1062, see S. Keynes, ‘Regenbald the Chancellor (sic)’, ANS 10, 1988, 202–3, n. 102, who points out that Ælfwold of Sherborne was still alive in 1062. K. Ugé, ‘Relics as Tools of Power: The Eleventh-Century Inventio of St. Bertin’s Relics and the Assertion of Abbot Bovo’s Authority’, Negotiating Secular and Ecclesiastical Power: Western Europe in the Central Middle Ages, ed. H. Teunis, A. Wareham and A. J. A. Bijsterveld, International Medieval Research 6, Turnhout 1999, 51–71, does not consider Folcard’s departure from Saint-Bertin. BHL 1296, ed. AA SS, September ii, 614–23; PL, cxlvii, cols. 1141–60; ed. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 1, 525–34. BHL 1293, ed. AA SS, September ii, 604–13. A similar scenario for Folcard, but without giving any reason, has been suggested by Frank Barlow in Vita Ædwardi, p. liii; Van ’t Spijker, ‘Gallia du Nord’, 269 suggests that Folcard’s expulsion was due to tension between the monks and canons of Saint-Omer, but such a suggestion only holds if Folcard was a canon of Saint-Omer. Slight evidence for this can be found in the Red Book of Thorney, Cambridge University Library, MS Add 3021, fol. 416r, where Folcard is described as postmodum fulcardus natione flandrensis decanus [MS: dcan’], cf. The Heads of Religious Houses, England and Wales 940–1216, ed. D. Knowles, C. N. L. Brooke and V. C. London, rev. edn Cambridge 2001, 74. If it can be accepted that Folcard left Saint-Bertin in the years 1050–2, it would strengthen the case for his authorship of the Vita Ædwardi. It would also allow for a scenario that placed him in Canterbury, as some manuscript evidence purports (Vita Ædwardi, pp. liii–liv), shortly afterwards. There, he would have been in a prime position to gather the evidence that makes the Vita Ædwardi such an important source for Edward’s relations with the Godwines in those years. For a rehabilitation of the Vita Ædwardi, but without discussing the identity of the author, see J. L. Grassi, ‘The Vita Ædwardi regis: The Hagiographer as Insider’, ANS 26, 2003, 87–102. BHL 4339, Vita sancti Johannis episcopi Eboracensis, ed. J. Raine, Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, 3 vols., RS 1879, i, 239–42 (prologue), trans. by F. Barlow, in Vita Ædwardi, pp. liv–lv.

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attitude to the Normans. No doubt, as Barlow has argued, as a direct result of Ealdred’s influence Folcard became abbot of Thorney abbey in c. 1068 until his deposition at the Christmas court in 1085.29 Goscelin remained a peripatetic author staying in the west country until c. 1078, the year his patron Bishop Herman died, and thereafter can be found at Canterbury with extended visits to the Fenland abbeys.30 Their colleague Drogo, monk of Saint-Winnocksbergen, who may have received his education at Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer,31 also, I suggest, spent some time in England,32 as well as in Denmark and Hamburg.33 He, however, ultimately returned to Flanders where he remained until his death sometime between 1084 and 1098.34 Clearly, therefore, England was attractive for the Flemish, and the question is why? The ready availability of wealth, in terms of cash or other forms of gifts (the author of the Life of Edward implies that he had received lands), of saints and relics was a major consideration in the decision of the Flemish to cross the Channel.35 Let me take the financial aspect first. The Flemish hagiographers came from a rich area of north-western Europe. Flanders was beginning its rise as the most urbanised and wealthiest province with a nascent money economy. In the mideleventh century money changed hands at Flemish relic shrines, while monasteries such as Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer, and Saint-Winnocksbergen, home to aspiring hagiographers, minted their own coins.36 Flanders had a flourishing trade

29

30

31 32

33 34 35 36

Heads of Religious Houses, 74. It is worth pointing out that before his appointment as abbot Folcard probably spent some time in York. His Life of St John reveals intimate knowledge of the city and Ealdred’s reforms at York cathedral. He comments on Ealdred’s ‘rooting out of the church’s former rusticity’, by introducing new clothing for the canons, their wearing of tunics during episcopal synods, the giving of alms and washing of feet of the poor, and the upkeep of the commemoration of the dead (Vita s. Johannis, ed. Raine, 254–60 and 241 (prologue)). Lapidge and Love, ‘Latin Hagiography’, 228–30, and Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. The Hagiography of the Female Saints of Ely, ed. and trans. R. C. Love, Oxford 2004, pp. lxxii, xciii and c–ci where it is argued that Goscelin may have stayed at Ely in c. 1085 and perhaps c. 1106. Another edition of the same Ely material with corrections to the Latin editon and translation by Love, can be found in B. A. Blokhuis, De Vitae van de angelsaksische heiligen van Ely in the twaalfde eeuw: hagiografie in context, Groningen 2004, in particular the Bijlagen, pp. iv–xv. Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 215. In his Life of St Oswald (d. 642), BHL 6362, AA SS, August ii, 94, Drogo says that he wrote it while he was away from Saint-Winnocksbergen. Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 215, suggests this meant he was at nearby Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer. A more plausible interpretation, surely, is that he was in England since Drogo’s Oswald research, primarily based on Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Book III, chapters 1–6, 9–13, is supplemented by local details. A stay in England could have been connected too with his colleague Balger’s trip to Sleaford in search for St Lewinna in April 1058 (Ex Drogonis Translatio s. Lewinnae, 782–9); most plausibly, he went overseas en route to Denmark around the same time (see next note). Details of Drogo’s trip to Denmark and Hamburg can be found in his Vita et miracula s. Winnoci, 781; Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 217 dates the trip to c. 1058. Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 219. Vita Ædwardi, 90–1: ‘et tot dona feret, predia talia det’. Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 236 for exchange of cash at a shrine, and 216 n. 33 on Abbot Rumold of SaintWinnocksbergen minting coins. For local mints, see D. M. Metcalf, ‘Coinage and the Rise of the Flemish Towns’, Coinage in the Low Countries (880–1500): The Third Oxford Symposium on Coinage and Monetary History, ed. N. J. Mayhem, BAR, International Series 54, Oxford 1979, 2–10 where it is pointed out that English coins outnumbered Flemish by 80 to 1 in Swedish hoards; N. J. Mayhem, Coinage in France from the Dark Ages to Napoleon, London 1988, 39–40 where Arras and Saint-Omer are singled out as the most important mints under Baldwin IV.

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with England which meant that harbours on both sides of the Channel were accustomed to exchanging goods and cash.37 Although to my knowledge none of the Flemish hagiographers working in England explicitly mentions money rewards, it must be assumed that England’s fame as a wealthy country acted as a magnet for the Flemish clerics used to cash and seeing opportunities in England, where patrons were known to reward writers handsomely. Even if, as seems likely, in most cases after their arrival in England the hagiographers received food and lodging as well as writing materials (quills, ink, parchment, wax tablets) and access to libraries, the very fact that monasteries and episcopal households could afford to employ the men suggests some financial surplus to afford the luxury of having one’s traditions recorded. I cannot think of any equivalent on the Continent of wandering hagiographers finding employment in this way. Although contemporary evidence for any specific financial arrangement is lacking, there is early twelfthcentury testimony supporting it. In his famous letter to the monks of Glastonbury, written c. 1120, Eadmer of Canterbury specifically refers to buying expertise from foreign authors. Writing to the monks on their desire to prove that they had the body of St Dunstan (which was in fact in Canterbury), he exclaimed: ‘Why didn’t you consult some foreigner from overseas? They are knowledgeable, very clever, and they know how to write fiction; they would have composed some likely lie which you could have bought.’38 Admittedly, Eadmer does not rate the Flemish services highly in terms of veracity nor does he quote rates of pay, but his explicit reference to writing as a result of patronage and in return for monetary rewards is clear enough. Secondly, there is the wealth of saints and saints’ relics in England. There is no doubt that on the Continent there was knowledge of the saints of England based on oral tradition, while the availability of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History was widespread.39 All Flemish hagiographers knew Bede’s work intimately and mined it for all it was worth: Folcard used it for St John of Beverley;40 Goscelin used it for his work on St Wulfsin, St Mildreth, St Edith and for some of the Ely material, to mention just a few;41 Drogo consulted it for his Life of St Oswald.42

37

38

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40 41

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Saint-Omer was wealthy enough for Count Baldwin V to promise its income to Earl Tostig in 1065 (Vita Ædwardi, 82–3; A. Derville, Saint-Omer des origins au début du XIVe siècle, Lille 1995; A. Verhulst, The Rise of Cities in North-West Europe, Cambridge 1999, 92–5 (Saint-Omer)). Memorials of Saint Dunstan, Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. W. Stubbs, RS 1874, no. 35, 415: ‘Quare non consuluisti aliquem hominem transmarinum, qui in multis conversati, multi imbuti, multa confingere sciunt, et vel pretio aggeretis quasi ipsi saltem vobis aliquid verisimile mendacium de tanta re componerent.’ Cf. R. Sharpe, ‘Eadmer’s Letter to the Monks of Glastonbury Concerning St Dunstan’s Disputed Remains’, The Archaeology and History of Glastonbury Abbey. Essays in Honour of the Ninetieth Birthday of C. A. Ralegh Redford, ed. L. Abrams and J. P. Carley, Woodbridge 1991, 205–15. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OMT 1969, pp. lix–lxvii and lxix–lxx. The cross-Channel influences with regard to liturgy and hagiography are also discussed in V. Ortenberg, The English Church and the Continent in the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries. Cultural, Spiritual and Artistic Exchanges, Oxford 1992. Vita s. Johannis, ed. Raine, esp. 245. The evidence has been usefully collected by Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 15–17 and ‘The Life of Saint Wulsin of Sherborne by Goscelin’, Revue Bénédictine 74, 1959, 79; Lapidge and Love, ‘Latin Hagiography’, 229 and 232; Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. The Hagiography of Female Saints, ed. Love, p. civ. Vita s. Oswaldi, AA SS, August ii, 94; Ex Drogonis translatione s. Lewinnae, 788, label on a bundle of relics in Old English characters that reveal knowledge of Ecgbert of Kent.

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These men may have become acquainted with the standard work on English history while still at Saint-Bertin, whose eleventh-century copy of Bede is now Boulogne Bibliothèque municipale MS 103.43 Even if they did not use Bede’s Ecclesiastical History as a hagiographical encyclopaedia they found interesting historical details to give their own work further authenticity. There is some evidence that Goscelin consulted a manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.44 The interest in English saints and knowledge of them as found in Bede can be explained by the need for information about the saints in England and in Flanders. Despite the claim that the English need became particularly acute after the Norman Conquest, there is no doubt that around the middle of the eleventh century there already existed a lively demand for hagiographical writing. This may have been a delayed reaction after the Reform Movement of the late tenth century on the grounds that once the monasteries and cathedrals had been refounded and re-constructed it was felt that the time was ripe to collect lives of saints whose relics were possessed.45 Related, too, is the notion that after the viking invasions the monks and clergy wished to have a proper record of their churches’, and thus their saints’, histories. And, finally, there is the important observation that the use of rhymed prose, so common on the Continent, became fashionable in England after its introduction by Flemish authors, and required the rewriting of existing hagiography.46 The availablity of both Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle provided a ready-made do-it-yourself kit for the aspiring hagiographer; an excellent example is the mid-eleventh-century Life of St Neot, tentatively attributed to one of the Flemish hagiographers.47 Flanders had similar requirements, though there the demand for particularly English saints requires more explanation. The seeming frenzy with which the Flemish monastic communities collected relics of English saints, real or imagined, which in turn stimulated demand for authentic records, reached a peak in the early to mid-eleventh century. One cannot help feeling that the existence of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History stimulated the search for relics of saints mentioned there. Also, the knowledge, however vague, of the seemingly inexhaustible supply of exotic Celtic saints in England – St Winnoc is just one example – meant that there was in principle a steady supply of not always authenticated relics. As a result, the Flemish hagiographers became masters in the art of authenticating saints and relics, fabricating lives and filling in the stories with as much convincing

43 44 45

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Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, 788, p. lxi; Huyghebaert’s suggestion of a date in the late eleventh or early twelfth century ought to be rejected (‘Drogon’, 210). D. W. Rollason, ‘Goscelin of Canterbury’s Account of the Translation and miracles of St. Mildreth (BHL 5961/4), an Edition with Notes’, Mediaeval Studies 48, 1986, 157, n. 13. Cf. J. Crick on charters and forgeries at St Albans and Westminster, suggesting an intermediate period of historical interest inspired by the Reform movement (‘St. Albans, Westminster and Some TwelfthCentury Views of the Anglo-Saxon Past’, ANS 25, 2002, 76–7 and 80–1). Encomium, pp. xxxix–xl; Vita Ædwardi, p. xxviii. K. Polheim, Die lateinische Reimprosa, Berlin 1925, 362–422 for the Continent and 422–5 for England, and B. Papst, Prosimetrum. Tradition und Wandel einer Literaturform zwischen Spätantike und Spätmittelalter, Cologne-Weimar 1994. ‘Vita prima sancti Neoti’, in The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition, vol. 17, ed. D. Dumville and M. Lapidge, Cambridge 1984, pp. lxxv–cxxxvi (introduction) and 111–42 (text); for the possibility of Flemish authorship see p. cx; cf. also Lapidge and Love, ‘Latin Hagiography’, 223. For its rhymed prose, see Papst, Prosimetrum, 705.

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detail as possible. Search trips were organised across the Channel and the finding of suitable saints was recorded in true adventure stories. One excellent example is the hilarious story told by Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen, who reports the theft of the relics of St Lewinna [BHL 4902], an otherwise unknown English saint (Leofwyn), from the harbour of Seaford. The relics were brought to Flanders by the monk Balger in April 1058, established at Saint-Winnocksbergen, and then taken on a tour for one of the circumlationes so fashionable at the time.48 Thus, although the causes and effects of the emigration of Flemish hagiographers to England are difficult to establish, English wealth in cash and saints was a significant attraction for the Flemish writers. But what made the Flemish hagiographers so attractive to the English? I would argue that their narrative style and linguistic skills were sought after in England. The Flemish men were extremely well educated and particularly skilled in Latin rhetoric.49 On the whole their Latin was deployed as a versatile and sophisticated language, but one that was far removed from the Anglo-Latin hermeneutic style characterised by graecisms, obscurantist vocabulary, extravagant ostentation.50 The Flemish authors themselves used some amplification, flowery language and duplication, but never to the point of the convolution, the heaviness and the impenetrability of their English predecessors.51 One of their trade marks, as we have seen, was a predilection for rhymed prose. At this point one might object that surely the indigenous English would have been able to shake off their heavy blanket style and produce something more palatable when the Winchester school, the Fenland abbeys, and the Canterbury churches produced pupils of high ability eager to reveal their literary qualities. Nevertheless, it is true that in the early twelfth century people like William of Malmesbury would look back on the eleventh century and complain about the dearth of indigenous hagiographical talent.52 For me, the crucial difference between the heavy English style and the lighter touch of the continental authors is the keen eye for observation revealed by the Flemish. Almost all hagiographical accounts, be they new saints’ lives, revisions, translationes accounts or miracle stories, betray an extraordinarily vivid and

48

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50 51

52

Ex Drogonis Translatio s. Winnoci, 783–9. There is a hint of high-level political Anglo-Flemish agreement for this transfer judging by the presence of bishops William of London (1051–750) and Drogo of Thérouanne (1030–78) at the comital Whitsun court 1060 at Saint-Winnocksbergen (circumlacio of St Ursmer, BHL 8425, ed. O. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 2, p. 839; trans. Koziol, 349). There is no general study on the state of monastic or clerical education in early eleventh-century Flanders, apart from E. de Moreau, Histoire de l’église en Belgique, 5 vols., Brussels 1947–52, ii, 139–77; for Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer, see 150–3 and 165–6. For work on individuals and their homes, the best starting point remains the database Narrative Sources. M. Lapidge, ‘The Hermeneutic Style in Tenth-Century Anglo-Latin Literature’, ASE 4, 1975, 67–111. Most work has been done on Goscelin’s style, see Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 15–16; Rollason, ‘Goscelin of Canterbury’s Account’, 142–3; Vita Ædwardi, pp. xxvii–xxviii (unattributed); Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. The Hagiography of Female Saints, ed. Love, pp. lxv, lxxiii–lxxvi and xcv–xcix; B. Papst, ‘Goscelin von St. Bertin und die literarische Biographie’, Scripturus Vitam. Lateinische Biographie von der Antike bis in die Gegenwart. Festgabe für Walter Berschin zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. D. Waltz, Heidelberg 2002, 933–47. Gesta regum, 592–3.

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lively style. There are many burlesque, some might say grotesque, stories which come close to the notion of grotesque realism identified by Bakhtin in the work of Rabelais.53 Admittedly, the Flemish texts never descend to the level of sexual explicitness found in the works of Liutprand of Cremona or the poems written for Archbishop Robert of Rouen (d. 1037) and Countess Gunnor (d. c. 1030) in early eleventh-century Rouen.54 The Flemish authors seem to have adapted an established literary tradition suited to bishops and their episcopal courts, by cutting out the most obvious crudeness and sexually explicit detail, while maintaining vivid realism, with an excellent eye for detail, and a surprising feel for sensuousness. Entertainment stood high on the agenda of the patrons (many of them were bishops) and their audience (episcopal courts, monastic communities and the royal court). I have already referred to Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen’s funny account of the theft of St Lewinna’s relics, full of little details which make it a delight to read: a neglectful cleric who is being beaten, drunken sailors, misunderstandings as a result of language problems, or an inebriated thief stranded on a beach.55 Goscelin similarly included many delightful digressions in his hagiography, for example the story told by an eyewitness Thierry of the St Vitus dancers in 1020s Germany in his Life of St Edith,56 while Folcard has hilarious stories of an over-generous butler at York in his Life of St John, with tongue-incheek allusions to the wedding at Canaa in the Gospels.57 Their sense of fun, eye for the absurd and delightful vividness are characteristics highlighted by William of Malmesbury in his praise for Goscelin, which could equally be applied to the other Flemish hagiographers. William particularly appreciated the almost photographic verisimilitude – though not of course in these words – of Goscelin’s narrative style. With reference to the Translatio of St Augustine, composed in 1091, he comments: ‘He [Goscelin] also polished up the story of St Augustine’s translation so vividly that he seemed to point a finger at every detail for his contemporaries and make future ages see it with their own eyes.’58 We only need to think of the anonymous author of the Life of Edward, who gave us the unforgettable image of Edith warming her husband’s feet in her lap,59 or Drogo’s concern for Godelieve, neglected by her husband, and having to rely on her female friends for food and the washing of rags.60 It is the contemporary and realistic detail in the Flemish stories, far removed from the solemn and fairly abstract style of the English works, that guaranteed their popularity, particularly with women. 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60

M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, Cambridge 1968; Ysengrimus, ed. and trans. J. Mann, Leiden 1987. R. Levine, ‘Liutprand of Cremona: History and Debasement in the Tenth Century’, Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 26, 1991, 70–84; Warner of Rouen, Moriuht, ed. C. J. McDonough, Studies and Texts 121, Toronto 1995, and Jezebel. A Norman Poem of the Early Eleventh Century, ed. and trans. J. M. Ziolkowski, Humana Civilitas, Studies and Sources Relating to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 10, New York 1989. For aspects of Drogo’s style, see Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 226–43. A. Wilmart, ‘La légende de ste Edith en prose et vers par le moine Goscelin’, Analecta Bollandiana 56, 1938, 5–101, 265–307 at 285–92. Vita s. Johannis, 254–5, 255–7. Gesta regum, i, 592–3: ‘Huius quoque translationis seriem ita expoliuit ut eam presentibus monstrasse digito futurorumque uideatur subiecisse oculo.’ Vita Ædwardi, 118–19. Coens, ‘La vie’, 130; trans. Venarde, 366.

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Moreover, the acute sense of description and eye for detail is accompanied by a capacity to empathise with feelings and emotions, which will be discussed below with special regard to women. In the same vein the hagiographers were masters in the art of amplificatio, that is using their own life experience and observation of the world around them to fill out the very basic information found in their sources. None of these descriptions are particularly long or extensive, but in their brevity they just add a delightful touch of reality to the story they provide: sea and coastal life with descriptions of harbours with ships, ships themselves, quaysides full of life; inland waterways and transport, rivers with boats on them and the skyline of villages as seen by the passengers; the hustle and bustle around relic shrines is of course familiar territory for the hagiographer; some highlights of interiors of churches, houses and courts. In short, the Flemish authors anticipated, as it were, the oil paintings of the so-called Flemish primitives of the Burgundian court, and the still earlier manuscript illumination which is such an important source for the, albeit stylised, knowledge of medieval life.61 Then there are the wider linguistic skills.62 What is significant about our hagiographers is that they are almost invariably drawn from the Flemish (Dutch) speaking parts of Flanders. They came from a Germanic language zone and their mother tongue must have made it relatively easy to pick up Old English.63 In this context, we may also need to be aware that the propensity for picking up Germanic languages may have helped in the hagiographers’ contacts with Scandinavian-speaking people in England. Drogo had visited Denmark and Hamburg, where on the occasion of an act of exorcism he discussed with the local German provost their mutual amazement at St Winnoc’s intervention amongst those who did not speak Flemish!64 Goscelin reports that Bishop Hermann had a friend with a Danish name, Svein, who in England was rescued from captivity through the mediation of St Edith.65 For any Flemish clerk planning to do hagiographical research in England, proficiency in Old English, Scandinavian and Latin was an indispensable tool. Folcard, Goscelin and Drogo, as well as the anonymous authors of the Encomium Emmae reginae, the Life of Edward and the Life of St Neot, loved showing off their knowledge of the English language by revealing that they could read Old English, or by giving the English etymology of place

61

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Description of everyday-life scenes and naturalism (for which much more research is needed) by Drogo and Goscelin is highlighted by Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 227–31, Vita Ædwardi, 143–4, and Papst, ‘Goscelin von St. Bertin’, 936–7. For the manuscript illumination, see Illuminating the Renaissance. The Triumph of Flemish Manuscript Painting in Europe, ed. T. Kren and S. McKendrick, Los Angeles and London 2003. These skills were presumably shared by the many clerks who came to England from other continental areas besides Normandy and Flanders to seek ecclesiastical service in the reign of King Edward, for example Giso of Wells who together with at least another five, if not seven, came from Lotharingia in the 1050s and early 1060s, see S. Keynes, ‘Giso, Bishop of Wells’, ANS 19, 1997, 207–12. Note that the Lotharingians would have spoken French or German. For the boundary between Romance-speaking and Germanic language zones in north-west France, roughly along the lines of the Scheldt/Leie rivers, see L. J. R. Milis, Religion, Culture, and Mentalitics in the Medieval Low Countries. Selected Essays, ed. J. Deploige a.o., Turnhout 2005, 353–68. Vita et miracula s. Winnoci, 781. Wilmart, ‘La légende de Ste Edith’, 38.

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names.66 The authors wished to put on record their language skills because their knowledge of English was a crucial way of authenticating their expertise. Testimonies in spoken and written English, even though subsequently translated into Latin, would form the record of evidence for future generations. Goscelin himself bears explicit testimony to his awareness of language zones and in particular of the division between classical (Greek, Latin and Arabic), romance and Germanic languages.67 It is surely significant that he did so when in c. 1080 he wrote to his friend Eve, the Wilton nun who left England for a life as a recluse at Angers, pointing out that with a Lotharingian mother Olivia, a Danish father called Api and herself living in England, she combined the various linguistic traditions, something, as he had already pointed out, that was commonly reserved for aristocratic married women who were usually the ones to leave their native soil and settle in a foreign country.68 All Flemish writers, including Goscelin, display an unusual alertness to language and speech, which they combined with interest in ethnicity. The combination of such sensitivities and empathy made them particularly suited to providing literary services to those people who had changed countries and languages. Amongst them in the mideleventh century there stand out not only the many expatriate bishops, but also many aristocratic women who had left their homelands not least in order to become queen.69 This observation leads to the last section of my paper. All Flemish hagiographers, known and anonymous, showed great sympathy and empathy for he women they knew and wrote about.70 The trend may well have been set by Abbot Rumold of Saint-Winnocksbergen (1032–68), who had been trained at Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer.71 Some knew the women personally: the anonymous author of the Encomium clearly knew Queen Emma; Folcard may have done so as well.72 Folcard certainly knew Queen Edith, and if he is to be identified with the author of the Life of Edward, he naturally knew her very

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67 68 69 70

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Goscelin: Talbot, ‘The Life of Saint Wulsin’, 75; Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 107–9 and 86–7 for the interesting observation that the English, like the Flemish, speak ‘Theutonicis’ tongues. In his earliest work, the Vita s. Amalbergae, AA SS, July iii, 98, he transliterates the Flemish word gansen (geese) as gances. Drogo: Ex Drogonis translatione s. Lewinna, 784, and Vita s. Oswaldi, 95. Vita Ædwardi, pp. xliv–xlv. Encomium, pp. xxxv–xxxvi, cf. also pp. xxxvi–xxxvii where spellings of Latin are identified as specifically Flemish. Life of St. Neots, evidence is collected at pp. cix–cx, where it is pointed out that any attention drawn to specific English etymology may indicate a distinction drawn between Latin writers and English speakers (who could be the same), rather than a distinction between English and Flemish speakers. Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 86–7 (languages). Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 41 (married women). M. Shergold, ‘Like Joseph in Egypt? Exile Experiences of Royal Women’, Exile in the Middle Ages, ed. L. Napran and E. van Houts, International Medieval Research 13, Turnhout 2004, 53–67. For the anonymous authors of the Encomium and the Life of King Edward, see Encomium, 4–9, 33–4, 38–9, and Vita Ædwardi (whether by Folcard or Goscelin), p. xliv; for Goscelin, see Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 22–3; Vita Ædwardi, pp. 138–9, and Goscelin de Saint-Bertin. The Hagiography, ed. Love, cvi–cxiii for an important analysis of Goscelin’s treatment of female sanctity with reference only to long-dead saints; for Drogo, see Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 243–56. He wrote a homily about Maluera, a young woman who, born c. 1025, recovered from blindness, which has not survived but was used by Drogo, who had met her himself, ed. W. Levison, MGH SS Rerum Merovingicarum 5 (1910), 785–6, and Huyghebaert, ‘Drogon’, 233. Encomium, 4; for Folcard and Emma, see above, p. 115.

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well indeed.73 Drogo knew of Queen Edith, but there is no evidence that he had actually met her.74 Goscelin had certainly seen the queen in the autumn of 1065 on one or perhaps two occasions.75 He knew Eve of Wilton intimately and was distressed by her departure for Angers.76 Drogo, as far as we know, never met Godelieve (d. 1070) but was deeply affected by her murder at the instigation of her husband and wrote a moving tale about her.77 I would like to stress the near contemporaneity of the women known and written about by these Flemish authors, because they stand in the sharpest possible contrast to the long-dead saints on whose lives the hagiographers had also sharpened their pens.78 The Flemish men are immensely sympathetic in their praise of the women for whom they write. They express sympathy for the women, who invariably lived under difficult circumstances. Queen Emma is caught between the factions around her two husbands (Æthelred and Cnut) and their two sets of children, and three ethnic identities (Norman, Old English, Scandinavian). It was Queen Edith’s fate to be childless and torn between two brothers, Harold and Tostig, and, ultimately, to be left without a husband, father, brothers, who were dead, mother, who fled, and sisters-in-law, who were out of reach. Eve was an orphan of sorts driven from Wilton and attracted by the austerity of anchorite life. Godelieve, too, had left her native country of Boulogne and had settled with inlaws who increasingly turned hostile. The authors’ empathy for the womenfolk is unambiguous. Why? I would suggest that all our authors had themselves not only left their native families by joining monastic communities, but more significantly had even further removed themselves from their native soil by crossing the sea temporarily or permanently. With similar experience of what it is like to change country, customs and language, they knew what married women in particular went through. The men all speak at some stage about their lives as wanderers, foreigners or exiles.79 Earlier on, I touched on the significance of their awareness of language and ethnicity, which is so intimately connected with

73 74 75

76 77 78

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Vita Ædwardi, pp. liv–lv; Vita s. Johannis, ed. Raine, 240–1. Ex Drogonis translatio s. Lewinnae, 783. The dedication of Wilton on 3 October and that of Westminster on 28 December, see Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 28–9. If, as seems likely, Goscelin was the author of the Vita s. Kenelmi, he would have actually discussed the saint with her, see Three Eleventh-Century Anglo-Latin Saints’ Lives: Vita s. Birini, Vita et miracula s. Kenelmi, Vita s. Rumwoldi, ed. R. C. Love, Oxford 1996, 50–2; unless the queen Eadgyth there is Edith Matilda (d. 1118). And naturally, if Goscelin wrote the Life of Edward, he would have known her intimately, Vita Ædwardi, 2–8, 90. Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 23, and Vita Ædwardi, 138–9. Coens, ‘La vie’, 125–37, and Venarde, ‘Godelieve’, 363–71. For Goscelin it is important to note that he wrote his first known work, the Life of St Amalberga, BHL 323, while still a puer (young man) at Saint-Bertin at Saint-Omer, i.e. before he went to England in the early 1060s as an adolescentulus (Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 102). Since the Life is concerned with a young virgin’s trial against persecution, assault and persistent pursuit by an unwanted lover, it contains all ingredients necessary for catching the ear of his audience, eager to empathise with the lot of young women (Goscelin of Saint-Bertin. The Hagiography, pp. lxxvii–lxxviii). We may wonder what such literature did to the young monk’s psyche in view of his lament about Eve twenty years later. For Goscelin, see Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 27, 82; for the author of the Vita Ædwardi, 88. For Folcard, see Vita s. Johannis, 240–1; for the Encomiast, Encomium, passim; for Drogo, see above, p. 116.

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the self-consciousness of being a foreigner. Of all authors Goscelin is the most explicit in his expression of these emotions. In his Liber Confortatorius, written for Eve c. 1080 after she had left for Anjou, he compares her entry into an anchorage as a first step on the road to death and the eternal life. He eloquently points out how much her life resembles that of married aristocratic women: The daughters of kings and princes having been fed milk in comfort know nothing but the glory and happiness of their native countries, they marry abroad and in these foreign nations, they acquire other barbaric customs and have to learn unknown languages and serve violent lords and repugnant laws far removed from natural use of laws.80

Goscelin’s emphasis of violent husbands and barbaric laws is significant in that it reflects more than just hyperbole or politeness used to support Eve on her difficult journey to become a recluse. That he has reality in mind is revealed by what follows immediately afterwards. He explicitly mentions the daughter of the count of Flanders, whom we know to be Adela, daughter of Robert the Frisian (1071–93), who had around that same time, c. 1080, married King Cnut IV of Denmark (1080–6) – incidentally the great-grandson of Emma’s husband King Cnut (1016–35). It is particularly interesting, and some might say insensitive, that Goscelin in his address to Eve equates violence and barbarism with Denmark in the light of his knowledge that Eve’s father Api was Danish. But he clearly has sympathy for poor Adela. In this he was entirely justified for in fact, history would prove him right in that only six years later, in 1086, Adela had to flee Denmark and seek shelter with her young son Charles, later Count Charles the Good of Flanders, back home in Flanders.81 Thus, says Goscelin to Eve, in the same way these young girls leave their parents and native lands behind, so you have to leave behind your life (as nun of Wilton). A similar sentiment is expressed by Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen in his Life of Godelieve where he movingly describes how Godelieve is maltreated by her husband Bertulf and mother-in-law, who particularly hates her foreignness (she was from Boulogne, perhaps just across the language frontier between Flemish and French) and on that account refers to her as ‘that black crow flown in from far away’.82 It is worth pondering to what extent the Flemish historiographers exploited the potential vulnerability caused by the women’s foreignness in order to appeal to their patronage, or to what extent they in fact constructed a tale of vulnerability. Describing emotional sensitivities like vulnerability, the hostility of in-laws, and betrayal by kin and in-laws may have particularly appealed to women who were on the whole much more exposed than men. For the queens in England, the Flemish monks were a source of consolation. In terms of politics and power, the hagiographers, as wandering foreigners, offered friendship, service, and literacy

80 81

82

Talbot, ‘The Liber Confortatorius’, 41. Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bon, comte de Flandre (1127–8) par Galbert de Bruges, ed. H. Pirenne, Paris 1891, c. 1, p. 3 and c. 68, p. 110; The Murder of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders, by Galbert of Bruges, trans. J. B. Ross, New York 1960, c. 1, p. 81 and c. 68, p. 232. Coens, ‘La vie’, 128 and trans. Venarde, 364; Huygebaert, ‘Drogon’, 211–12, n. 2.

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for sale. They acted as mouthpieces for the royal women. They were willing and able to record, in an entertaining fashion, contemporary events from the queens’ perspective. Emma and Edith, even though Edith was not really a foreigner, found themselves in the thick of infighting factions at court. While they might have found it difficult to trust any English, Scandinavian, or even continental bishop, they could rely on the overseas Flemish monks to write on their behalf. Crucially, considering the fast-changing political circumstances of the 1050s and 1060s, all hagiographers (with the exception of the Encomiast who wrote in 1041) continued to express sympathy for the English or Anglo-Scandinavians even when collaboration with the Normans became inevitable. Folcard’s coolish attitude towards the Normans never, as far as we can tell, turned into the warmer tones of conciliation expressed by Goscelin from the 1080s onwards.83 In fact, reciprocal cooling of relations between Folcard and the Norman elite would explain why he was dismissed in 1085.84 The most baffling aspect of the staunch support of these Flemish monks for the English is the absence of any significant number of Flemish personnel, in the post-conquest royal court. Given the fact that the new queen, Matilda, was Flemish, the relative lack of Flemish clergy in her entourage is as noteworthy as is the lack of Flemish eulogists recording her or her husband’s actions.85 Naturally, Bishop Guy of Amiens, said to have been the queen’s chaplain in 1068, and author of the Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, the propagandistic poem eulogising William, may well be the proverbial exception to the rule.86 Otherwise, all we know is that Matilda had one Flemish chamberlain called William.87 She seems to have become a Norman who, despite continuing some Flemish traditions in her life (consulting Flemish (?) prophets in times of distress), was seen as a Norman.88 In view of the Flemish literary skills put at the disposal of two consecutive queens of England, Emma and Edith, the lack of any continuation of this tradition is a poignant testimony to the strong identification of the Flemish hagiographers with the English cause. Not only was there no Flemish eulogy for Queen Matilda, but, what was worse, in the 1060s, before and after the Norman conquest of England, her family in Flanders offered refuge to the close relatives of Queen Edith, whose sister-in-law Judith, mother Gytha and niece Gunhild

83

84

85 86 87 88

Though note Goscelin’s row with Bishop Osmund of Salisbury (1078–99), a Norman, in c. 1078 or 1079 (Vita Ædwardi, 140), and his inexplicable outburst against Queen Emma in the early 1090s (Rollason, ‘Goscelin of Canterbury’s Account’, 176–7). Vita Ædwardi, pp. lii, 144 on Goscelin and liii and n. 189 on Folcard’s cool politeness in his dedication of the life of St Botulf [BHL 1428] to Bishop Walkelin of Winchester (1070–98), a Norman clerk from Rouen, see AA SS, June iii, 402–3, with a prologue printed in T. D. Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials Relating to the History of Great-Britain and Ireland to the End of the Reign of Henry VII, 3 vols., RS 1857, i, 373–4. For Matilda, see E. van Houts, ‘Matilda of Flanders’, Oxford DNB, xxxvii, 318–20. Carmen, pp. xlii–lii (for Guy of Amiens). Les actes de Guillaume le Conquérant et de la reine Mathilde pour les abbayes caennaises, ed. L. Musset, Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaries de Normandie 37, Caen 1967, no. 27, p. 139. Orderic, 104–5 where the hermit is said to live in Teutonica regione.

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were housed by the count of Flanders.89 It seems inconceivable to think that the matriarch of the Flemish comital family was not involved. Countess Adela of Flanders (d. 1075), whose literacy and educuation were praised, as we have seen, by Archbishop Gervase of Reims, must have been consulted by her sons and grandson about the fate of the fugitive English royal women. Adela is, in fact, the one lay woman in Flanders, apart from Godelieve, who was singled out for praise by the Flemish hagiographers. Despite their criticism of Adela’s husband Count Baldwin V, there is extensive praise for Adela herself and her support for the monks and saints in Flanders.90 Nevertheless, it is perhaps not surprising that neither Countess Adela of Flanders, nor her daughter Queen Matilda I of England and Normandy, acted as patrons for Flemish writers on the scale of the English queens Emma and Edith. Neither Adela nor Matilda is known to have been at the mercy of court factions, rival clans of nobles or hostile husbands. The only time that Matilda disagreed with her husband was during the row with their son Robert Curthose.91 While Matilda openly supported William, behind his back she gave money to Robert, who promptly went off and spent it in Flanders. This was, however, an isolated incident. Adela and Matilda were noble women in full command of the authority they were supposed to dispense; they were certainly not victims. For this reason they had no need for apologists and thus there was no pressing reason to spend money on penniless writers, Flemish or otherwise. Queen Edith’s death in 1075 coincided with the start of the greatest concentration of Flemish hagiographical writing in England. Instead of writing about live women with dead husbands, the writers turned to long dead saints. For a whole generation the writing was in Flemish hands unsupported by queens. This situation changed as soon as England acquired an English queen again, in 1101, when Henry I married Edith Matilda, daughter of Malcolm III of Scotland and Margaret, great-granddaughter of King Æthelred II (978–1016), who became renowned as a literary patron, interested in saints, relics and her royal ancestors.92 She was literate herself, having been educated at Wilton just after Goscelin had left.93 As queen she commissioned the Life of her mother Queen Margaret of Scotland,94 and some years before her death (in 1118) she commissioned the greatest of English writers, William of Malmesbury, to record the deeds of her ancestors.95 He, as we have seen, was a great admirer of Goscelin, on whom he modelled his language.

89

90 91 92 93 94

95

Vita Ædwardi, 80–83, and John of Worcester, 6–7. In 1087 Gunhild, sister of King Harold, and thus daughter of Earl Godwine and Gytha, bequeathed to the chapter of St Donatian at Bruges a psalter with Old English glosses, see P. Grierson, ‘The Relations between England and Flanders before the Norman Conquest’, TRHS, 4th ser. 23, 1941, 109, n. 5. By Abbot Bovo in his narrative of Saint-Bertin, ed. Holder-Egger, MGH xv. 1, 531, and by Drogo, see Ex vita et miracula s. Winnoci, 779 (x 2) and 789. Orderic, iii, 102–3. L. Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland: A Study in Medieval Queenship, Woodbridge 2003, 125–43. Huneycutt, Matilda, 18–20. Vita s. Margaretae Scotorum reginae, ed. H. Hinde, Symeonis Dunelmensis opera et collectanea, Durham 1868, 234–54; trans. Huneycutt, Matilda of Scotland, 161–78; for the early thirteenth-century miracles of St Margaret, see The Miracles of Saint Aebbe of Coldingham and Saint Margaret of Scotland, ed. and trans. R. Bartlett, OMT 2003, pp. xxix–xxxviii and 70–145. Gesta regum, i, 6–9.

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William’s Latin fits nicely in the Flemish tradition and stands in sharp contrast to the queen’s own literate language. For judging by her letters to Anselm, she employed the sort of convoluted, pretentious and ostentatious Latin that was closer to that used around the turn of the millennium and which had on the whole had been successfully supplanted by that of the Flemish authors. In conclusion, the significance of the contribution of the Flemish hagiographers lies in its influence on Latin writing in England in terms of linguistic skill and narrative style; both rhetorical attributes were superbly deployed for entertainment and political partiality in a time of serious ethnic and political disruption. The vulnerability of the queens of England provided a market for literary patronage: wandering Flemish scholars familiar with a life in exile identified with aristocratic women living away from their native family and, often, surrounded by intrigue. The hagiographers were able to provide an emotional sounding board for women perceived to be in a hostile environment. Whereas any biographer in good classical and early medieval tradition provided Latin pen portraits of women, men, or saints, the Flemish authors, with the superb command of their Latin, provided an extra two-fold dimension. With words they photographed the physical world around them, while at the same time they injected a new emotional depth. The political circumstances of eleventh-century England proved fertile ground for the foreign hagiographers who, supported by queens, were encouraged to explore the limits of biography through their eye for everyday detail and distress.96

96

I am deeply grateful for the help on specific points from Steven Vanderputten, and to Ineke van ’t Spijker and Rosalind Love for making their publications available to me before they were in print.

8 The Conqueror’s Earliest Historians and the Writing of his Biography DAVID BATES

B

IOGRAPHY and character are a consistent theme in Frank Barlow’s publications. While Edward the Confessor, William Rufus and Thomas Becket of course stand in the forefront of his biographical writings, it is worth remembering that both volumes of his English Church also begin with people.1 Lurking beneath the scholarship of these magnificent books is, I would suggest, the basic principle that we can make an individual from the past accessible to modern minds if we draw partly on a modern framework of ideas and partly on a carefully researched and scholarly understanding of how and why the main sources for that individual’s life were written. In terms of the first part, his Edward, just like his William the Conqueror and his Lanfranc (a man in search of a father), seems to me to owe a fair amount to psychoanalytic theories fashionable in the 1960s.2 In terms of the second part, his edition of the Vita Ædwardi Regis, through the brilliance of its search for meaning in and behind the text, enabled him in due course to reassess the supposedly saintly and otherworldly Edward the Confessor and to penetrate the thought-world of the political classes of mid-eleventh-century England as they slid half-unknowingly into the catastrophe of 1066. William of Poitiers’ contemporary biography of William the Conqueror has never dominated the general perception of his character in the way that the Vita Ædwardi did of Edward the Confessor’s before Frank Barlow’s work changed everything. Its reputation as a source is not in general good, summed up – to select one statement from a multitude of similar and much less complimentary

1

2

Frank Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 3rd edn, London and New Haven 1997; William Rufus, London and New Haven 2000; Thomas Becket, London 1986; The English Church, 1000–1066, 2nd edn, London 1979; The English Church, 1066–1154, London 1979. The first version of this chapter was prepared while the author was holding a Marc Fitch British Academy Research Readership and a Visiting Fellow Commonership at Trinity College, Cambridge. I have had profitable discussions of this chapter with many people and wish to express particular thanks to Pauline Stafford, John Blair, Tessa Webber, Simon Keynes and James Bickford-Smith. Frank Barlow, William I and the Norman Conquest, London 1965, 11–12; ‘A View of Archbishop Lanfranc’, JEH 16, 1965, 175–6. On his portrait of the Conqueror, David Bates, ‘The Conqueror’s Adolescence’, ANS 25, 2003, 1–19.

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sentiments – by John Gillingham’s assessment as being ‘nauseatingly sycophantic’ in its treatment of William.3 Yet for all this, like any contemporary biography, it must raise in acute form the question, much discussed in relation to Einhard, Asser, Joinville and the like, of the potentially emotionally fraught relationship between a living or well remembered subject and their biographer. As William’s chaplain over a long period, Poitiers must have known his subject well; Orderic indeed believed him to have personally witnessed many of the events he wrote about and to have been an accurate historian.4 For a would-be biographer of William, the biggest question of all is to ask what did the Conqueror think of what Poitiers was writing. Did he know? Did he care? To nail my colours firmly to the mast, I find absolutely incredible the idea that William would have been unconcerned or unaware. Although extensive detail is impossible in this essay, it seems to me that almost the whole of William’s life, for all its violence and his at times pitiless conduct, was a self-conscious search for secular and religious legitimation of actions of which the most controversial was of course the brutal removal in 1066 of a crowned and consecrated king; witness, for example, the awareness of self-image and self-justification displayed in his earliest surviving English writs.5 This line of argument becomes all the more convincing when it is appreciated that the central contemporary sources for William’s life were directly engaged with events in ways which have not been appreciated, and were created in the midst of contemporary debate about the morality and legality of his actions. Crucial to this argument is the revival independently by the late Patrick Wormald and by Geoffrey Cubbin of Dorothy Whitelock’s opinion that, for 1066 and the years immediately afterwards, the ‘D’ version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is fundamentally a contemporary text compiled in the circle of Archbishop Ealdred of York.6 Additionally significant is Patrick Wormald’s suggestion that it and Ealdred were drawing on the archive of the great Wulfstan, archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023, and therefore by implication on memory of a previous crisis.7 This assessment of ‘D’ does present some problems because the text included in the annals for 1066 to 1069, most notably the passages relating to Queen Margaret of Scotland, cannot all be contemporary with the events of those years. If, however, we accept – as I personally think we should – that it is a contemporary source interpolated and adjusted to take account of the later history of Edgar ætheling’s kin, then we have what may well be a record of the Conquest

3 4 5 6

7

John Gillingham, ‘William the Bastard at War’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. C. Harper-Bill, C. Holdsworth and J. L. Nelson, Woodbridge 1989, 141. Note ‘ipse siquidem praedicti regis capellanus longo tempore extitit’, Orderic, ii, 184. Almost all that we know about William of Poitiers appears in Orderic, ii, 184, 258–60. Pierre Bauduin, ‘La parentèle de Guillaume le Conquérant: l’aperçu des sources diplomatiques’, in La Normandie et l’Angleterre au moyen âge, ed. Pierre Bouet and Véronique Gazeau, Caen 2003, 34–5. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: A Collaborative Edition. Volume 6: MS. D, ed. G. P. Cubbin, Cambridge 1996, pp. lxxviii–lxxix; Patrick Wormald, How Do We Know So Much about Anglo-Saxon Deerhurst, Deerhurst Lecture, 1991, Friends of Deerhurst Church 1993, 9–17. Both provide references to earlier work. Patrick Wormald, The Making of English Law: King Alfred to the Twelfth Century, vol. 1: Legislation and its Limits, Oxford 1999, 130–4, 223–4.

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played out in the mind and actions of one of the chief actors, and is certainly an account designed to explain Ealdred’s actions.8 On this interpretation, the relationship between Ealdred and William becomes in some senses a re-run of the relationship between Wulfstan and Cnut, and ‘D’s apparent inconsistencies, a reflection of the policy followed in 1066 by Ealdred as he sought to affirm a legitimate succession to the kingdom and to gain divine forgiveness for the English people in the midst of disaster. References to the sins for which the English were being punished are a constant theme. The allusion to the rightful claim of Edgar ætheling must on this reading be seen as a failed attempt to find a course which would propitiate God’s anger. The preparatory oath exacted from William by Ealdred before his coronation that he would rule like the best of previous kings represents both an attempt to control William and to set the English on a course for redemption. The subsequent criticisms of William, which include excessive taxation, the breaking of promises, oppression and the unnecessary taking of life, were not patriotic resentment of an unwelcome newcomer – although they may have been that as well – but above all a critique of a king who was failing to live up to Ealdred’s and others’ expectations. Another reason to read ‘D’ in this way is that other sources, notably William of Malmesbury and an anonymous twelfth-century York writer, describe Ealdred’s relationship with William as that of a pastoral adviser and represent the Conqueror as responsive to his strictures.9 It is worth adding to this that ‘D’s emphasis that the English were defeated because of their sins is not only pure Wulfstan but, along with the comments about a search for redemption, has notable parallels with the themes of the Vita Ædwardi Regis.10 Although it is not my subject, these parallels do in my view strengthen Frank Barlow’s case that Folcard of Saint-Bertin was the author of the Vita. Ealdred had in all likelihood been an earlier patron of Folcard’s and, while the Vita’s author does not write about Ealdred with exceptional warmth, he does say a lot about him. The penitential tone of the last sections of the Vita could indicate a shared perspective with a former supporter, although one perhaps not wholeheartedly shared; the author’s new patron was after all Harold’s sister who might not have so openly welcomed Ealdred’s readiness to accommodate William.11 The crucial point of all this, however, is that the Vita in a crucial way reinforces the version of events set out in the ‘D’ Chronicle. The latter’s disappointment with William both demanded a response and, as we shall see, set out an agenda which was profoundly influential on those who came later. Just as Frank Barlow saw Poitiers as consciously revising the Carmen on certain aspects of the events of 1066,12 he must also surely be seen as answering the

8 9

10 11 12

On ‘D’, see also, Pauline Stafford, ‘Chronicle D, 1067 and Women: Gendering Conquest in EleventhCentury England’, forthcoming. De gestis pontificum, 252–3; The Historians of the Church of York and its Archbishops, ed. J. Raine, 3 vols., RS 1879–94, ii, 352; for some comment on this theme, David Bates, ‘William the Conqueror and his Wider Western European World’, HSJ 15, 82–3. Vita Ædwardi, 118–23. Vita Ædwardi, pp. liii–lviii, 52–6. Carmen, pp. lxi–xci.

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criticisms which contemporaries were making of William. This argument requires no direct textual relationship between Poitiers and the ‘D’ Chronicle; the opinions were the currency of all contemporary debate about the Conquest and, given the circles in which both texts were produced, would have been well known to all involved. Poitiers’ statement about the limits placed on the collection of tax and tribute stands in direct opposition to ‘D’s mention of the imposition of a ‘severe tax’.13 His praise of the quality of custodians of castles likewise confronts ‘D’s criticisms directly.14 His contrast between William’s moderation and Cnut’s brutality reads like a justification of William’s rapid coronation; with hindsight this comment might also have been aimed at any of William’s supporters who questioned his judgment in undertaking so quickly the obligations of a king when violence unfettered by a coronation oath might have been a more effective means to subdue opposition.15 His need to state categorically that William’s extensive generosity to churches in France was not a despoliation of the English Church looks like another reaction to an obvious criticism.16 The section which describes William’s generosity to the English and says that he gave nothing to a Frenchman which had been unjustly taken from an Englishman reads like an answer to the critique of unjust rule in the ‘D’.17 Overall his appeal to the English to recognise William’s fine qualities reads like a plea for reconciliation.18 Like ‘D’, he treated Edgar ætheling with respect and very significantly twice singles out Ealdred for praise.19 The passing of time and the bitterness of the warfare of 1068–72 undoubtedly affected some of what Poitiers wrote in a text brought to completion in the 1070s – the extreme language of some of his denunciations of Harold seems like a good example of this – yet many aspects of his work make best sense as attempts to rebut criticism. Poitiers’ Gesta Guillelmi and William of Jumièges’ Gesta Normannorum Ducum are often taken together and treated as ‘the Norman sources’. Elisabeth van Houts’ re-dating of the composition of the latter means, however, that for a would-be biographer of the Conqueror, this is simply no longer acceptable.20 With the obvious exception of the events shortly before and after 1066, which were additions to Jumièges’ original text and in all likelihood drew on a dossier also used by Poitiers, it effectively takes out of court most of the earlier discussion of the relationship of Jumièges and Poitiers, and makes Jumièges a writer whose perspective on events is largely that of the 1040s and 1050s and Poitiers,

13 14

15 16

17 18 19 20

‘Tributis et cunctis rebus ad regium fiscum reddendis, modum qui non grauaret posuit’, Gesta Guillelmi, 160–1. ‘Custodes in castellis strenuous uiros collocauit, ex Gallis traductos, quorum fidei partier ac uirtuti credebat’, Gesta Guillelmi, 162–3. Note also the eulogies of William fitz Osbern and Bishop Odo whom ‘D’ specifically criticises, Gesta Guillelmi, 164–7. Gesta Guillelmi, 156–7. ‘Potentes nonnulli sanctis inique largiuntur, plerumque in iisdem donationibus laudem suam in mundo, delicta sua coram Deo adaugentes. Spoliant ecclesais, et rapinis ipsis alias ditant. Rex uero Guillelmus nunquam nisi bonitate sinceram famam sibi comparauit, donans uere sua’, Gesta Guillelmi, 176–9. Gesta Guillelmi, 164–5. Gesta Guillelmi, 156–9. Gesta Guillelmi, 146–7, 150–1, 162–3, 186–7. Jumièges, i, pp. xxxii–xxxv.

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of the 1060s and 1070s. That Poitiers made use of Jumièges in some of the earlier sections of the Gesta Guillelmi is well known and indisputable; that he otherwise wrote in a way which fitted the purposes of his panegyric, equally so.21 It is therefore crucial for a biographer to observe the differences between the ways in which the two writers treat the same events, because Poitiers would unquestionably rewrite Jumièges to suit his purposes. An obvious case of this is the case of William’s victory over the defenders of Alençon: Jumièges says that he burnt the town and had the hands and feet of some of the defenders cut off, while Poitiers simply says that William took the town almost without any fighting.22 Other differences include their treatments of William’s role in Edward the Confessor’s accession to the English kingdom, his military contribution to the Battle of Val-ès-Dunes and his attitude to Guy of Brionne and William of Arques. While Poitiers mentions fear of a Norman invasion of England as a factor in Edward’s succession, Jumièges simply says that Harthacnut summoned his brother from Normandy and left him as heir to the entire kingdom at his death.23 If Elisabeth van Houts is correct, as I think she is, in identifying this as one of the English passages in the Gesta Normannorum Ducum written in the 1050s, then we can see how the victory of 1066 led to a different representation of events; the tradition of Norman support for Edward was well-established in the 1050s in a way which accords perfectly with the contemporary English perspective on the subject, but after 1066 Poitiers decided to present William as always manipulating, if not actually controlling, events.24 Jumièges’ account of Val-ès-Dunes – in any case a fuller one than Poitiers’ – not only has William seek King Henry I’s help, but makes the French king an equal contributor to victory; Poitiers in contrast makes William the architect of success.25 Jumièges says that William treated Guy of Brionne mercifully, but defines this as house arrest. In the case of William of Arques, he simply says that he went into exile. Poitiers in contrast presents William’s treatment as much more merciful in both cases, with Guy ultimately refusing the kindnesses offered to him and going into exile of his own volition, and William of Arques, although exiled, being allowed to retain his patrimony and granted other lands.26 The two historians’ accounts of all these episodes are ultimately perhaps not irreconcilable, but the picture presented of William’s conduct is significantly different. A further difference between the two concerns William’s choice of counsellors. At one point, Jumièges, like Poitiers, refers to William’s wise choice of counsellors as he advanced to maturity, but elsewhere in the context of the disturbances

21 22 23

24

25 26

For a summary of the current view, Gesta Guillelmi, pp. xxvii–xxviii. Jumièges, ii, 124–5; Gesta Guillelmi, 28–9. Jumièges, ii, 106–07; Gesta Guillelmi, 18–21. On Edward’s return, Barlow, Edward the Confessor, 48–50; see now above all, J. R. Maddicott, ‘Edward the Confessor’s Return to England in 1041’, EHR 119, 2004, 650–66. Inuentio et miracula sancti Vulfranni, ed. Dom. J. Laporte, Rouen and Paris 1938, 29–30. See further, E. M. C. van Houts, ‘Historiography and Hagiography at Saint-Wandrille: the ‘Inventio et Miracula sancti Vulfranni’, ANS 12, 1990, 248–9 (repr. in History and Family Traditions in England and the Continent, 1000–1200, Aldershot 1999). Jumièges, ii, 120–3; Gesta Guillelmi, 10–11. Jumièges, ii, 104–05, 122–3; Gesta Guillelmi, 12–13, 42–3.

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of William’s late childhood and early adolescence, says that he would have mentioned certain individuals by name as responsible for the violence, but that he fears to do so, since they are now the very men who claim to be William’s most faithful followers and whom he has rewarded lavishly.27 Again there is not necessarily a contradiction – the disturbers of the peace could quite easily have become wise with age – but there is in Jumièges at least an implied sense that virtue was not necessarily the predominant characteristic of those whom the young William chose as his closest associates. While both Jumièges and Poitiers were ultimately concerned to portray William as an exemplar of good rulership, Jumièges’ William is a harsher and less than perfect specimen of the breed and a man less able to mould his destiny than Poitiers’. It is arguably in the context of these numerous and significant differences that we need to examine a further consequence of Dr van Houts’ re-dating of Jumièges, namely to explain why he apparently stopped writing in the late 1050s. His text supplies no decisive clues and it is quite possible that he was diverted by other monastic duties or that he simply lost interest. Yet it has to be of some significance that his treatment of the 1050s is notably thinner than his treatment of the 1040s and that what he has to say about Maine in the penultimate section of the text written in the 1050s is garbled. There are also possible hints that he felt uncomfortable about William’s parentage; the use of the phrase more danico to describe the unions of William’s princely predecessors looks in particular like a coded criticism of the duke.28 The idea of an author withdrawing from a subject which he was finding increasingly intolerable could also explain his supposed chronological misplacement of certain episodes, although, with the exception of the passages concerned with English affairs which are sui generis, there is in fact only one section which is out of order, namely the revolt of William of Arques. It is pure speculation to suggest this, but it may not be a coincidence that it would have been correctly placed in sequence in the late 1030s and 1040s if Jumièges had originally intended it to be a eulogy of a distinguished kinsman of the young duke, and of someone who, unlike the counsellors criticised earlier, had taken no known part in the disturbances of the early 1040s. It is notable that the section begins exactly as if this was its intention with a mention of the death of Archbishop Robert of Rouen, who died in 1037.29 Even if Jumièges did deliberately put his history to one side for this reason, the decision to resume and include the conquest of England scarcely needs to be explained. It, the preface dedicating the Gesta Normannorum Ducum to William, and the epilogue indicate that any unease the author may have felt about William had to be superseded by the need to acknowledge his achievements.30 All accept that William of Poitiers knew the classics and was superbly educated. He also knew his Augustine. And he wrote well about war. As has long

27 28 29 30

Jumièges, ii, 92–3, 120–21; Gesta Guillelmi, 8–9. Jumièges, i, 58–9, 78–9. Jumièges, ii, 102–05. For William of Arques, Bates, ‘The Conqueror’s Adolescence’, 12–13; Pierre Bauduin, La première Normandie (Xe–XIe siècles), Caen 2004, 309–10. Jumièges, i, 4–7; ii, 182–5.

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been appreciated, his very erudition causes problems in relation to almost every aspect of his credibility. As the late Ralph Davis pointed out, for example: Is the story of William eating a hearty breakfast on board ship as his invasion fleet crossed the Channel fact, or a good story adapted from Virgil to create the right effect?31 The new edition goes a long way to setting study of the Gesta Guillelmi on a new footing.32 Composition and format are much clarified. Yet we must not allow Poitiers’ learning and literary skills to blind us to just how much he was a product of his times. The way in which George Garnett brought Pseudo-Isidore into the discussion was a valuable first step.33 To understand him fully, however, it must be recognised that Poitiers’ whole text belongs within the genre of eleventh-century kingly biographies and that comparative analysis shows him to present kingship and kingly behaviour in terms of exactly the same motifs and rituals as other similar sources.34 Likewise the claims for William as the protector and enforcer of law are ultimately no more that an extravagant literary elaboration of conventional contemporary thought.35 In the end, it is perhaps only on the conduct of warfare that Poitiers’ William consistently gives a biographer uncomplicated direct information.36 Yet he was very much part of the broader intellectual traditions of eleventh-century Europe, was intensely topical in what he wrote, and was not ultimately especially innovative. For a modern biographer of William, it is unquestionably very important that someone of such outstanding literary accomplishment was chosen to write the Conqueror’s first biography. The famous obituary in the ‘E’ version of the Chronicle displays a greater degree of detachment towards William than is evident in earlier sources. Probably written at Canterbury by an author who had certainly known William, it saw much to admire in the Conqueror, but it warned all against his flaws. His magnificence as a king, his wisdom, the sternness and effectiveness of his justice and his protection of the Church are praised. His greatest flaws were avarice and greed. His love of hunting was also criticised and in particular the way he protected game for this purpose.37 This more dispassionate tone is in some ways an intermediate stage between the politically engaged writings of the ‘D’ Chronicler and William of Poitiers and the great early twelfth-century works of Orderic Vitalis and William of Malmesbury. Both famously of mixed Anglo-French parentage, they are as different as chalk and cheese. Orderic’s standards of morality are

31

32 33 34 35

36 37

R. H. C. Davis, ‘William of Poitiers and his History of William the Conqueror’, in The Writing of History in the Middle Ages. Essays presented to Richard William Southern, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Oxford 1981, 72–3. Gesta Guillelmi, pp. xvii–xviii, xxi–xxii, xxvii–xxxii. George Garnett, ‘Coronation and Propaganda: Some Implications of the Norman Claim to the Throne of England’, TRHS 5th ser. 36, 1986, 93–5, 108–10. See further, Bates, ‘William the Conqueror and his Wider Western European World’, HSJ 15, 80–2. This emerges clearly from the important but flawed book by Gilduin Davy, Le Duc et la Loi: Héritages, images et expressions du pouvoir normative dans le duché de Normandie, des origines à la mort de Guillaume le Conquérant, Paris 2004. See above all, Gillingham, ‘William the Bastard at War’, 141–58. ASC E, 1086 (recte 1087); for the latest views on authorship, The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. A Collaborative Edition. Vol. 7, MS. E, ed. Susan Irvine, Cambridge 2004, p. lxxxv.

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resolutely monastic and his analogies are usually biblical. In contrast, Malmesbury’s fascination with the classics was the basis for a brilliance in the depiction of character which has often been remarked on.38 Yet detachment was ultimately impossible, both because both writers felt themselves indissolubly linked to the events of a generation earlier and because both were at the mercy of the main historians writing at that time, all of whom they had read. This was above all true for Orderic, whose attitudes derive much more from the tradition related to the ‘D’ Chronicle and William of Poitiers, than for Malmesbury, whose views stem more from ‘E’.39 The two can disagree quite radically on topics which are central to a biography. Their approaches to William’s parentage are a case in point, with Malmesbury writing that Duke Robert had for a time kept Herleva as if she were a lawful wife and Orderic providing all the material to suggest that she was of low birth and that William’s illegitimacy made him loathed by the Norman nobles. For Orderic, these factors explained the troubles of William’s late childhood and early adolescence; Malmesbury in contrast put the emphasis elsewhere by simply quoting Ecclesiastes: ‘Woe to the land whose king is a child.’40 Why, I wonder, have so many subsequent historians followed Orderic in preference to Malmesbury in their treatment of the first two decades of William’s life, when the latter was right in terms of custom and practice, canon law and recorded events? The two historians also differ on the morality of William’s devastation of northern England in the winter of 1069–70, with Orderic condemning it as so excessive that God would surely not forgive it, and Malmesbury describing it in terms of the strategic requirements of war.41 They take a different line on the guilt of Earl Waltheof in 1075, with Orderic convinced that the miracles which took place at his tomb showed that William had been persuaded by ambitious courtiers to order the execution of an innocent man and Malmesbury writing that opinion was divided on Waltheof’s guilt.42 Both should be read as critical readers of the earlier sources. Distance from events gave them perspective and they had sources of fresh information which are often invaluable to a prospective biographer. Orderic’s revisions of William of Poitiers have already been excellently discussed by Pierre Bouet; he quite simply refused to include what he considered excessive praise.43 Malmesbury’s departure from Poitiers’ account of Harold’s fateful mission to Normandy is of a different order. Here it is clearly a matter of him simply not believing what he had in front of him and substituting a version of events which is essentially

38 39 40 41 42 43

Marjorie Chibnall, The World of Orderic Vitalis, Oxford 1984, 190–6; Gesta Regum, ii, p. xliii. For Orderic, below, pp. 137–40; for Malmesbury and E, Gesta Regum, ii, 12–13. Gesta Regum, i, 426; Jumièges, ii, 96–7. Orderic, ii, 230–33; Gesta Regum, i, 464–5. Orderic, ii, 320–23; Gesta Regum, i, 468–9. Pierre Bouet, ‘Orderic Vital, lecteur critique de Guillaume de Poitiers’, Medievalia Christiana xie–xiiie siècles. Hommage à Raymonde Foreville, ed. C. E. Viola, Paris 1989, 25–50. See also, Gesta Guillelmi, pp. xxxv–xxxix.

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Eadmer’s.44 When it comes to new information, Malmesbury is in general a fascinating, but frustrating, writer. His statement that William was thought impotent as a young man because he abstained from sexual relations before marriage has been treated as possible evidence of homosexual proclivities, but also seems to fit models of masculinity identified by Jinty Nelson and others.45 Yet even if the presentation owes a considerable debt to Suetonius, who cannot believe him when he wrote that the Conqueror sought to terrify all and sundry with loud oaths, or of his physical prowess on horseback?46 On the other hand, the prodigies that supposedly took place at the Conqueror’s birth, although recorded in other sources, must strike us as the kind of legends likely to have grown up around the obscure beginnings of a great man.47 Yet for all the novelty of some of his information and the way in which he uses his knowledge of the classics to inform his Latin, Malmesbury’s debt to earlier sources is transparently clear. Both Poitiers and Jumièges were crucial to his account and we have seen the part that Eadmer played. When it came to his assessment of William’s character, the faults on which he comments most – excessive addiction to hunting and greed – derive directly from the obituary in the ‘E’ Chronicle. He ultimately excused the flaw which he found most credible, namely greed, on the grounds that William had to fight a lot of wars. Malmesbury’s judgements – perhaps founded ultimately in his superb knowledge of classical authors – tend more towards the worldly than the moral. Orderic is a source for much that is grist to a biographer’s mill: the Ecclesiastical History contains unique material on William as a parent, on his court, and on much else besides. He draws on a range of sources which can often be identified. His account, for example, of Queen Matilda’s arguments with her husband about their eldest son Robert Curthose derives from the personal testimony of one of her former servants, and his record of the great quarrel between William and Robert which took place at Laigle near to Orderic’s abbey of Saint-Evroult must be based on local knowledge.48 His account of the Conqueror’s death-bed could have drawn on several informants and is a unique record of a death in full public view, and seemingly one which includes William’s own thoughts as the end approached; if Orderic is to be believed, William was above all preoccupied with his sins and the struggles of his life.49 Orderic’s treatment of William nonetheless changed as his great work evolved. In its earlier sections, where the focus was on Saint-Evroult and its benefactors, he portrays the duke’s treatment of some of the abbey’s benefactors as arbitrary and partisan. The story that William acted against Abbot Robert de Grandmesnil because he made jokes about him is hardly a flattering one, but the account of his support for Abbot 44 45 46 47 48 49

Gesta Regum, i, 416–19; ii, 213. For William of Malmesbury and Eadmer, see further, Rodney M. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, revised edn, Woodbridge 2003, 72–4. Barlow, William I, 11–12; Janet L. Nelson, ‘Monks, Secular Men and Masculinity, c. 900’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley, London and New York 1999, 121–42. Gesta Regum, i, 508–11. Gesta Regum, i, 426–7; ‘The Brevis Relatio de Guillelmo nobilissimo comite Normannorum Written by a Monk of Battle Abbey’, ed. E. M. C. van Houts, Camden Miscellany 5th ser. 10, 1997, 47. Orderic, ii, 356–9; iii, 102–05. Orderic, iv, 78–101. For Orderic’s possible sources, Chibnall, World of Orderic, 185–6.

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Osbern in Normandy and at Rome after his predecessor’s deposition is good evidence for William seeing a difficult situation through to an acceptable resolution.50 When writing about events after 1066, Orderic’s attitude to William’s kingship is usually supportive, but at times critical. The theme which runs through is of William as a just and pious ruler, a king whose manner of dying was as noble as his life had been, but of one who behaved badly on occasions and who was pushed off course by the acquisitiveness and ambition of his followers.51 Orderic’s sympathy for the sufferings of the English is well known.52 It must derive in part from memories about his childhood, but the possibility that it drew very directly on adult experience also needs to be considered.53 While his extensive treatment of the 1075 revolt and of the cult of Earl Waltheof is always rightly seen as a consequence of his visit to Crowland, the potential importance of his visit to Worcester should be emphasised more than it usually is. He writes of John of Worcester in glowing terms and he inserts his comments about him into his history immediately after his account of William’s coronation, a sequence suggestive surely that John’s work was associated in his mind with the coronation and the tragedies which followed.54 Although the relationship of John’s text to surviving versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is not straightforward, a version resembling ‘D’ – which was after all in some way associated with Worcester – must surely be treated as one of Orderic’s sources.55 Textual parallels between Orderic and ‘D’ for the period after 1066 there are not, but there are several interesting similarities. For William’s coronation, Orderic for the most part follows Poitiers, but his adjustments echo ‘D’ and John. He makes no mention of the preparatory oath before the main ceremony, which figures in ‘D’, John of Worcester and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta Pontificum, and which was central to Ealdred’s attempt to make William treat French and English as equals. Equally he does not directly cite all the statements about injustice, but he does see the coronation as pivotal, the moment at which the Devil intervened to sow discord between the two peoples. The Devil’s direct interventions in human affairs appear relatively rarely in Orderic; that the coronation is central in both his account and ‘D’ and its successors to fraught relations between conquerors and conquered is to say the least suggestive.56 His treatment of the regency of Bishop Odo and William fitz Osbern as a time of oppression is close to ‘D’. So too is his opinion expressed in the monk Guitmund’s speech that Edgar ætheling had the best hereditary claim to the English kingdom.57 In the context of his declared intention to be fair to both peoples, his

50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Orderic, ii, 90–7, 108–15. Orderic, ii, 184–5, 192–5, 214–17, 320–3; iv, 80–1. Chibnall, World of Orderic, 11. For the (possibly over-stated) importance of Orderic’s childhood memories, Chibnall, World of Orderic, 185. Orderic, ii, 186–7. For John and the Chronicle after 1066, John of Worcester, iii, pp. xx–xxii, 4–11. Orderic, ii, 182–5; Elizabeth Mégier, ‘Divina Pagina and the Narration of History in Orderic Vitalis’ Historia Ecclesiastica’, Revue Bénédictine 110, 2000, 110–11. Orderic, ii, 202–03, 276–7.

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famous treatment of the ‘harrying of the North’ reads like an elaboration of the strictures in ‘D’. Marjorie Chibnall has quite brilliantly suggested that Orderic’s visit to Worcester may have been the trigger which persuaded him to expand his history of his abbey into the great work it subsequently became.58 The notion that the perspectives and the networks he encountered there may have inspired him to write as he did about the fate of the English by giving substance to a compassionate nature and vague memories is fascinating and arguably persuasive. Speculatively, I do, however, wonder whether we should not see the situation slightly differently and think in terms of it being Orderic’s determination to be fair to English and Normans that took him to Worcester and Crowland in the first place; these were after all two centres where he would be very likely to learn in detail about the English point-of-view. The speeches which he inserted into the mouths of his subjects have very reasonably been seen by Marjorie Chibnall as Orderic’s way of expressing criticisms of William. One example, the speech inserted into the account of the 1075 revolt, is a particularly good one because it includes the oppressions suffered by the English, the accusation that he was a murderer, his greed, and the suggestion that he did not adequately reward his supporters, a mixture from both English and Norman perspectives.59 Because of material like this, Orderic, more than any other source, seems to be a good quarry for context. We should nonetheless remind ourselves that his views on a variety of subjects, such as the relationship of Normandy and England, the character of the Norman gens, and individuals such as Robert Curthose and Robert de Bellême have been shown in recent times to be simplifications.60 How far then can we take his William at face value? His treatment of the quarrel between William and his eldest son, for example, may as much reflect conventionalised perceptions of masculine norms as what actually happened.61 His account of William’s humiliating funeral, when his body proved to be much too large for the tomb which had been prepared, may not just be a superficial commentary on the ephemeral nature of worldly power, it may also be a metaphor for the king’s sinfulness; the miraculous enlargement of a small grave or coffin to accommodate a saint’s body was a frequent occurrence apparently transmitted into hagiography and known to Orderic, perhaps from general religious culture, and in practice from the case of St Anselm.62 Even his treatment of the

58 59 60

61 62

Chibnall, World of Orderic, 36–7. For suggestive information on Orderic’s networks, Orderic, i, 89–90. Orderic, ii, 312–13. On the first there is a large bibliography, on which see Neil Strevett, ‘The Anglo-Norman Civil War of 1101 Reconsidered’, ANS 26, 2004, 163 n. 32; G. A. Loud, ‘The gens Normannorum – Myth or Reality?’, ANS 4, 1982, 105–08; J. A. Green, ‘Robert Curthose Reassessed’, ANS 22, 2000, 95–116; Kathleen Thompson, ‘Robert of Bellême Reconsidered’, ANS 13, 1991, 263–86. W. M. Aird, ‘Frustrated Masculinity: the Relationship between William the Conqueror and his Eldest Son’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. Hadley, 39–55. I owe this point to John Blair. Note, for example, the cases of King Sebbi of the East Saxons, St Willibrord, St Wulfsige and St Anselm, Bede’s History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors, OMT 1969, iv, 11, 366–9; ‘Vita Willibrordi archiepiscopi Traiectensis auctore Alcuino’, ed. W. Levison, MGH Scriptores rerum merovingicarum, vii, 1, 1919, 135; St Wulfsige and Sherborne: Essays to Celebrate the Millennium of the Bendictine Abbey, 998–1998, ed. K. Barker et al., Bournemouth 2005, 109; Eadmer, Vita Anselmi, ed. R. W. Southern, OMT, 2nd edn, 1972, 142–5.

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sufferings of the English looks to be a simplification when set alongside William of Malmesbury, who noted how divided the English were in response to William and how he exploited the divisions.63 Orderic is in short a difficult author to ‘read’. His treatment of William’s burial may well be a sign that he would resort to allegory when he lacked the confidence to spell out what he thought might be correct. The suggestion of diabolical intervention in 1066 to explain the deep differences between Normans and English may well indicate a recourse to other-worldly explanation where his sources did not provide a convincing rational one. For these reasons we must be on our guard against allowing his moral preoccupations and his fondness for analogy to exert an excessive influence on how we interpret William. It is possible that the fairness which he set out to achieve in relation to the aftermath of 1066, and which has subsequently impressed many historians, may be a somewhat derivative and manufactured one. It can feel like an attempt to accommodate Poitiers and the ‘D’ Chronicle without rejecting the central tenets of either. On the other hand, his unique emphasis on the innate irreconcilability of the English people’s expectation of protection from William and the conquerors of reward expresses precisely the impossible mix of demands on William which may well have made the Conquest the brutal affair it became. There are of course many other sources beyond the ones considered in this chapter to deepen our knowledge of William the Conqueror’s life and personality. Domesday Book, charters, poetry, architecture, archaeology and coins can all be brought under the microscope in ways which have not previously been done. More generally, all of the information they provide needs to be placed within the conceptual framework within which medieval politics in other periods and theatres is analysed. Poitiers’ Gesta Guillelmi, for example, is a prime target for the sort of analysis of ritualised politics developed initially by the late Karl Leyser and Gerd Althoff and subsequently by many others.64 The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is every bit as politically engaged as the Carolingian annals recently so splendidly discussed by Rosamond McKitterick.65 We need in short to bring William up to date biographically, just as Frank Barlow did with Edward the Confessor. When all of this has been done, a new narrative and a new biography will emerge. From it, and from a re-examination of the relationship between the earliest sources, we can find our way to the public and private William. I will develop most of this further elsewhere, except to remark that with the ‘D’ Chronicle and Poitiers located within a dialogue in which William was personally involved, we can see his near-obsession with atonement, legitimacy and security

63 64

65

Gesta Regum, i, 470–1. For further reflections on these points and on the task of a biographer, David Bates, ‘Writing a New Biography of William the Conqueror’, in State and Empire in British History: Proceedings of the Fourth Anglo-Japanese Conference of Historians, ed. Kazuhiko Kondo, Tokyo 2003, 9–20. For an example of a new approach to Poitiers, Matthew Strickland, ‘Provoking or Avoiding Battle? Challenge, Duel and Single Combat in the Warfare of the High Middle Ages’, in Armies, Chivalry and Warfare in Medieval Britain and France: Proceedings of the 1995 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. M. Strickland, Stamford 1998, 323–7. Rosamond McKitterick, History and Memory in the Carolingian World, Cambridge 2004.

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and his engagement with swirling contemporary debates about morality, power and authority. One result will be to banish forever the image of the ill-educated soldier. Another, especially as an outcome of the analysis in terms of Spielregeln, however they are defined, will also make a harshness of personality and a sense of the dignity and authority of office unavoidable as central qualities. D. C. Douglas wrote of William: ‘He remains then something of an enigma: admirable; unlovable; dominant; distinct.’ Also, ‘the personal portrait which emerges is undoubtedly repellent’.66 All these words could be probed in great depth, but there is no space to do so. Of the adjectives, only ‘dominant’ strikes me as being incontestable. A study of William’s early historians can, however, I think, dispel most of the enigma. Ambivalence towards William and argument about his qualities were creations of the sources written during William’s lifetime and they in their turn were reinterpreted by the great early twelfth-century historians. What may have seemed to Douglas to be ambiguities were in truth not the different perspectives of objective historians, but the different perceptions of writers of history intensely absorbed in the debates of their times. A further observation is that the task of writing a contemporary account of the Conqueror seems to have come at a high personal cost. Ealdred, the ‘D’ Chronicle’s patron, died in 1069, a broken man. More speculatively, I wonder whether William of Poitiers’ failure to finish the Gesta Guillelmi may derive directly from the problems of his subject; Orderic’s image of an author prevented from finishing his work by unfavourable circumstances and giving himself up to silence and prayer might just reflect a saddened biographer and apologist who had ultimately found his brief to be beyond him.67 William of Poitiers’ dilemmas might just be encapsulated in his statement that non-Normans flocked in great numbers to support William in 1066 attracted by the justice of his cause and his well-known reputation for generosity.68 To be just to all and to give generously to supporters were two central ideals of good rule which proved to be irreconcilable after 1066. William the Conqueror ultimately squared the circle at a cost of immense human suffering. It is possible that William of Poitiers could not.

66 67 68

D. C. Douglas, William the Conqueror, London 1964, 374, 376. Orderic, ii, 258–9. Gesta Guillelmi, 102–03.

9 Secular Propaganda and Aristocratic Values: The Autobiographies of Count Fulk le Réchin of Anjou and Count William of Poitou, Duke of Aquitaine1 JANE MARTINDALE

Et ieu prec en Iesu del tron Et en romans et en lati And I pray to the lord Jesus on [his] throne/ Both in romance and in Latin (Pos de chantar m’es pres talentz/ Since the wish to sing has taken me . . .) (lines 23–4)2

W

ILLIAM, Count of Poitou and Duke of Aquitaine here sang of his grief at leaving ‘the lordship of Poitou’ (‘Lo departirs m’es aitan grieus/ Del seignoratge de Peitieus’, lines 9–10), of fear for his son who was still ‘young and feeble’ (‘iov’ e mesqui’, line 20) and exposed to war and threats from enemies. His short lyric certainly does not resemble a conventional biographical text of this time, but is entirely biographical – indeed autobiographical – in character. The poet sang of war and the danger of being attacked: he also rejoiced that he had been a man of ‘prowess and joy’ (‘De proeza e de joi fui’, line 25), of ‘joy and delight’ (‘joi et deport’, line 39) and recalled the furs (‘E vair et gris e sembeli’, line 41) which symbolised the luxury of his secular existence. He now has to renounce everything that he has loved – ‘chivalry and pride’ – and prays to God to receive him among his ‘own people’:

1 2

I should like to thank Caroline Barron, David Chadd, Ruth Harvey, and Jonathan Harris for their suggestions and help, but I take responsibility for the views eventually expressed. Les chansons de Guillaume IX, Duc d’Aquitaine (1071–1127), ed. A. Jeanroy (French trans.), Paris 1927, re-edn 1972, no. XI. Other editions principally used for this chapter are N. Pasero, Guglielmo IX. Poesie. Edizione critica (Italian trans.), Modena 1973, 267–95; F. Jensen, Provençal Philology and the Poetry of Guillaume of Poitiers (English trans.), Etudes romanes de l’Université d’Odense, Odense 1983; P. Bec, Lo gat ros, le comte de Poitiers, premier troubadour. A l’aube d’un verbe et d’une érotique (French trans.), Montpellier 2003. This poem has survived in more manuscript copies than any other of Duke William’s poems, Bec, 61–3. The English translations given in the paper are mine.

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Tot ai guerpit cant amar sueill, Cavalaria et orgueill . . . E prec li [i.e. Dieu] que.m reteng’ am si. (lines 33–4, 36)3

This poet was born in the year 1071 into one of the most illustrious aristocratic families of the Capetian kingdom of France. As an adolescent he succeeded his father Duke Guy-Geoffrey-William as count and duke in 1086, and died in 1126 after ruling ‘tota la terra’ of his principality of Aquitaine for forty – often turbulent – years. Both as ‘territorial prince’ and ‘first troubadour’ his position was extraordinary, and without parallel elsewhere in western Europe at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.4 His short Occitan lyric (forty lines and a tornada of two lines; a brief fragment of musical notation survives in a later text5) announced his grief at the expectation of death and provides medieval historians with remarkable insights into the attitudes and some of the emotions of a great layman at the turn of the eleventh century and during the early twelfth century. Since the poet also refers to powerful political figures like ‘Fulk of Angers’ and ‘the king from whom I hold my honour’ (‘Folcos d’Angieus’, ‘E.l reis de cui ieu tenc m’onor’, lines 13–14), his verses – if read literally – have a particular interest for historians and biographers.6 Topographically, too, his references in this poem are almost exclusively to places within his great ‘territorial principality’of Aquitaine – to Poitou/Poitiers, the Limousin, and in general to the inhabitants of Gascony.7 So the lyric provides an interesting context for understanding the existence of a secular prince, viewed through his own eyes, startlingly expressing himself in his own vernacular Occitan. Because this was composed during years when few autobiographical or biographical works by laymen were written or preserved, ‘Pos de chantar . . .’ has a significance which is too often underestimated by historians, since for many medievalists ‘the poet has overshadowed the prince’ and the duke’s abandonment to ‘la joie d’amour’ has (perhaps not surprisingly) aroused greater interest than investigation of his military expeditions or political ambitions.8 There is no contemporary biography of this duke, but his public activity is known from the mixture of documentary and narrative sources with which historians of this period are familiar.

3 4 5

6 7 8

It has been argued that ‘reteng am si’ carries the feudal meaning of ‘to keep as one’s vassal’, Jensen, Provençal Philology, 316; but that does not seem wholly justified, cf. below, n. 56. Below, pp. 156–9. Jeanroy, 45. For a survey of the problems presented by troubadour music in a recent excellent volume, M. Switten, ‘Music and versification, Fetz Marcabru los motz e.l so’, in The Troubadours. An Introduction, ed. S. Gaunt and S. Kay, Cambridge 1999, 141–63. The poet’s verse was designed for oral performance – which presents another problem for the biographer/historian. For discussion of their identities, below pp. 145, 149–51, 154–9. Ibid., lines 4, 16; ‘On a . . . l’impression que . . . sa vie poétique et troubadouresque [est lieé] aux pays occitans’, Bec, 13–14. As a poet William is normally described in the rubrics of the manuscripts as ‘lo coms de Peitieus’ (with considerable differences in orthography), see notes to Jeanroy’s edn, 31, 32 (twice), 34, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42. For a re-appraisal of William’s career and of the social context of his surviving oeuvre, see my article ‘ “Cavalaria et Orgueill”: Duke William IX of Aquitaine and the historian’, in J. Martindale, Status, Authority and Regional Power (Aquitaine and France, 9th to 12th Centuries), Aldershot 1997, X, 87–116, at 90 and references, 91, notes 16–17; and for a thorough overview, Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: Le Moyen Age, Paris 1964, under Guilhem IX, cols. 592–5.

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A discussion of this poem provides a valuable opportunity for investigating how far the study of the writing of biography in the Middle Ages might be extended by considering a text (like this one) which would not normally be regarded as a biographical source or considered in terms of its value for historians. Throughout western Europe in the late eleventh and earlier twelfth centuries traditional prose biographies were chiefly written in Latin, but additionally almost all were composed by clerics.9 Nevertheless, one survival in simple Latin prose by an aristocratic layman does have a number of biographical features in common with Duke William’s lyric. Its author was a count of Anjou who can be identified as Fulk le Réchin (born 1043, died 1109) who began his narrative by declaring himself ‘Ego Fulco comes Andegavensis’ (‘I, Fulk Angevin count’), and then immediately described his descent from previous holders of his county. Furthermore this county and other territories bordered – indeed, as Fulk describes it, had often encroached on – William’s ‘seignoratge de Peiteus’.10 This fragment of autobiography has survived in a single medieval manuscript (Vatican, Queen Christina, MS latin 173), but Louis Halphen, who edited it in the early twentieth century, described it as though it were a traditional narrative historical source, ‘une brève chronique des comtes d’Anjou . . . une des plus importantes que nous avons sur la maison d’Anjou’. Fulk had admittedly introduced it by stating that he wanted to narrate an account of how his ancestors acquired and added to their ‘honor’; but, after describing the death of his uncle Count Geoffrey ‘Martel’ in the year 1060, Fulk became the central figure of his narrative and described his activities in the first person.11 Since the last entries in his fragmentary text can be dated to about the year 1096, he was clearly a close contemporary of Duke William of Aquitaine, although problems associated with the dating of Duke William’s verse make it difficult to determine whether Fulk le Réchin was the ‘Folcon d’Angieus’ requested to aid his young son in the duke’s song. Even in its incomplete state Fulk Réchin’s autobiography has been treated as an essential source for the history of the county of Anjou in the eleventh century. As its editor Louis Halphen observed, it included ‘information’ not contained ‘in any other chronicle’ and he, like many other regional historians, regarded this text as an essential source of facts relating to the Angevin counts’ rise to political power, rather than as a text which – if used critically – would supply a unique

9

10 11

In the widespread use of the vernacular for historical narrative as well as for many other purposes, the kingdom of the Anglo-Saxons was obviously an exception, but the layman Ealdorman Æthelweard, who did write a history of his West-Saxon dynasty in the late tenth century, chose to do so in (an extremely tortured) Latin, see below, p. 148. Cf. notes 16–18. ‘Fragmentum Historiae Andegavensis’, henceforth cited as ‘Fragment’, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, Paris 1913, 232–8; for the manuscript, introd., pp. lxxxix–xc (citation at p. clxxxix). Halphen’s own history of the county remains invaluable, Le comté d’Anjou au XIe siècle, Paris 1906; cf. O. Guillot, Le comte d’Anjou et son entourage au XIe siècle, 2 vols., Paris 1972. See J. Dunbabin, France in the Making, 843–1180, 2nd edn, Oxford 2000, 126, 190 for important re-appraisals of this source, 246–8 on the transformation of regional history-writing during the course of the twelfth century; cf. a reference to this ‘unimpeachable source’, G. Koziol, ‘Political culture’, in France in the Central Middle Ages, ed. M. Bull, Oxford 2002, 69.

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version of an eleventh-century aristocrat’s aims and achievements.12 There is certainly enough detailed information conveyed in Count Fulk’s autobiography to satisfy (as Lionel Gossman put it), a nineteenth-century positivist’s ‘devotion to fact’, even if Fulk’s ‘facts’ were not always remembered correctly, or if they appear to have been selected or distorted in the author’s own interests.13 The Fragment has obviously been much used by all historians who have made detailed regional studies of the county of Anjou and its rulers – in particular by Louis Halphen himself and more recently by Olivier Guillot.14 And, as Sir Richard Southern commented in an attractive character-sketch of the development of the county of Anjou, this Fulk ‘was a historically minded count, who set himself to record the traditions of the family and his own recollections . . .’. Southern also considered that ‘the history of this county provides a rich portrait gallery of the makers of a “medieval state” ’.15 In a detailed study of Fulk Réchin’s career, Jim Bradbury considered him as the precursor of the Angevin English kings; but Jean Dunbabin reviewed the text in more general terms ‘as an essential contribution to the image-making on which comital authority largely depended’ in the Capetian kingdom.16 Thomas Bisson, too, considered that Fulk ‘narrated the deeds of his ancestor counts down to his own day’ and furthermore, in this text produced ‘a model of lay nobility’.17 A closer reading of the text suggests, on the other hand, that Fulk was far more concerned with his ancestors’ deeds and their ‘prowess’ (probus, probissimus, probitas) than with their social standing. Probus was also a term applied after his death to Duke William, who also sang of himself as a man of prowess (proeza).18 The modern critical fortune of Duke William’s song is wholly different. Only a few years before Halphen’s edition of the ‘Fragmentum Historiae Andegavensis’, Alfred Richard (historian of the counts of Poitou) thought that the poems of

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‘Fragment’, pp. lxxxix–xc: ‘Sur quelques points, le chroniqueur, qui écrivait de mémoire, a pu se tromper; mais il nous donne en même temps quantité de renseignements . . . qu’un homme particulièrement bien informé était seul à même de produire.’ Halphen was meticulous in checking Fulk’s ‘facts’, but did not consider that the author might have had an ulterior purpose in presenting them. Quotation, from the very interesting study of the growth of interest in medieval sources under the ancien régime, L. Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment. The World and Work of La Curne de Saint-Palaye, Baltimore Maryland 1968, 356. References, above, p. 145. Despite lengthy critical discussions of documentary sources, Guillot did not consider the value of the ‘Fragment’ as a narrative text. R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages, cited from the edition published London 1959, 85–6. J. Bradbury, ‘Fulk le Réchin and the origins of the Plantagenets’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to R. Allen Brown, ed. C. Harper-Bill, C. Holdsworth and J. Nelson, Woodbridge 1989, 27–43; J. Dunbabin, France in the Making, 2nd edn, Oxford 2000, 126–7. In an extensive comparison of texts extolling ‘princes’ (both lay and ecclesiastical) Fulk’s is the only one which contains self-praise, T. N. Bisson, ‘Princely nobility in an age of ambition (c. 1050–1150)’, in Nobles and Nobility in Medieval Europe. Concepts, Origins, Transformations, ed. A. Duggan, Woodbridge 2002, 102, 107. In his text Fulk did not himself express interest in a concept of nobility nor in any terminology of social hierarchy, although an eighteenth-century editor of his text did comment on its importance ‘on account of the nobility of the writer’, RHF x, 203. Above, p. 143; below p. 159. For Jensen, ‘proeza’ is a personification here, Provençal Philology, 312, n. 25. For an Occitan definition of this term, made up of ‘ardimen’, ‘forssa e fermetat’ (‘hardiness/boldness’, ‘force and firmness’), M. Raynouard, Lexique roman ou dictionnaire de la langue des troubadours, Paris 1838–44, iv, 660.

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the ‘first troubadour’ could not be the subject of a critical publication because of their often ‘licentious’ character ‘qui auraient demandé des commentaires scabreux’. Richard was reflecting on the rest of the duke’s corpus of poems, consisting of ‘love-lyrics’ ranging from the refined to the obscene.19 Scholars’ sensibilities and readers’ tastes have changed dramatically since Alfred Richard’s time, but nevertheless ‘Pos de chantar m’es pres talentz’ is the one song in which the poet presents himself as a ruler (‘I’), grieving to leave his ‘seignoratge de Peitieus’, and, as we have seen, worrying over his son’s future as well as his own fate at death (‘a la mort’, line 37). Duke William’s lyrics were used by Reto Bezzola to construct a biography of the poet in which he supposedly moved from ‘cynical sensuality’ to a ‘new ideal of profane love . . . a paradise of courtly society’ and, eventually, to a death as a good Christian. This curriculum vitae was based on the assumption that his poems expressed sentiments literally describing different stages of the duke’s life.20 He was also regarded as an originator of a doctrine of courtly love, and thus as an individual who profoundly transformed western attitudes towards social behaviour and heterosexual relations. That interpretation is no longer sustainable; but, ‘although the demystification of the “myth” of courtly love was undoubtedly urgent’, as critical approaches to troubadour poetry evolved in response to Marxist sociological interpretations of twelfth-century social change, to structuralist literary techniques, or Lacanian theories, it still seems desirable to reconsider the attitudes and the political and social position of a man whose dynasty ruled almost a third of medieval France.21 For historians interested in secular issues – the lives of the laity and, more particularly in this instance, the lives of the politically powerful in the Capetian kingdom – the lack of biographical works written by laymen (let alone laywomen) is a serious defect, even though it is one with which all medievalists have to come to terms when they are investigating the history of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. The predominantly ecclesiastical background of authors writing on the political world of the early Capetians needs always to be borne in mind. The aim of this essay is principally to consider the concerns and values of the two aristocratic laymen revealed in their autobiographical compositions, for, despite their differences of language (Occitan and Latin) and form (verse and prose), these two texts open a window onto a world which often differs greatly from the one portrayed by ecclesiastical writers in their biographies of laymen or in their own

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A. Richard, Histoire des comtes de Poitou, 2 vols., Paris 1903, i, 506, n. 2. This remains the standard work encompassing the period from the eighth century to the capture of Poitou by King Philip II in the year 1204. For a more specialised study of this duke, Martindale, ‘ “Cavalaria et Orgueill” ’, 88–113. This was inserted into a broad analysis of changes in western European literature (both Latin and vernacular), R. Bezzola, Les origines et la formation de la littérature courtoise en occident (500–1200): La société féodale et la transformation de la littérature de cour, Paris 1966, 306, 307. There is an extremely valuable overview of trends in troubadour scholarship in The Troubadours. An Introduction, 1–7 (quotation at 6); cf. S. Gaunt, The Troubadours and Irony, Cambridge 1989, esp. 20–2, 30–3; S. Kay, Subjectivity in Troubadour Poetry, Cambridge 1990, esp. 6, 114–15, 155–6. The topic of ‘courtly love’ cannot be debated here, but for one recent author it remains a reality, S. Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility, Philadelphia 1999, 78, n. 55.

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autobiographical writings. The similarities and differences need to be discussed.22 This aim has a secondary importance because in broad terms members of the laity have often been supposed to be illiterate (analphabetic, in the modern sense of the term), for the most part unschooled in Latin (the learned language which transformed the clergy in western Europe into litterati, in the medieval sense of the term). Views of, or expressed by, the laity are nearly always gained at second hand, filtered through a mesh of judgments often based on moral and religious values shaped by an ecclesiastical education. Count Fulk and Duke William developed themes and expressed values which certainly do not always correspond to those formulated in biographies of important secular figures written by ecclesiastical historians, which have sometimes too easily been regarded as representing the norms of medieval attitudes and values. A more detailed examination of these two texts by laymen helps to extend knowledge of medieval biographies. Nothing written in Capetian France during these years can be compared to the Byzantine Princess Anna Comnena’s Alexiad, a learned and elaborate biography of her imperial father which she composed in her own Greek vernacular some time after the Emperor’s death (the Emperor Alexius I ruled 1081–1118).23 Equally there is nothing to match the Latin history of his own dynasty written by the noble English layman Æthelweard in the late tenth century, composed for his cousin Matilda, a nun in the German kingdom, who interestingly, like Count Fulk of Anjou, also occasionally referred to himself by the Roman title of consul.24 By contrast, the only two complete surviving biographies of kings who ruled within the French kingdom during the early Capetian period were composed by monks: their outlook was influenced by their clerical education and its deeply imbued religious values and attitudes. The Life of King Robert II (996–1031), which was composed by the monk Helgaud, has been severely criticised as ‘the work of a hagiographer rather than a biographer’; and this Life was in any case designed to be a sequel to Helgaud’s encomium of the religious founder of his own monastery of Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire (otherwise known as Fleury).25 The Life of

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Below, p. 153. Written some thirty years after the emperor’s death, however, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. Sewter, London 1969, 000. Cf. J. L. Nelson, ‘Gender and Genre in Women Historians of the Early Middle Ages’, in The Frankish World 700–900, London 1996, 186–7. It has been doubted whether Anna was actually responsible for this biography of her father, but that charge is effectively countered in a collection of conference papers, Anna Komnena and her Times, ed. T. Gouma-Peterson, New York 2000: P. Magdalino, ‘The pen of the aunt: echoes of the mid-twelfth century in the Alexiad’, 15–43; and R. Macrides who concludes ‘Anna, in her writing of the history of her father’s reign . . . [is] bound more to her family, her times, and her genre than to her sex’, ‘The pen and the sword: who wrote the Alexiad?’, ibid. 75. My thanks to Jonathan Harris for these references. The Chronicle of Æthelweard, ed. A. Campbell, NMT 1962, 1–2 and introd., pp. xii–xvii, xlv–lx (on the author’s Latinity). On the complications of this text and its limitations, Helgaud de Fleury, Vie de Robert le Pieux – Epitoma Vitae Regis Rotberti Pii, ed. and trans. R.-H. Bautier and G. Labory, Paris 1965, 36. But at the end of the work Helgaud admitted that he would leave to historians (‘istoriographis’) the task of describing the king’s military engagements and victories (139). For this Life and other historical works produced at Fleury, A. Vidier, L’historiographie à Saint-Benoît-sur-Loire et les miracles de Saint Benoît, Paris 1965, 70–112 (90–3 for Helgaud’s Vita); cf. also M. Mostert, ‘La bibliothèque de Fleury-surLoire’, in Religion et culture autour de l’an mil. Etudes réunies, ed. D. Iogna-Prat and J. C. Picard, Paris 1990, 119–23.

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King Louis VI ‘the Fat’ (1108–37) was written by the monk Suger, who was abbot of the wealthy royal monastery of Saint-Denis which he had entered as a child. Suger also began to compose a Life of the following king, Louis VII (1137–80), but that is incomplete.26 Until his death in the year 1151, however, Abbot Suger’s involvement in the government of the kingdom under Louis VI and Louis VII meant that the themes of royal political and military activity were described in considerable detail, and were also central to the portrayal of Louis VI’s role as king, although his piety and devotional practices were also emphasised. Suger’s account of the king’s last days is of especial significance in the context of this chapter and, by comparison with Duke William’s attitude toward his own death, Suger wrote that Louis made his ‘catholic’ confession, ‘not as an illiterate man, but as a most literate theologian’ (‘non tanquam illiteratus, sed tanquam literatissimus theologus’). Suger then commented that the king ‘burst out’ (‘erumpit’) into a long recital of the creed (given verbatim in the text).27 There could hardly be a more marked contrast to the religious sentiments expressed by Duke William in his lyric, or even to Count Fulk Réchin’s reference to the ‘good end’ made by his uncle Geoffrey Martel. Yet even so, the Life of Louis VI reads far less like the life of a saint or holy man than does Helgaud’s eleventh-century biography of King Robert II.28 The text of the ‘Fragmentum Historiae Andegavensis’ begins: ‘I Fulk, Angevin count, who was the son of Geoffrey of Château-Landon and of Ermengardis, the daughter of Fulk count of Anjou, and nephew of Geoffrey Martel who was the son of the same Fulk, my grandfather and my mother’s brother . . .’ (‘Ego Fulco, comes Andegavensis, qui fui filius Gosfridi de Castro Landono et Ermengardis, filie Fulconis comitis Andegavensis, et nepos Gosfridi Martelli, qui fuit filius eiusdem avi mei Fulconis et frater matris mee . . .’). Fulk does not describe the legal basis of his succession to Anjou as count, or comment on the complications which surrounded that succession; but even this introductory passage shows that his ‘inheritance’ came via his mother’s descent as the daughter of Count Fulk (‘Nerra’), and not as a result of direct patrilineal inheritance, which many historians have regarded as prevalent in the Capetian kingdom by the second half of the eleventh century.29 The author, Fulk, states that he was knighted when he was

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Suger, Vie de Louis VI le Gros, ed. and trans. H. Waquet, Paris 1964; and De glorioso rege Ludovico, Ludovici filii, in Suger, Oeuvres, ed. and trans. F. Gasparri, Paris 1996, i, 157–77, 243–6 (notes). On Suger, L. Grant, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, London 1998, 77–84, with comments on his writings, biography and letters, 34–43, and his ‘ideology’, 10–19. ‘Ego peccator Ludovicus confiteor . . .’, Vie de Louis VI, 276–7. The simplicity of Duke William’s poetic appeal to the lord Jesus (see above) is in stark contrast to Suger’s account of the king’s declaration of belief in ‘one God . . . consubstantial, coeternal’. The interest of this elaborate account of Louis VI’s personal religious preparations for death was not of interest to A. Luchaire in his monumental Louis VI, annales de sa vie et de son règne (1081–1137), Paris 1890; but see Grant, Abbot Suger, 137–9. Above, pp. 143–5 for Duke William; ‘Fragment’, 236 for Count Geoffrey Martel’s death, having renounced ‘omnem curam militie rerumque secularium’ on the previous night. ‘Fragment’, 232. For recent discussion of this complicated genealogy (which does not, however, in my view give sufficient weight to Fulk Réchin’s own account of his parentage), C. Settipani, ‘Les comtes d’Anjou et leurs alliances’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Woodbridge 1997, 254–9.

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seventeen years old by his uncle, Count Geoffrey Martel, who also committed the charge of the Saintonge to his nephew.30 Since that ceremony took place in the year 1060, he must have been born in 1043, and was about a generation older than Duke William of Aquitaine (twenty-nine years exactly). But Fulk declares that he did not begin his narrative until ‘I had held the consulship of Anjou for twenty-eight years, and the Touraine and Nantais and Maine . . .’ (‘cum tenuissem consulatum Andegavinum viginti octo annis et Turonensem et Cenomannensem . . .’): that long delay has never been explained, and is a rather mysterious feature of his composition. Throughout his narrative Count Fulk portrayed himself in the best possible light, sometimes by means of some rather surprising omissions. He does not, for instance, ever mention that he was a younger son, nor does he ever name his elder brother, nor refer to the fact that it was that brother (Geoffrey le Barbu) who succeeded to the county of Anjou after their uncle’s death. Eventually Fulk does record the occasion when ‘I rode against him . . . and fought with him in a battle in the field in which, by the grace of God, I overcame him’ (‘equitavi contra illum . . . et pugnavi cum eo campestri proelio, in quo eum Deo gratia superavi’).31 Comparisons with other regional sources show that Fulk was not always concerned about the accuracy of his ‘facts’. For instance, he certainly did not ‘hold’ Maine or the city of Le Mans securely throughout these years as he implies; but, like his ancestors, he fought to gain possession of this important county and its metropolitan city. Possession and control of the city of Tours and the Touraine, too, continued to be disputed, while Fulk was certainly ‘economical with the truth’ in his account of how the Angevin counts acquired the Saintonge, which lay south of the county of Poitou in territories largely controlled by the duke of Aquitaine.32 Fulk’s narrative was deliberately intended to provide an account of how ‘my ancestors acquired their honour and held it down to my time’. He included an extremely sketchy description of Anjou under the Carolingians, but concentrated on the three generations of counts who had preceded him – ‘from my grandfather Fulk, and from his father Geoffrey Grisegonelle, and from my uncle Geoffrey Martel’.33 This uncle was correctly termed ‘avunculus’ (mother’s brother); however, with the exception of his mother Ermengarde, the daughter of Count Fulk Nerra, he did not mention any women of the comital dynasty, or even any of his wives. On the other hand, his expressed hostility to the Capetian dynasty might have been occasioned by King Philip’s seduction of Fulk’s wife, Bertrada de

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‘Fragment’, 236. Fulk never refers to his own nickname, but explains that Count Geoffrey’s uncle was justifiably called ‘Martel’ – ‘Hammer’ – because of his success in crushing his enemies. ‘Fragment’, 232, 237; cf. above, p. 145. ‘Fragment’, 232, n. 3; Halphen, Le comté d’Anjou, 187. The count of Anjou did not legally gain control of the county of Maine until the marriage of Fulk’s own son Fulk, the future king of Jerusalem, to Aremburgis, daughter of Hélie de la Flèche, then count of Maine, in the year 1109, J. Chartrou, L’Anjou de 1109 à 1151, Paris 1928, 4–5. ‘Fragment’, 232–3. Fulk’s treatment of the earliest counts (‘consules’), Ingilgerius, Fulk ‘the Red’ and Fulk ‘the Good’ will be omitted for lack of space. However, note the elaborate ‘myths’ or fictions created in the later twelfth century around the personalities of these earliest counts, ‘Chronica de Gestis Consulum Andegavorum’, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 26–37, 135–42, 162; N. Wright, ‘Epic and Romance in the chronicles of Anjou’, ANS 26, 2004, 178–89.

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Montfort: Fulk called King Philip (1060–1108) ‘impious’, but did not name Bertrada.34 And, although he does recall some important religious and devotional acts performed by his predecessors (including Fulk Nerra’s pilgrimages to Jerusalem, the foundation and endowment of monastic communities at Beaulieu and in Angers, dedicated to Saint Nicholas), his account of the expansion of Angevin power is based very largely on his ancestors’ aggressive and successful use of military force, followed by his own. Their wars and their clusters of castles allowed this Fulk, as their successor, to call them ‘probissimi comites’: it was ‘prowess and prudence in secular affairs’ (‘probitas et prudentia in rebus secularibus’) that brought Count Geoffrey Martel ‘praiseworthy fame throughout the whole kingdom of France’.35 Military reputations of members of the secular aristocracy apparently spread widely by word of mouth after any notable campaign during this time: for instance, it was recorded by one of William the Conqueror’s biographers that while he was ‘in exile in Poitiers, the fame won by the Norman count [in a prolonged siege], was spread abroad in Aquitaine’.36 ‘Secular affairs’ – in the broadest possible sense of the term – were military affairs, and Fulk attributed at least one victory in battle to each of his predecessors. The cumulative impression in this short text is striking: each mini-biography of these counts by their successor is centred on the military expeditions in which they engaged, the battles which they fought in the territories surrounding the city of Angers, and their involvement in castle-building and siege warfare.37 The author’s technical vocabulary seems carefully chosen, even if there is no information about tactics or detailed descriptions of battles. Count Fulk Nerra, for instance, fought ‘two very great battles in the field’ (‘duo campestria prelia valde magna’) against the Breton count Conan and the ‘very powerful’ Count Odo. Geoffrey Grisegonelle is recorded as defeating the Poitevin count in ‘prelio campestri’ and in putting the Bretons to flight when the sons of Conan approached Angers ‘with a ravaging expedition’. In the account of Geoffrey Martel’s career, ‘duo prelia’ are distinguished from the wars (‘guerra’, ‘bellum’) in which he engaged throughout his life to defend his honour against ‘foreign races’ (‘exteris gentibus’); and explanations are given for the two ‘prelia’ against the Poitevins and Count Herbert Bacon of Maine, and for the ‘war’ in which Geoffrey engaged against Count Theobald of Blois.38 Fulk Réchin also represents himself as

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He traces the count’s position ‘a rege Francie, non a genere impii Philippi [Philip I, r. 1060–1108] sed a prole Caroli Calvi, qui fuit filius Hludovici filii Caroli Magni’ (‘from the king of France, not from the race of the impious Philip, but from offspring of Charles the Bald who was the son of Louis the Pious, son of Charles the Great’). Possibly the details of his marriages and children were contained in the lost part of the text, but it nevertheless seems significant that he does not provide details of his predecessors’ marriages, even though he notes when one count was the father of his successor. ‘Probus’, ‘probissimi comites’, or ‘probitatis’, ‘Fragment’, 232, 233, and for the citation in the text, 235. Gesta Guillelmi, 14–15 and n. 1. Castles built or acquired by Count Fulk Nerra are listed, ‘Fragment’, 234; by Geoffrey Martel, 235–6. Fulk Nerra has been credited with the construction of Langeais (c. 994), ‘le plus ancien donjon en maçonnerie encore existant en France’, J.-F. Fino, Forteresses de la France médiévale, Paris 1967, 367 (but unfortunately he does not discuss the general reliability of the ‘Fragment’). ‘Fragment’, 223, nn. 2–3; 234 (death of Count Conan and a thousand of his men . . .); 235 (capture of the Poitevin count at the Battle of Montcouë in 1033). All these engagements are discussed by Halphen, Comté, 21–5, 129 (battle of Conquereuil, c. 992); 34–5 (battle of Pontlevoy, c. 1016); 57 (Montcouë).

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succeeding in gaining complete control of his uncle’s territories only after he had once imprisoned his brother. Then, after Geoffrey’s release and subsequent attack on the castle of Brissac, Fulk states that he defeated his brother in battle ‘by the grace of God’. ‘Therefore I took the cit(ies) of Angers and Tours and the castle(s) of Loches and Loudun, which are the heads of the honour of the counts of the Angevins’ (‘Proinde accepi civitatem Andegavem et Turonum et Lochas castrum et Lausdunum, que sunt capita honoris Andegavorum consulum’). Fulk was here actually alluding to two fortified sites which lay outside the county of Anjou, as well as to the metropolitan city of Tours where the Capetian king retained a considerable amount of power.39 The concluding part of the ‘Fragment’ must have been composed in 1096 during, or soon after, Pope Urban II’s unprecedented journey through the Capetian kingdom. In Fulk’s own words the pope’s mission was to summon ‘our race to go to Jerusalem to fight the gentile population which had occupied that city and the whole land of the Christians as far as Constantinople’. This text contains nothing to show that the author was aware of the Christian army’s remarkable success in capturing Jerusalem in July 1099, and there are no obvious anachronisms to suggest that it was written up with hindsight (say, before Fulk’s own death in 1109).40 His references to this memorable papal journey show that Fulk was above all interested in regional events and incidents which concerned his dynasty and himself personally, even though he does once mention ‘signs and prodigies’ which occurred in ‘the whole kingdom of Gaul’. In particular, he emphasised Pope Urban’s presence at the ceremonial ‘translation’ of the body of Count Geoffrey Martel from the chapter-house to the church of the comital monastery of Saint-Nicolas d’Angers.41 Fulk also made much of the pope’s gift to him of ‘a golden flower’ (‘florem aureum’) – a gift which has intrigued modern historians. In any case Fulk records that this ceremonial gift was made during Lent in the great church of Saint-Martin de Tours after Urban II had processed ‘crowned’ from the city’s cathedral of Saint Maurice. According to Fulk’s narrative both these occasions were to be invested with ritual significance by being commemorated annually, either at the pope’s command or by order of Count Fulk himself, who laid down that his successors were to transform the gift of the golden flower into an annual ritual. Fulk’s account of the relations between

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And for the complicated political and military conflicts between Geoffrey Martel, Fulk Réchin and Count Theobald III of Blois, Comté, 47–8, 50–1. ‘Fragment’, 237. Fulk states that Geoffrey Grisegonelle ‘exacted’ (‘excussit’) Loudun from the Poitevin count whereas, according to Adémar de Chabannes, it was granted in benefice by that count, ‘Fragment’, 233; Adémar de Chabannes, Chronique, ed. J. Chavanon, Paris 1897, 152, 164. Fulk’s autobiographical ‘Fragment’ makes no reference to the fact that in 1068 he was obliged to do homage to the count of Blois for Tours, Halphen, Comté, 149–50, n. 4. ‘. . . ammonuit gentem nostram ut irent Jerusalem expugnaturi gentilem populum . . .’, ‘Fragment’, 238. This was not of course as yet described as ‘crusade’, and for historians who interpret religious aspirations as the mainspring of all medieval decisions and actions, it may seem odd that this Fulk apparently remained unmoved by the papal appeal, as was noted by M. Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade (The Limousin and Gascony c.970–c.1130), Oxford 1993, 63, 253. Ibid., 237–8. Was Fulk deliberately employing a term – ‘translatum’ – which was frequently used to describe the honouring of a saint’s body?

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the pope and the Angevin count was surely intended to draw attention to the prestige of the Angevin dynasty, but would also provide a means of emphasising the legitimacy of Fulk’s own position as count. As seems often to be the case with this text, there may also have been ulterior political motives underlying an eclectic account of the beginnings of a movement which entirely changed the Christian West.42 In general it is remarkable that, as a layman, Count Fulk should have written an autobiography at all. Equally important is the account of how he acquired his information: for his account of the past of the Angevin counts was based (he asserted) entirely on oral communication, until he reached a time when he could draw on personal impressions and recollections. ‘These . . . my ancestors’, he wrote, ‘as my uncle Geoffrey Martel told me, were very brave counts’ (‘Illi igitur antecessores mei, sicut ille meus avunculus Gosfridus Martellus narravit mihi, fuerunt probissimi comites’); but he acknowledged that little could be known about the counts who had lived further back in time, for even their burial places ‘are unknown to us’. He therefore concentrated on the three generations who are ‘nearer to us’: this implies for historians interested in the structure of medieval biographies that the memory of a secular family-group based on oral transmission, but unsupported by written evidence, only stretched back just over one hundred years.43 If Fulk indeed accepted Geoffrey Martel’s oral account of the early history and genealogies of the Angevin counts, then he had acquired all the early information he inserted into the Fragment by the time he was seventeen years old – the year of his own knighting and of his uncle’s death in 1060.44 But he does not tell his readers why he did not take the decision to write down his account until so many years later: ‘And so I have held that honour for twentyeight years down to the time when I took the decision to make this writing’ (‘. . . usque ad terminum illum quo scriptum istud facere disposui’) and, he went on, ‘if you want to hear what I have achieved, follow what I write (“scribo”) and you will know what has happened’, but unfortunately very little has been preserved in the manuscript of what should have followed.45 Many interesting questions might have been answerable about the count’s life between the time of the First Crusade and his death in 1109 if Fulk’s text had survived in its entirety. In his introduction Fulk had initially set out his aim of putting his oral knowledge of the Angevin counts into writing (‘volui commendare litteris . . .’). Was the use of that phrase deliberately intended to show that he was doing more than using ‘letters’ to write down what he had been told and experienced, but that he was going to employ Latin for his scriptum? That possibility seems quite plausible because ‘Latin’, as Michael Clanchy has remarked, ‘had a special status as 42

43 44 45

Ibid., 238. It has been ingeniously suggested that this flower might be associated with the Plantagenest (broom-plant) of Fulk’s descendants, Bradbury, ‘Fulk Réchin and the origin of the Plantagenets’, 40–41. According to Koziol this was a ‘golden coin’, but he cites no evidence for that; and it was Fulk himself who ordered that his successors should carry this flower each year on the same day, and not the pope, who made ‘the injunction that the counts of Anjou always keep the coin with them’, ‘Political culture’, 69–70. ‘Fragment’, 232–3; Halphen, Comté, 6. ‘Fragment’, 232, 237. ‘Fragment’, 237.

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the language of literacy . . . and to be “litteratus” meant specifically to know Latin and not specifically to have the ability to read and write’.46 The extent and levels of lay literacy are problems which have always bothered medieval historians; but it is clear that, although ‘letters’ were at this time normally reserved for boys and men destined for a clerical career, laymen might also acquire some of this learning. Even though Fulk makes no mention of education in the modern sense of the term, a number of contemporary or near-contemporary cases suggest that he could very well have been instructed in ‘letters’ in his youth, despite the priorities of his military training and career. Peter Abelard, for instance, wrote, ‘My father had acquired some knowledge of letters, and later on his passion for letters was such that he intended all his sons to have instruction in letters before they were trained to arms.’47 A few years after Fulk Réchin’s death Guibert of Nogent described in his own autobiography the ‘rough love’ (‘saevus amor’) shown by his priestly master in teaching him Latin: daily beatings were administered while the boy Guibert and his widowed mother remained undecided over whether he should remain a layman and take up a military career or enter an ecclesiastical institution.48 Both those individuals eventually took the decisive step of entering the clerical order, but their own writings show that instruction in ‘letters’ was not entirely restricted to ‘clerks’. The latinity of Fulk’s own fragmentary autobiography, however, is very different in quality and character from elaborate compositions by authors who received a lengthy education in the schools and nascent universities of twelfth-century France. Even so (as Michael Clanchy has observed in the case of Peter Abelard), both Fulk and Abelard began their autobiographical writings in the same direct fashion with an account of their family origins, prefaced in the first person by the Latin ‘Ego . . .’.49 Both as biography and autobiography Fulk’s narrative is far more than a collection of novel facts or information concerning the history of the counts of Anjou. This text needs to be recognised as a deftly composed piece of retrospective propaganda, designed with hindsight to justify the legitimacy of his own position as count. He was surely being disingenuous in asserting that the overriding aim of his work was to produce an account of how his ‘ancestors acquired their honour . . . and held it down to my time’, although distinguished modern historians have accepted that statement at its face value. Fulk’s emphasis on the continuity of political control in Anjou has undoubtedly been underrated, since it was important for him to show that he was part of a comital line of succession which stretched back to the Carolingian era.50 The ulterior motives of his text

46 47

48 49 50

M. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd edn, Oxford 1993, 186. The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, revised edn, ed. B. Radice and M. Clanchy, pp. xiii–v, 3. Abelard was born c. 1079 so, although he was considerably younger than Count Fulk, he would have received his education before Fulk began to write, M. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life, Oxford 1997, 42–8, 336. A phrase cited either from Virgil or Ovid, Guibert de Nogent, Autobiographie, ed. E-R. Labande, Paris 1981, 35; and 23–43. Clanchy, Abelard, 123. Cf. above, p. 150; ‘Fragment’, 232.

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emerge at first (as has been already argued) from what, as author, he did not say. The omissions and errors relating to his brother’s career, for instance, are flagrant, since many surviving charters prove decisively that Geoffrey le Barbu was Count Geoffrey Martel’s immediate successor – a fact that seemed conveniently to slip Fulk’s mind when he finished describing his ancestors’ pasts, and began an account of his own career.51 The episode which most strongly supports this interpretation of his autobiographical fragment is Fulk’s own reference to his being knighted by Count Geoffrey on Whit Sunday 1060 in the city of Angers. ‘My age [was] seventeen years when he made me a knight’ (‘Etas autem mea decem et septem annorum quando me fecit militem’), Fulk wrote.52 Although (unfortunately for historians) no details are given of the ceremony involved on that occasion, it could be regarded as a rite of passage by which a boy would be invested with adult arms, enabling him to fight as a man and to take part in all the activity which would be understood by the vernacular term cavalaria, as employed by Duke William in Pos de chantar. The only other mention of such a ceremony in the Fragment is to Geoffrey Martel’s knighting during his father’s lifetime when he was not appointed his father’s successor, but ‘exercised the novelty of his knighthood against the neighbouring regions’ (‘in vita patris sui miles exstitit et novitatem militie sue contra finitimos exercuit’).53 An alternative explanation of the importance attributed to this episode is that Fulk’s knighting was a ritual of inauguration which formally transmitted the comital succession to him after his uncle’s death. That is an interpretation advanced by Jean Flori as a ‘recognition of his rights’, and accepted by Olivier Guillot. It is likely that this was what Fulk hoped his readers would understand but, given that Geoffrey le Barbu not Fulk at first succeeded their uncle, it seems an improbable interpretation. It would have meant that in 1060 Count Geoffrey Martel endowed his younger nephew with the ‘honour’ of Anjou, thus in fact disinheriting Fulk’s elder brother.54 So Fulk’s distortion of the sequence of political events (since Geoffrey le Barbu was in practice Geoffrey Martel’s immediate successor) allowed him to imply that, after their uncle’s death, he was the rightful count and could be justified in keeping his brother in chains and fighting him on two separate occasions.55

51

52

53 54 55

Charters of Geoffrey le Barbu are calendared by Guillot, Comte d’Anjou, ii, cal. nos. 226–9, 232–5, 238–54. No. 244 was given at Angers (1063), no. 250 at Chinon (1058–64). By 1067 Fulk le Réchin had gained possession of Saumur, which was the subject of dispute between him and his brother (cf. nos. 241, 255). ‘Fragment’, 236. By the late twelfth century an aristocratic knighting-ceremony was expected to be a costly and elaborate affair lasting many days, when the ‘subject’ would be showered with gifts of arms and horses, if John of Marmoutier’s account is to be believed of the knighting of Fulk le Réchin’s grandson, Geoffrey le Bel (prospective husband of the Empress Matilda), ‘Historia Gaufredi Ducis Normannorum et comitis Andegavorum’, in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 179–80. ‘Fragment’, 235. The term ‘finitimos’ makes the translation of this passage difficult, since it could relate either to the neighbouring ‘regions’, or to the ‘neighbours’ themselves. ‘. . . la reconnaissance de ses droits’, J. Flori, L’essor de la chevalerie (XIe–XIIe siècles), Geneva 1986, 68–9. Above, p. 150; J. Dunbabin, Captivity and Imprisonment in Medieval Europe (1000–1300), London 2002, 132.

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Turning now to ‘Pos de chantar’: like all the highly accomplished verse that has been preserved from the ‘workshop’ (obrador) of ‘lo coms de Peitieus’, it is composed in the first person and (as with Fulk’s prose ‘Fragment’) the author’s autobiographical standpoint is made clear in the first lines: Farai un vers, don sui dolenz: Mais non serai obedienz En Peitau ni en Lemozi. (lines 2–4) (I shall make a song about which I am sorrowful/ I shall never [again] be a lover/ In Poitou or in the Limousin,56) Qu’er m’en irai en eisil: En gran paor, en gran peril, En guerra laissarai mon fil, E faran li mal siei vezi. (lines 5–8) (I shall go into exile,/ In great fear, in great danger,/ I shall leave my son at war,/ And his neighbours will do him harm.)

The poet then expresses the hope that Fulk of Angers will bring help to ‘all the land’ (‘tota la terra’) and his ‘cousin’ or, if Fulk cannot, that the king – ‘l.reis de cui eu tenc m’onor’– will do so. Beneath the relative simplicity of the structure of the verse, the poet develops a number of interwoven themes: he reflects on a past life of joy and gaiety, but also on his own prowess, before he goes on to recognise that this life cannot last because ‘our Lord does not wish it to be so’, and that he will go ‘where all sinners find an end’ (lines 28, 30). His prayer in ‘roman’ and ‘lati(n)’ and his hope that God will welcome him among His people anticipate his death and embody religious sentiments which – despite their language and poetic form – seem more or less conventional for the early twelfth century. By contrast it is highly unusual in this context for the lyric also to contain appeals to his ‘companion(s)’ to forgive any harm he may have done them. Remarkably also, Toz mos amics prec a la mort Que vengan tut e m onren fort Qu’eu avut joi e deport Loing e pres et a mon aizi (lines 37–40) (At death I pray all my friends/ That they will all come and do me great honour/ For I have had joy and delight/ Far and near and at home.)

The lyric therefore celebrates a great layman’s life, but also his great political fear – that the succession to ‘all his land’ might be endangered because of his son’s youth, or the possibility that this son ‘is not sufficiently experienced or

56

The meaning of ‘obedienz’ has been disputed: Jeanroy translated this ‘servant d’amour’ (26), whereas for Pasero it should be regarded as ‘un’ espressione che sintetizza l’osservanza delle norme feudali’ (29) – presumably referring to the poet’s relationship to the king? But I have followed Jeanroy’s interpretation since, in another of the poet’s lyrics, the terms ‘obediens’ and ‘obediensa’ are used in connection with those who ‘wish to love’, Chanson VII, lines 30–31. For the ducal obrador, Chanson VI, line 13.

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brave’ (‘Si ben non es savis ni pros’, line 17).57 The poet’s worldly concerns need to be balanced against his thoughts on the otherworld. Details of identification and dating may seem to be the most obvious problems to solve in considering ‘Pos de chantar’ as a source of information on the autobiography of a great layman like the duke of Aquitaine. Without this song, historians and biographers would only have access to rather dry local annals or histories and a group of northern or later narratives that are for the most part extremely critical of this duke’s actions and beliefs. The problems associated with dating this ‘Adieu au monde’ have caused much modern debate because references to the duke’s son as ‘jov’ e mesqui’ mean that it could not have been written just before the duke’s death in the year 1126. Even in 1120 when William led a force of warriors across the Pyrenees to give aid to King Alfonso of Aragon, his son seems to have been old enough to be left in charge of the government of his father’s duchy.58 Complicated arguments have therefore been advanced which might place the composition of the song at the time of one of the duke’s military expeditions within his own principality. Nevertheless, the song must have been composed after the birth of the duke’s elder son in the year 1099, but for how long could that son have been described as ‘jov’ e mesqui’? Many theories have been advanced about the occasion on which this poem might have been produced: for instance, supposedly after serious wounds suffered in a campaign against the lord of Parthenay, or after the lifting of excommunication imposed because of the duke’s treatment of the bishop of Poitiers (c. 1112, 1117).59 If any of those hypotheses were correct, then the unnamed king referred to in the song would be the Capetian King Louis VI, and ‘Fulcon’ would be not Fulk Réchin but his son – another Fulk who would be the future king of Jerusalem – (i.e. there would be a terminus post quem of 1109). Those identifications have been widely accepted. One problem for critics, however, has always been the order in which Alfred Jeanroy edited Duke William’s lyrics, since that order has given the impression that psychologically ‘Pos de chantar’, with its pre-occupation with death, was the last composition of his life (it was printed as no. XI, in a series which began ‘totz mesclatz d’amor e de joy e de joven’, ‘all mixed with love and joy and youth’, Jeanroy, I, ‘Companho faray un vers . . . covinen’, line 3). There is apparently no evidence in the manuscripts for that assumption and, if the song cannot be linked to any specific events or firmly identifiable individuals, the king could as well be Philip I (died 1108), while Fulk of Angers could

57

58

59

Commentators have found it difficult to classify this song. Bec asserted ‘Qualifieé tour à tour de “chant de repentir” (“Buszlied”), de lamentation funèbre sur soi-même (“plaint”), ou de pièce essentiellemnt historico-féodale, elle se distingue de toute façon des autres chansons du comte . . .’, but cf. Pasero’s view that ‘il compianto de Guglielmo è perciò tutto incentrato sull’ Io dell’autore’, Lo gat ros, 253, and Guglielmo IX Poésie, 274. The verso of an original grant made by Duke William IX to the great Cluniac abbey of Montierneuf in the suburb of Poitiers bears the note that it was confirmed by his son on the day that the count himself departed for Spain: it was enacted in ‘aula Episcopi Pictavensis’, Recueil des documents relatifs à l’abbaye de Montierneuf de Poitiers (1076–1319), ed. F. Villard, Archives historiques du Poitou 59, 1973, no. 62. Villard dated this to the end of the year 1119. Chronique de Saint-Maixent, ed J. Verdon, Paris 1979, 170 (for the birth of the duke’s son); 185–6; cf. Lo gat ros, 253.

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be Count Fulk le Réchin of Anjou. All historians would presumably regard it as important to establish such points as accurately as possible; but, on the other hand, it seems that for a biographer this poem has more value for its cultural testimony than for its precise chronological or historical detail. In this respect it is entirely different from Fulk’s autobiography which is organised as a narrative, loaded with details of battles, castles and incidents designed to give support to Fulk’s authority, as well as to portray his ancestors’ ‘probitas’ as counts. William did not need to justify his own position: he could afford to be allusive. ‘Pos de chantar m’es pres talentz’ has recently been described by Pierre Bec as ‘probably William’s most celebrated song’. It is the only one of the eleven poems attributed to him which reveals his historical persona, rather than the tantalising poetic masks which caused him to be described as ‘trovatore bifronte’. All the others are either love poems which are dedicated to a single lady (domna), or which elaborate ingenious erotic themes. On grounds of morality or taste those used to be condemned, or cited to show the debauched character of the poet’s (supposedly all-male) audience. In terms of the poet’s own times even those songs seem sometimes to have had a serious purpose concealed beneath his irony or his ‘gab’/‘gap’. In ‘Farai un vers, pos mi sonelh’ (‘I shall make a song while I am asleep’), the poet adopts the person of a false-dumb pilgrim who becomes involved in a scurrilous, but wholly unbelievable, adventure in a castle in the Auvergne with two ladies and their red cat with vicious whiskers.60 Although this has been regarded as a near-fabliau, it also declares the opinion that ‘ladies’ should never spurn the love of a ‘cavalier’, while those who go so far as to love a monk or clerk (‘o monge o clergal’, V, line 9) should be burned alive. Duke William’s reputation as a ‘vehement lover of women’ was widespread by the later twelfth century, but anecdotes about him on erotic themes circulated in the Anglo-Norman kingdom at an earlier date.61 Some at least of these may have embodied in prose the topics of lost songs; and no contemporary clerical commentator recognised that the duke could also introduce ironical reflections on essentially serious problems such as the celibacy of the clergy with the sexual consequences of this doctrine for relations between laity and clergy.62 Like the rest of the first troubadour’s lyrics, ‘Pos de chantar’ was composed for oral performance, and intended to be heard by (or relayed to) ‘all my friends’ (‘Toz mes amics’) as well as ‘Jesus Our Lord’ or ‘God’ (lines 23, 30, 35). Even if the music of his song has virtually all vanished, the great value attached to this necessary type of ‘accompaniment’ for oral performance can be seen from comments in other lyrics – that a newly composed song must not be ‘bawled’ or shouted by the performer,63 and, in another case, that this music, too, is ‘good’.

60

61 62

63

Ed. Jeanroy, no. V; for Bec, who discusses the extensive bibliography, . . . ‘c’est une pièce narrative, une espèce de fabliau, une histoire salace dont Guillaume est censé être le héros’, Lo gat ros (two versions), 187–201. For references, see Martindale, ‘ “Cavalaria et orgueill” ’, 89–90. Namely the implications of a lady’s choice between a cleric or layman as lover. Cf. also the anecdotes asserting that the duke’s shield bore his mistress’s image, and that he founded an abbaca pellicum at Niort, Martindale, ‘ “Cavaleria et orgeuil” ’, ibid. Chansons VIII, line 30 (‘dice man que chan e [no] bram’), VII lines 37–42.

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The authors of both these texts were laymen; each of them wielded great political power during the late eleventh, and early decades of the twelfth centuries. For historians that is their principal general significance, even though that may be difficult to recognise unless the ‘Fragmentum’ and the vernacular ‘Pos de Chantar’ are placed in the setting of ecclesiastical biography and autobiography which were briefly discussed above. At a superficial level, also, intertextual references justify the comparisons made between them: for instance each refers to the Capetian king (although he is unnamed in Duke William’s song) and the lyric twice calls on a Count Fulk of Anjou, whereas the ‘Fragment’s author was, of course, ‘Count Fulk the Angevin’. On the other hand, the equally obvious contrasts between Count Fulk’s incomplete text (a Latin prose narrative, although composed in the first person) and Duke William’s lyric (in Occitan verse, although equally expressed in the first person) have surely prevented valuable historical comparisons being made. For, in spite of the fundamental differences of medium, there is a remarkable overlap of vocabulary which does not seem to have attracted much attention. To give only two examples: the term ‘honor’/‘onor’ seems to have been central to each man’s concept and definition of power: then as a term of ethical value and praise both authors mentioned their own or their ancestors’ ‘probitas’ (or its Romance/Occitan derivative ‘proeza’) and used the adjective ‘probus’ or ‘proz’. Modern translations unfortunately often obscure the interest and importance of the lexicon employed by these powerful laymen, but more extensive investigations are desirable. Most remarkable is the place that both autobiographical fragment and Occitan lyric occupy in the medieval ‘transition from orality to literacy’, and the relationship between the auctoritas attributed to Latin historiography and ‘romancing the past’.64 In their idiosyncratic ways both these texts show that it is necessary to consider whether, as has been supposed, laymen were barred from direct access to the past by illiteracy or ignorance of Latin. More positively these texts make it essential to return to questions relating to the education of the laity in the later eleventh century and, specifically, to pay more attention to the attitudes and subjectivity displayed by Duke William and Count Fulk in these autobiographical works. These re-assessments may help to expand rather than limit historians’ understanding of medieval biography; and it is hoped that these preliminary comments will provide a suitable offering for the distinguished editor of medieval texts and medieval biographer to whom this volume is dedicated.

64

W. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London and New York 1982, 115; Gabrielle Spiegel, Romancing the Past: the Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth Century France, Berkeley 1995, 3; P. Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Woodbridge 1999, 16–42 (auctoritas, especially 31–2).

10 Reading the Signs: Bernard of Clairvaux and his Miracles CHRISTOPHER HOLDSWORTH

M

UCH OF the first Life about Bernard of Clairvaux concerns miraculous events which many contemporaries held demonstrated him to be a man of exceptional gifts, a man of God. Modern scholars, with few exceptions, have dismissed the miracles as without significance. My purpose is to suggest that read carefully they throw considerable light upon Bernard’s development and the impact he had upon his world. Through them we come to understand him better. This theme seemed appropriate since Frank Barlow, the scholar honoured in this volume, wrote about two men who, like Bernard, were held to be saints in the twelfth century, that curious king, Edward the Confessor, and that stubborn and strange archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket. That few scholars have taken Bernard’s miracles seriously emerges from the many volumes which appeared following the celebration of the nine-hundredth anniversary of his birth in 1991. Only one, Vie et légendes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux, contains three pieces involving his miracles, of which only one has them as a central theme.1 There Boglioni, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Montréal, and Picard, a Cistercian monk at Notre-Dame-du-Lac in Quebec, built upon Picard’s dissertation, prepared under Boglioni’s supervision and published in 1991.2 Common report holds that when earlier Picard confessed in a Cistercian session at Kalamazoo that he was working upon Bernard’s miracles, the reaction was stupefied hilarity. Be that as it may, by one of those curious coincidences my own first article on the miracles appeared the year before his own book: neither of us was then aware what the other was doing,

1

2

Pierre Boglioni and André Picard, ‘Miracles et thaumaturgie dans la vie de Bernard de Clairvaux’, in Vie et légendes de saint Bernard de Clairvaux, ed. Patrick Arabeyre, Jacques Berlioz and Philippe Poirier, Cîteaux, Commentarii Cistercienses, Textes et Documents 5, 1993, 36–59. See also JeanFrançois Holthof, ‘Avant-propos’, pp. v–xii; A. M. Piazzoni, ‘Le premier biographe de saint Bernard, Guillaume de Saint-Thierry. La première partie de la Vita Prima comme œuvre théologique et spirituelle’, 3–18. La thaumaturgie de Bernard de Clairvaux d’après les Vitæ, Abbaye Notre-Dame-du-Lac 1991.

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nor that a German scholar, Michaela Diers, was devoting a considerable section of her dissertation, presented to Freiburg University, to these miracles.3 The general dismissal of Bernard’s miracles reflects the influence of two scholars: Dom Jean Leclercq and Adriaan Bredero. The former, the greatest Bernardine scholar of the twentieth century, held that the earliest Life of Bernard, the so-called Vita Prima, and especially its first book by William of SaintThierry, told us more about William than Bernard.4 The latter, who has worked upon a new edition of the Vita Prima for much of his life, and now, sadly, seems unlikely to finish it, dismissed the miraculous elements of that Life as being built upon hagiographical commonplaces, commune hagiographicum.5 Although the influence of that tradition cannot be denied, many details in the Vita Prima suggest to me that the writers based their miracles upon real events. We may also recognise that while Leclercq and Bredero were reacting against the uncritical reading of saints’ lives typical of the era before their births, now there is a need to look again at Bernard’s signs, with eyes opened by the work of scholars like Peter Brown and Clare Stancliffe dealing with similar material from an earlier period.6 The Vita Prima is a complex work by three authors written over about ten years, from 1145, eight years before Bernard died, until 1155–56, three years at most after his death.7 The author of the first book, Bernard’s close friend William of Saint-Thierry, had known Bernard since about 1119. Then he was a Benedictine monk, but when he began to write had been a Cistercian at Signy for about a decade. Another Benedictine monk, Ernaud of Bonneval, a monastery in the diocese of Chartres, wrote the second book, and may well have been selected because he knew two of the people who had been close to Bernard in the 1130s, Geoffrey bishop of Chartres (the subject of another chapter in this volume), and Theobald count of Blois. Most of the Vita, its last three books, fell to another Geoffrey, Geoffrey of Auxerre, monk at Bernard’s own monastery, Clairvaux, who had become the abbot’s secretary and companion soon after he left the schools in Paris in 1140. William was older than Bernard, and started to write as he realised that he would die first. Death in 1148 cut short his broadly chronological account when

3

4 5

6 7

Christopher Holdsworth, ‘Saint Bernard: What Kind of Saint?’ in Monastic Studies, i, ed. Judith Loades, Bangor 1990, 86–101; Michaela Diers, Bernhard von Clairvaux: Elitäre Frömmigkeit und begnadetes Wirken, Münster 1991, 270–310. I am grateful to Burcht Pranger for drawing this to my attention. Jean Leclercq, Nouveau visage de Bernard de Clairvaux, Paris 1976, 11–34, and Bernard de Clairvaux, Paris 1989, 9–13 and elsewhere. Bredero’s first considerable study of the Vita Prima is Adriaan Bredero, Etudes sur la ‘Vita Prima’ de saint Bernard, Rome 1960, 73, 104, 142–4, 151. His latest book is Bernard of Clairvaux: Between Cult and History, Edinburgh 1996; a translation of the Dutch version, Bernard de Clairvaux: tussen cultus en historie, Kampen 1993, 30, 61–2, 80, 82. His essay ‘La Vie et la Vita Prima’ in Bernard de Clairvaux: Histoire, Mentalités, Spiritualité, ed. Dominique Bertrand and Guy Lobrichon, Sources Chrétiennes 380, Paris 1992, 53–83, is concise and clear. The Vita Prima is in PL clxxxv, cols. 225–335: henceforth cited as VP with book, chapter, paragraph, column. Peter Brown, The Cult of Saints, London 1981; Clare Stancliffe, St Martin and his Hagiographers, Oxford 1983. The chronology is not yet altogether clear: Bredero, Etudes, 22, for the terminus ad quem. The next two paragraphs broadly follow his Bernard of Clairvaux, 90–140.

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he had scarcely reached the 1130s.8 There is no definite evidence that Bernard was aware that William was writing, parallel to that we have for Anselm and Eadmer, but since his own secretary, Geoffrey, provided notes that William used, it is hard to imagine him being unaware. Geoffrey indeed, seems to have initiated the Life’s writing.9 While William concentrated upon Bernard at Clairvaux, Ernaud wrote largely about Bernard on the roads of Europe during the Anacletan Schism. Geoffrey, divided his work not as they had done chronologically but thematically: first various aspects of his behaviour and teaching, then his many mighty works, and lastly his death.10 He also drew upon three other sources, the first and last wholly written by him, the second partly so.11 The Vita Prima, therefore, was largely written while Bernard was alive, and its first draft completed soon after his death. Parts took shape almost contemporaneously with the events recorded, though each author looked back to events which preceded the periods when they had known Bernard. William, most obviously, started with Bernard’s conception, nearly thirty years earlier.12 Now a new question faces us: how large is the miraculous element in the Vita Prima? Here we meet a methodological problem, namely what should be included in this category. William appears, at first reading, to suggest one answer when he called one of Bernard’s healings ‘the first sign which Christ made famous in the world by the hand of his servant’, while the Fragmenta, on which he drew here, called it the most famous, best-known miracle.13 We need to summarise the episode to understand these descriptions. The sick man, Josbert, viscount of la Ferté-sur-Aube, held by some to have been a relative of Bernard’s, lived about five kilometres south of Clairvaux to which he had made significant gifts.14 Suddenly he became paralysed, unable to speak or understand. His relatives, troubled that he might die without being confessed, and so be damned, sent messengers asking Bernard to come. When he arrived, after admonishing the family to see that Josbert returned the property

8

9

10 11

12 13

14

Piazzoni, ‘Le premier biographe’, 4, n. 8, deduces from the panegyric closing his work that William had always intended to stop at that point. Ferrucio Gastaldelli, ‘Le più antiche testimonianze biografiche su san Bernardo’, Analecta Cisterciensia 45, 1989, 28, 52, dating three miraculous events: VP, I.xiv.67, col. 264: I.xiv.68, col. 264. For these notes, see, R. Léchat, ‘Les fragments de Vita et Miraculis S. Bernardi par Geoffroy d’Auxerre’, Analecta Bollandiana 50, 1932, 83–122. Gastaldelli, ‘Le più antiche’, 7–11, 21–32, argues that Geoffrey may not have written the first five paragraphs of notes, and, more cautiously, that Rainald, former abbot of Foigny, did. He suggests that Geoffrey first intended his notes for Rainald’s use, although evidence is lacking that Rainald ever wrote about Bernard apart from the paragraphs mentioned. Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux, 26–7, is convinced by these hypotheses. VP, pref. to Book III, col. 302. For the first two see PL clxxxv, cols. 410–16, and for the third, A. H. Bredero, ‘Un brouillon du XIIe siècle: L’autographe de Geoffroy d’Auxerre’, Scriptorium 13, 1959, 27–60. See also Bredero, Bernard of Clairvaux, 25–6. Piazzoni, ‘Le premier biographe’, 5–6. ‘Primum ergo signum hoc fuit, quod in manu servi sui mundo celebre christus effecit . . .’, VP, I.ix.43, col. 252; cf. ‘Fragmenta’, no. 19, 99–100. For the VP’s vocabulary for miracles, see Picard and Boglioni, ‘Miracles et thaumaturgie’, 49. Constance Brittain Bouchard, Sword, Miter and Cloister: Nobility and the Church in Burgundy, 980–1189, Ithaca and London 1987, 119, 204–6, with map, 237–8 (her scepticism about the relationship).

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which he had stolen from the church (a significant accusation of his major patron), he restored his ability to speak and understand, after which Josbert prepared himself for death. It is easy to see why William described these events as the first sign making Bernard famous; they involved a powerful noble in his own home, whereas other earlier extraordinary happenings, most of them waking visions or dreams, occurred to Bernard, or members of his family, most often at Clairvaux.15 These did not cause a great noise in the ‘world’, for they involved a small, intimate group around Bernard, on his home ground. But should the description of Josbert’s ‘healing’ mean only healings should count as miracles? Bernard’s own practice in his Life of the Irish bishop Malachy, who died at Clairvaux in 1148, suggests otherwise. There he distinguished six types of miracles performed by Malachy: prophecy, revelation (by which one may deduce from the examples provided he meant openings received in waking or sleeping dreams), revenge on the ungodly, healing, changing of minds and raising the dead.16 We may, therefore, legitimately include all these categories among Bernard’s own miracles. How large a part do they play in the Vita Prima? Picard and Boglioni enumerated 315 miraculous events in the Vita Prima.17 This is much higher than my number, probably because I counted as one episodes which might involve two or more kinds of miracle, for example, foreknowledge in a vision or dream that someone would be healed and the healing itself.18 They divided their events into four categories; (listed here in descending order of magnitude): healings 209: supernatural knowledge (i.e. prophecies and visions), 67: marvels (i.e. powers over nature) 22: and victories over Satan (mainly exorcisms), 17. This all suggests the scale and variety of the signs we are trying to read. There is scarcely a column of the Vita Prima without its miracle, some of them told briefly, others, particularly in Ernald’s book, covering many columns. The scale of Bernard’s miracles emerges by comparing them with those done by listing five saints, all of them, bar the first, known to Bernard. Eadmer, Vita Anselmi: 28 events: of which nature miracles (e.g. calming the sea), 12: healings 7. Walter Daniel, Vita Ailredi: 18 events: 5 revelations, 3 healings, 1 nature. Anonymous, Book of Gilbert of Sempringham: 20 events: mostly healings, 1 nature.

15

16

17 18

See earlier visions: VP, I.ii.4, col. 229; I.iii.16, col. 236; I.v.26, col. 242; I.vi.29, col. 244; I.vii.34, col. 247: prophecies: I.iii.11, col. 233: nature: I.iii.14, col. 235: gift of skill, I.iv.24, col. 240: arrival of money: I.vi.27, col. 242: healing: I.vi.27, col. 242. Vita sancti Malachiae, XXIX. 66, S. Bernardi Opera [hence SBO], iii, ed. J. Leclercq and H. M. Rochais, Rome 1963, 370: for an English translation see The Life and Death of Saint Malachy the Irishman, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Cistercian Fathers 10, Kalamazoo 1978, 84. Cf. Diers, Bernhard, 286–92, on Malachy’s miracles, and 281–86, on Bernard’s attitude to miracles; Gastaldelli, ‘Le più antiche’, 78–9. Picard and Boglioni, ‘Miracles et thaumaturgie’, 59; Gastaldelli, ‘Le più antiche’, 78–9. Holdsworth, ‘St Bernard’, noted 176 episodes, 89, 98. For composite accounts, e.g., VP, I.xii.58, col. 258, a vision in which Bernard himself receives healing, and IV.viii.46, col. 347, Bernard heals a woman after a dream in which he foresaw himself doing this.

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Anonymous, Vita Norberti: 20 events, of which 7 visions, 6 exorcisms and 5 peace makings. Bernard, Vita Malachiae: over 50 events, of which 23 healings, 12 prophecies.19 These summaries demonstrate Bernard credited with far more miraculous acts than anyone else, though if posthumous acts were added the situation would look different. Bernard’s friends would have explained that he did few such by the fact that at his funeral the abbot of Cîteaux, horrified by the crush in the church at Clairvaux, forbade him to do any more.20 But why was he so active in life? The answer seems to be connected with his travels, not only within geographical France, but in Italy and the Empire, which he undertook first to end the Anacletan Schism, and later to preach the Crusade or to weaken heretics. Only Anselm was on the road so much, and the paucity of his signs may reflect the fact that he traveled mainly on his own business and did not have, perhaps, to prove his character, nor the justice of his cause. Now let us turn back to the miraculous element in the Vita Prima itself and attempt to find some other ways of reading it. My hope is to provide some new understandings about, first, its function, and, second, Bernard’s own reaction to his own signs. We may start by recognising that the authors of the Vita Prima were committed to the view that Bernard was a holy man, a man of God. In this they are not alone. John of Salisbury, writing in 1164, eleven years after Bernard’s death, put the point somewhat sceptically in his Historia Pontificalis; ‘he was a man mighty in deed and word with God, so some would believe, and with men as we all know.’21 Earlier, in 1148, while Bernard was alive, Gerhoch of Reichersberg, a German Augustinian canon, excepted Bernard, and him alone, from his attack on fraudulent miracle-doers, praising him for both his thundering sermons and many sparkling miracles.22 Around the same time, Abelard’s pupil, Berengar, was, on the other hand, being sarcastic when he addressed Bernard when defending his teacher as ‘You man of God who makes miracles . . .’.23 As for Bernard himself we have seen that he expected a holy life would be accompanied by such

19

20

21 22

23

See the following: The Life of Saint Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury by Eadmer, ed. R. W. Southern, OMT 1962; The Life of Ailred of Rievaulx by Walter Daniel, ed. F. M. Powicke, London 1950; The Book of Saint Gilbert, ed. Raymonde Foreville and Gillian Keir, OMT 1987; Vita Norberti, ed. R. Wilmans, MGH, SS, xii, Stuttgart and New York, repr. edn 1963, 663–706 (using the Vita ‘A’); for Malachy, see n. 16 above. Exordium Magnum, II, 20, cited by Brian P. McGuire, The Difficult Saint: Bernard of Clairvaux and his Tradition, Cistercian Studies, 129, Kalamazoo 1991, 36. The most easily accessible edition is VP, VII.xxviii.59, col. 448. John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, NMT 1956, 20. ‘[I]n deed and word’ echoes Acts 7. 22. For contemporary opinions about Bernard’s miracles, Diers, Bernhard, 297–310. ‘Praedicantibus contonantibus et miraculis nonnullis coruscantibus’. In Ps. XXXIX, MGH, Libelli de Lite Imperatorum et Pontificium, 3 vols., ed. E. Bernheim et al., Berlin 1892–97, iii, 436. See Diers, Bernhard, 297–99 for disputes about what Gerhoch meant. R. M. Thomson, ‘The Satirical Works of Berengar of Poitiers: an Edition with Introduction’, Mediaeval Studies 42, 1980, 89–138, at 112. Cf. Diers, Bernhard, 309: ‘Die Erwähnung von Wundern Bernhards ist im polemischen Kontext der Schrift unverkennbar ironisch.’

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acts as he noted for Malachy, although we may observe that he then explained he had recorded them just because holy men were rare in his day.24 Authors in general, and of saints’ lives in particular, as well as the possible saints themselves, expected a holy life would be marked by wondrous signs. Next we observe that sometimes the writers of the Vita Prima seem to tell their stories cautiously. This comes out at least three times as William dealt with revelations experienced by Bernard early in his life and abbacy. Then he used phrases like ‘it seemed to him that he saw.’25 This is interesting since one must suppose that the ultimate source for such stories was Bernard himself. Elsewhere all three authors discriminated between whether the event occurred when Bernard was asleep or in a waking dream.26 These characteristics give rise to three observations. In the first place they suggest that the authors were trying to distance themselves from the evidence; to make clear they were not sure just what Bernard had ‘seen’. This attitude clearly lasted at Clairvaux, since we find in the huge Exordium Magnum put together almost fifty years after the Vita Prima, its author defended Bernard against the accusation that he had talked too freely to the monks about his revelations.27 Even so, secondly, these visions and dreams did serve a significant purpose in Bernard’s life. We all, I suspect, sometimes express our moments of insight or clarity with phrases like ‘I suddenly saw’ the truth of such and such. So giving us the pictures which the young Bernard visualised, William of Saint-Thierry, again, enables us to realise that they may have been one way in which Bernard became more aware of the difficulties which his monks faced as they listened to him preaching, or confessed to him, and having realised that, to have gone on to take corrective action: to simplify his style, or deal more gently with their needs as penitents.28 Visions, because of their supposed supernatural origin, also enabled Bernard to change his mind without losing face about the desirability of Clairvaux moving to a less cramped site, something which his monks had urged upon him, and which he had resisted.29 This aspect of the Vita Prima appears to me to be part of a wider issue, which, when I first recognised it over a decade ago, then hit me almost an unexpected revelation, and to which I will return later.30 Third, the Vita Prima reveals sceptics within Bernard’s closest circle throughout his life. William of Saint-Thierry, for example, in his account of the temporary reprieve for Josbert, mentions that both Bernard’s uncle Gaudry and his eldest brother Guy were disturbed at Bernard’s confident assertion that he could achieve it. William says that it was Bernard’s youth and short experience as a

24 25 26 27 28 29 30

‘Verum nunc maxime id requirit raritas sanctitatis, et nostra plane aetas inops virorum.’ Pref. to Vita Malachiae, SBO, III, 307: trans. 11. E.g. VP, I.iii.9, col. 231: I.xii.57, col. 258: I.xiii.58, col. 258. E.g. VP, I.ii.4, col. 229: II.i.3, col. 270: IV.11.11, cols. 327–8. McGuire, Difficult Saint, 170–1. VP, I.vi.29, col. 244. VP, I.vii.34, col. 247: his unwillingness, II.v.29–30, cols. 284–85. See Holdsworth, ‘Saint Bernard’, 90–1.

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monk which made them doubt.31 A little later, we may also note, when Gaudry had a fever, and asked Bernard for healing, he was forced to eat humble pie, when his nephew reminded him of his earlier doubts.32 This is one of the rare occasions suggesting that Bernard had a sense of humour. Now it may be that the existence of doubting Thomases around Bernard early in his career, could have been ‘created’ by the recollection that there were doubters in Jesus’s circle (Mark 6:1–4, cf. Matt 13:54–8, Lk 4:22–4). That possibility cannot be discounted, since it is clear that the writers often had the pattern of Jesus’s life in mind. William in his preface explained that he had only written about the exterior part of Bernard’s life, and chose to elucidate that with a phrase taken from the First Epistle of John referring to Christ, ‘that which we have seen and heard, and handled with our hands’.33 Yet the accounts of doubters at Clairvaux seem very concrete, and their existence could actually have served to increase Bernard’s self-confidence when events which they had doubted occurred. The signs confirmed his sense that God was with him. At the other end of his life there is an episode betraying caution, a certain scepticism, about Bernard’s behaviour in South-West France in 1145.34 Then he promised a crowd of sick people at Sarlat that they would be healed if they ate bread blessed by him, and that their healing would demonstrate that what he preached to them was true, and what the heretics taught was false. There is something reminiscent of Elijah’s contest with the priests of Baal in all this (3 Kings, 18:21–40), though Geoffrey does not mention the parallel. Instead he has Geoffrey of Chartres, witness to some of the most extraordinary events in Bernard’s life, attempt to modify Bernard’s assertion by adding that the sick would only be healed if they eat the blessed bread in good faith si bona fide sumpserint, sanabuntur. Bernard, typically perhaps, rejected the qualification, reiterating his original claim: ‘but truly those who taste will be healed, so that they will know that we are true and truthful messengers of God’. After this, we are told, a multitude of sick was indeed healed. How, we must ask, could Bernard have gained such confidence? The answer, I believe, is from those extraordinary events just mentioned, a series of exorcisms, mainly, but not exclusively, performed in Italy in 1135, and reported by Ernaud of Bonneval. With them we move into more dramatic terrain where just what occurred is probably largely beyond our understanding. But we can, I suggest, recognise that Ernald selected them to show that Innocent II’s side was God’s side, and Bernard his most important helper. Most of these exorcisms occurred when Bernard went to Milan for Innocent, along with Geoffrey of Chartres and the Cluniac cardinal Matthew of Albano, to persuade the city to accept terms already agreed by its ambassadors in Pisa, terms designed to end 31

32 33

34

VP, I.ix.433, col. 252. The miracle’s date is not quite clear: Elphège Vacandard, Vie de Saint Bernard abbé de Clairvaux, 4th edn, Paris 1920, i, 174–5 and note, suggests before the consecration of Foigny, i.e. Nov. 1124: Gastaldelli, ‘Le più antiche’, 44, has 1125. VP, I.x.46, col. 253–4. I John 1:1. The preface needs further study; it is rich in reminiscences, including one ultimately derived from Sulpicius Severus in his Life of Martin: see Christopher Holdsworth, ‘Sanctity and Secularity in Bernard of Clairvaux’, Archief voor Kerkgechiednis 75, 1995, 151–3. VP, III.vi.18, cols. 313–14. Cf. Diers, Bernhard, 296, n. 296, who also draws attention to this passage.

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Milan’s support for Innocent’s rival, Anacletus, since the Schism began in 1131.35 This visit is one for which we have, exceptionally, an independent account from the Milanese chronicler Landulf, writing close to events.36 He records that Bernard found two remarkable preparations: the Milanese dressed like penitents in rags, with shorn hair, while gold and silver objects had been removed from the churches because their visitor was known to dislike them. He then provides a series of ‘signs’ which occurred: water changed into wine, devils put to flight, cripples walking and the sick healed, which together moved the citizens so much towards love ‘for the Emperor Lothar and towards obedience to Pope Innocent’ that all Bernard’s directions were complied with. This is a powerful sketch of the corporate allegiances of the people being shifted through what Brown has called rituals of abasement accompanied by tokens of the new order to which they were submitting.37 Landulf does not describe these tokens; for them we have to turn to Ernaud of Bonneval. He recounts six exorcisms in the city, four of women, and two of children, one of whom was a boy.38 The proceedings are packed with drama, especially two female exorcisms effected during the celebration of mass by Bernard in Ambrose’s great basilica. They reach a triumphant conclusion when the consecrated elements, in chalice and paten, were placed on the women’s heads. Much recalls Peter Brown’s reflections upon the ‘heavy judicial overtones of the process of excommunication at a shrine’ or of how the ‘visible authority behind the human agent of exorcism could be seen pitted against the power of demons.’ Exorcism too, he explained, was a kind of public penance and forgiveness which aimed at the ‘reintegration’ of the individual into the community.39 The relevance of these aspects of the rite to the political and ecclesiastical situation created in Milan since the Schism hardly needs emphasis. Now, although the reconciliation occurs at least twice in Ambrose’s church, that holy man plays no apparent part in events, although his shrine must have been obvious to everyone. Instead a living man wielding the power of the Sacrament, rather like a form of trial by ordeal within the Mass, becomes himself a kind of walking shrine. All sorts of questions could arise out of this account: now I shall address one. How high was exorcism in the scale of miracles? It seems that it was still high, just as it had been in Jesus’s time. If that is correct it is easy to understand that Bernard’s exorcisms could have redounded to his credit, and that they would also have strengthened his self-confidence, a theme to which I shall return. A further point emerges from the fact that among the Vitae examined only Norbert’s has a significant number of exorcisms, six, almost a third of his twenty or so miracles.

35

36 37 38 39

For Milan’s situation, Piero Zerbi, ‘I Rapporti di S. Bernardo de Chiaravalle con ii vescovi e le diocesi d’ Italia’, in his Tra Milano e Cluny, Italia Sacra, Studi e Documenti 28, Rome 1978, 3–109. See also Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany 1056–1273, Oxford 1988, 46–7. Diers does not comment on these events. Landulfo de S. Paulo, Historia Mediolanensis, ed. I. Bethmann and P. Jaffé, MGH SS, xx, 46–7. Brown, Cult of Saints, 98–9. VP, II.ii–iv.8–24, cols. 273–83. Brown, Cult of Saints, 108–9, 110.

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One involved a young girl possessed by the devil who delayed the exorcism by making her repeat the whole of the Song of Songs, and then translate it into French, followed by German. Norbert finally expelled the devil, rather in Bernard’s manner, by placing the Gospels on her head, and holding the consecrated elements above her.40 These acts may well have served to show critics that both the monk abbot and the canon had God on their side when they were out in the world, rather than in their own communities, where they were supposed to have withdrawn.41 Yet devils occurred on their home grounds: Bernard twice fought the devil at Clairvaux, and Norbert once at Prémontré.42 Now let us examine the Life for Bernard’s opinions about his own miracles. As already noted, Bernard thought that he lived in an age when there were fewer holy men than there had been in the past.43 The logical corollary of such a belief, we may think, would be that miracles would be scarcer than they had been and makes evidence of his opinion about his own numerous signs even more interesting. Here four passages in the Vita Prima, and one from his treatise De consideratione, call for attention, although the subject could well fill a whole paper. We may start with his views about the contribution made by the faith of his audience to his healing. At Milan, according to Ernaud, he explicitly connected his miracles to the faith of the people there: So much faith of the people is unknown in our days, and so much power in a man; between whom there was a religious contest, as the abbot credited the glory of the signs to their belief, while they ascribed it to the true holiness of the abbot, and they undoubtedly felt about him, that whatever he asked of the Lord, he would obtain.44

But at Sarlat, a decade later, as we have seen, he was so confident that the blessed bread would heal that he appears to have thought that the recipients’ faith was unnecessary.45 The healing itself would demonstrate the truth of his preaching. Perhaps his different assessments arose because whereas Bernard may have felt that the faith of the Milanese could contribute to what occurred, since they were being reconciled with Rome, at Sarlat, where the people had still to be convinced that his preaching was true, their faith could be of no avail. The sign there, if it occurred, was to be the means through which they could achieve true faith. Another twist to the connections between preaching and miracles is revealed in the account of another healing at an unknown place in France.46 Then Bernard asked God for a miracle just as the news of the disastrous outcome of the Second

40 41 42 43 44 45 46

MGH SS, xii, repr. edn, 680. Probably half of Norbert’s exorcisms precede his election as archbishop of Magdeburg. VP, II.1.7, col. 272, and I.x.49, col. 255: Vita Norberti, 692–3. See n. 24 above. VP, II.ii.10, col. 274. See n. 34 above. VP, III.iv.10, col. 309.

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Crusade was spreading, probably in late 1149 or early 1150. Here his hope seems to have been that a miracle would convince the people that his preaching of the Gospel had been divinely inspired, and having prayed he proceeded to heal a blind boy. Did he single out a blind person in the crowd because the restoration of sight might stand as a preliminary parable for the acceptance by the people standing round of the truth of what he had preached? The episode certainly reflects something else, that his confidence had been severely weakened by the Crusade’s collapse. Interestingly enough, Geoffrey of Auxerre preceded this miracle with a quotation from Bernard’s De consideratione (a treatise unwritten at the time of the healing) in which Bernard reflected upon his own role as the greatest enthusiast for the Crusade. There he claimed that it meant nothing to him to be attacked by detractors and blasphemers, since his conscience was clear.47 But, equally striking, Geoffrey omitted an earlier passage in which Bernard imagines those who heard his preaching asking him, ‘How do we know that the words have come from God? What signs do you perform, that we may trust you?’48 After the last sign comes a passage, unique I believe, in which Bernard reflected upon his own miracles at some length.49 Geoffrey inserted it at the end of his account of the campaign against heresy in Toulouse, and has Bernard thinking aloud about what has occurred before some of his own monks. This passage has rarely been discussed, so I make no apology for citing it at some length: I ask myself with deep astonishment what these miracles mean, and why God has found it good to do such things through such hands. I think I have never read in the pages of holy Scripture about this type of signs. In truth, signs have sometimes been done by holy and perfect men [per sanctos homines et perfectos], and sometimes also by impostors [et facta sunt per fictos]. I know that I am not perfect, not an impostor [Ego mihi non perfectionis conscius sum, nec fictionis]. I know that I do not possess the merits of saints who were lit up by miracles, and am confident that I do not belong to that class of men who do many great things in the name of the Lord, ‘and yet are not known by him’.50

Geoffrey then adds that Bernard later commented on his signs when he realised that his death was approaching: Miracles of this sort take place, I am not unaware, not to exalt the holiness of one man, but for the salvation of many. God is concerned in the man through whom He does such things, not so much with his perfection, but with the opinion which people have of him, and in this way he recommends to people the

47 48

49 50

De consideratione, II.4. (SBO, iii, 413): Five Books on Consideration, trans. John D. Anderson and Elizabeth T. Kennan, Cistercian Fathers 37, Kalamazoo 1976, 51. De consideratione, II.3: ‘Unde scimus quod a Domino sermo egressus sit? Quae signa tu facis, ut credamus tibi?’ (SBO, iii, 412–14): cf. trans., 50. I follow here M. B. Pranger, The Artificiality of Christianity. Essays on the Poetics of Monasticism, Stanford 2003, 54. VP, III.vii.20, cols. 314–15. Cf. Matthew 7:22–3. The splendid play on perfectos and per fictos is typical of Bernard: cf. C. Stephen Jaeger, The Envy of Angels: Cathedral Schools and Social Ideas in Medieval Europe 950–1200, Philadelphia 1994, 276.

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powers that we believe him to possess. Those marvels, indeed, are made not for those through whom they are done, but rather for those who see them or hear tell of them. These things, then, the Lord works not with the aim of proving that those whom he uses to achieve them are more holy than other people, but to inspire others to more love and zeal for holiness. Nothing, therefore, belongs to me in the miracles I do; they are, I know, the result of the fame that I enjoy, more than my actual life, and they happen not to commend me, but to warn others.51

There is much in these two passages to ponder. Firstly we may note Bernard’s almost humorous denial of being either a saint or an impostor. Second, his view that the miracles occurred to help others, rather than to magnify his own attainments. This reads interestingly when set against the fact that evidence of miracles was precisely what was being required by popes as they began to exert tighter control over the process of the public recognition of holiness.52 A third point, his recognition that his miracles were in some degree the result of his fame, is not perhaps so far from one understanding which is emerging within this paper. We, I suggest, may identify a reciprocal relationship between Bernard’s successes in the world, as well as in the narrower monastic world, with his miracles. Success, as a founder of many monasteries, or as a protagonist for Innocent II, won him fame which could increase both the confidence with which the sick sought his help, and his own confidence in responding to their plight. From the other end of the relationship, so to say, his healings, prophecies and visions, strengthened his ability to attract potential monks and patrons, as well as the authority he could assume, and be acknowledged to possess, when he tried to make peace between competing forces within Milan, or Reims, or Metz.53 Here again, the comparison with Norbert is illuminating: he too was a successful negotiator between warring factions as well as a founder of communities. Geoffrey of Auxerre, on the other hand, took Bernard’s reflections upon the deeds he wrought as yet another sign of his saintly character, of his humility and discretion, and hence of his very sanctity. We, perhaps, often being agnostic about the existence of a divine force and about what holiness may consist of, may take these same reflections as signs of the kind of human Bernard had become towards the end of his extraordinary life. Lastly, I want to suggest another way of reading these very signs, occurring to me as I thought about the differences between the Vita Prima and Eadmer’s Life of Anselm. In the latter Anselm’s character is largely created by the conversations between archbishop and his monk friends which Eadmer presents.54 The Vita

51 52

53 54

VP, III.vii.20, col. 315. Picard, La thaumaturgie, 144, cites only part of this passage. He and Boglioni, ‘Miracles et thaumaturgie’, 50, cite it again, without much discussion. See A. H. Bredero, ‘The Canonisation of Bernard of Clairvaux’, in Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. Studies Commemorating the Eighth Century of his Canonization, ed. M. Basil Pennington, Cistercian Studies 28, Kalamazoo 1977, 77–9. For Milan see above, pp. 167–69: Reims, VP, I.xiv.67, col. 264: Metz, V.i.3–6, cols. 352–5. See R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and his Biographer: A study of Monastic Life and Thought 1059– c. 1130, Cambridge 1963, 320–36, esp. 332–3; Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape, Cambridge 1990, 422–8.

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Prima lacks such talk, with the exception of the long passage I have just mentioned, and there we only get one side of the conversation. But what I suddenly saw was that in the Vita Prima Bernard’s miracles played a role not dissimilar to Anselm’s conversations: they showed sides of him which his other works do not betray so clearly, namely his growth and change over the years. He began as a hard abbot, whom his monks found hard to accept, but in time he became more effective, more sympathetic to where his monks actually were in life, until in his later years he could reflect upon himself in a fairly cool way. All these developments, I would suggest, are hinted at in the Vita Prima through miraculous happenings. Two authors of the Vita Prima, William and Geoffrey, show the changes, the development of the man most clearly, though I know that Bredero would disagree. In 1996 he wrote, that those who promoted Bernard’s claim to be a saint portrayed him as ‘an absolute saint’ from the moment of his birth, and that this ‘precluded any essential development in his sainthood’.55 I have become convinced otherwise, and have been heartened by the views of the two Italian scholars, on whom I have often depended, Piazzoni and Gastaldelli. The first has argued powerfully that William made no bones about showing some of Bernard’s faults.56 The second that Geoffrey often did the same, and that elsewhere in his sermons he had developed a theology to support his practice, making a distinction between the holiness of those alive, whose holiness was in some sense incomplete, and those in heaven whose holiness was now safe (Est sanctus qui sanctificatur adhuc, et est sanctus sanctificatus).57 Gastaldelli had no hesitation in placing Bernard within the former category, and I am happy to follow him. Finally, I hope that the case for a new reading of Bernard’s signs that helps us to find out more about why they are emphasised in his Life, and to discover a more real, and certainly more sympathetic, person, is beginning to seem more convincing.

55 56 57

Bernard of Clairvaux, 58. Piazzoni, ‘Le premier biographe’, 16–17. Gastaldelli, ‘Le più antiche’, 79, citing sermon Ad abbates, from F. Gastaldelli, ‘Quattro sermoni “ad abbates” di Goffredo d’Auxerre’, in Cîteaux 34, 1983, 186–91; cf. from the same sermon, ‘Nimirum est sanctus qui sanctificatur adhuc in proposito et est sanctitas iam in tuto, sicut virtus alia quidem in stadio, alia iam in triumpho.’

11 Arnulf’s Mentor: Geoffrey of Lèves, Bishop of Chartres LINDY GRANT

I

N 1939, Professor Frank Barlow produced the first of his distinguished biographies of great figures of the central Middle Ages. As a biography as such it is short, for it constitutes part of the introduction to his edition of the letters of Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux.1 Like Professor Barlow’s later biographies, it sets its protagonist in a broad cultural context, as well as establishing his career in church and government. As the young Arnulf spent formative years as a clerk in the household of Geoffrey of Lèves, bishop of Chartres, this chapter sets out to expand on Professor Barlow’s perceptive comments as to what, in the making of Arnulf, that might have meant, by looking at Geoffrey’s world, and Geoffrey’s cultural context. But with Geoffrey, we confront the central theme of this volume, the problems and limitations of medieval biography, since rarely has someone of such contemporary prominence been so elusive to historians. Geoffrey was bishop of Chartres from 1116, in succession to the formidable St Ivo, until his death in 1149. These were turbulent years in the northern French church, as ecclesiastical reform and political power struggles became inextricably mixed. From the mid 1120s to the mid 1130s, the Capetian kingdom hovered on the verge of civil war. Most modern accounts of this period mention Geoffrey only in passing; but if one starts with the Morigny Chronicle and Abelard’s account of his calamities, and then reads Suger, or the letters of Bernard and Peter the Venerable, in the light of them, it is clear that Geoffrey was the leader of the moderate reformers in the French church, and that he was the most politically adept, and thus politically prominent of his many colourful contemporaries, both within and without the northern French church.2 He was the great conciliator of his time. Where there was discord, Geoffrey brought peace. He 1 2

The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, ed. Frank Barlow, London 1939, Camden 3rd ser. 61, pp. xi–lx. I have dealt more fully with this aspect of Geoffrey’s career in L. Grant, ‘Geoffrey of Lèves, Bishop of Chartres: “famous wheeler and dealer in secular business” ’, in Suger en question: Regards croisés sur Saint-Denis, ed. R. Grosse, Munich 2004, 45–56. See especially the comments of Abelard, ‘Historia Calamitatum’, PL clxxviii, cols. 148–50, or in The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, trans. and ed. B. Radice, rev. M. T. Clanchy, Penguin Classics, London 2003, 22, and La Chronique de Morigny (1095–1152), ed. L. Mirot, 2nd edn, Paris 1912, 39, 68, 70.

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twice rescued Abelard from the ire of the extreme reformists, though he could not protect him from Heloise’s uncle Fulbert; it was Geoffrey who reconciled the apparently irreconcilable chancellor Stephen de Garlande with the bishop of Paris, Stephen of Senlis, and the king with both. The Morigny Chronicle describes Geoffrey as the famous disposer and arranger of secular business.3 It is tribute to Geoffrey’s political stature that Louis VII left the governance of Aquitaine, and the care of its young duchess, to him in 1137, when Louis had to rush back to Paris to secure the kingdom on his father’s unexpected death.4 One might ask why, given this political prominence, it was Suger, and not Geoffrey who was chosen as regent when Louis went on Crusade ten years later. I think the answer is quite simply age and failing health. Geoffrey was probably five or ten years older than Suger. Suger made no call on his support during the regency, and in early 1149 Geoffrey died. Geoffrey’s career and stature as the leading churchman of Capetian France in the early twelfth century was doubtless the main reason why Arnulf, who came from a family steeped in both ecclesiastical politics and ducal administration,5 was attracted to Geoffrey’s household, though I do not think it was the only one. When he himself became a bishop, Arnulf boasted that he built around himself a chapter and a household that was more distinguished and cultured than any other within the province of Normandy.6 In fact, Arnulf was far outclassed in this by Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen. Nevertheless, Arnulf quite consciously tried to establish Lisieux as a major centre of proper reformed ecclesiastical practice, learning and enlightened artistic patronage around a cultured, learned, intensely lettered bishop who saw himself as providing reformist intellectual leadership for the Norman, let alone the lexovinian church.7 In this, I think, Arnulf’s model was Geoffrey of Lèves, of whose entourage Arnulf was a member. As with much else, Geoffrey’s intellectual milieu proves more elusive to the modern biographer or historian than it did to Arnulf and other contemporaries. The Morigny Chronicle describes Geoffrey as renowned for his refinement, his ‘elegancia’.8 He was the dedicatee of Geoffrey Grossus’s Life of St Bernard of Tiron, and Arnulf’s own Invective against Gerard of Angoulême, and the subject of a lost biography by his friend, Abbot Ernaud of Bonneval, who was also one of the authors of the Vita Prima of St Bernard.9 But Geoffrey wrote nothing

3 4 5 6

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Chron. Morigny, 70. Chron. Morigny, 68. Arnulf Letters, pp. xi–xiii, and M. Arnoux, Des clercs au service de la Reforme. Etudes et documents sur les chanoines reguliers de la province de Rouen, Bibliotheca Victorina, Turnhout 2000, 44–5. Arnulf Letters, no. 133, 201: ‘quecumque vacabant in ecclesia . . . accitis ab omni parte viris litteratis et honestis, ecclesiam meam tot personis venerabilis illustravi, ut nulla sit in provinicia tota, que possit earum meritis adequari.’ Arnulf Letters, esp. pp. xxii–xxiv, xxxiii–xxxix. For Rotrou of Warwick, archbishop of Rouen, see L. Grant, Architecture and Society in Normandy, c.1120–1270, New Haven and London 2005, esp. 28–9, 93–5 and 232–3. Chron. Morigny, 68. Geoffrey Grossus, ‘Vita Beati Bernardi’, PL clxxii, cols. 1367–1446, col. 1367 for the dedication; Arnulf, ‘Invectiva in Girardum Engolismensem episcopum’, ed. J. Dieterich, MGH Libelli de Lite, vol. III, 1897, 81–108, p. 85 for the dedication; for the lost life by Ernaud of Bonneval, see Duchesne’s notes to Abelard, ‘Historia Calamitatum’, PL clxxviii, col. 148, n. 42.

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surviving himself. Even when scholars of intellectual history and art history were fascinated by the school of Chartres and the famous sculptures of personifications and exemplars of the liberal arts on the west portals of Chartres cathedral, none cast a glance at the bishop under whose aegis these manifestations of integrated cultural renaissance were thought to occur (plate 1). Since Southern’s interventions, it is generally agreed that by the time the west front of Chartres was rebuilt after the fire of 1134, and for some decades before, the school of Chartres was fundamentally a cathedral school for the training of cathedral and diocesan clergy; and that the famous masters of the new theology, the new texts and the new techniques of disputation, who attracted the most ambitious students, might have held prebends at Chartres, as at other cathedrals, but did their teaching in the schools of Paris. With the myth of the school of Chartres exploded, over the last thirty years or so, scholars have concentrated on Paris to immense effect. The Paris schools and Parisian intellectual culture in the early twelfth century are now almost familiar, while Geoffrey’s Chartres languishes in obscurity.10 And not just Geoffrey’s Chartres. Chartres belongs in a cultural context sometimes called Ligerian. The Ligerian monastic centres, and the cities of Angers and Tours, were undoubtedly important,11 but this cultural miasma spreads across Maine to the borders of Brittany and of southern Normandy. The dioceses of Sées and Avranches are both sometimes and to some extent implicated.12 Le Mans, which attracted two of the greatest intellectuals of their day, the writer and exegete, Hildebert of Lavardin, and the theologian, Guy of Etampes, as successive bishops, played, I think, a more prominent role than it is usually given credit for. Both the deeds of the bishops of Le Mans, and the remaining fabric of the city, suggest a remarkably sophisticated appreciation of how one might draw on, redeploy, and make play with, a classical heritage, both literary and lapidary, to recreate a new Rome.13

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For the question of the schools of Chartres and Paris, see R. W. Southern, ‘The Schools of Paris and the School of Chartres’, in Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century, ed. R. L. Benson and G. Constable, Oxford 1982, 113–37; M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: A Medieval Life, Oxford 1997, 68–80, and indeed, Abelard’s own comments in ‘Historia Calamitatum’, in Letters of Abelard and Heloise, 3–4. For Paris as an intellectual centre, see also R.-H. Bautier, ‘Paris au Temps d’Abelard’, in Abelard en son Temps, ed. J. Jolivet, Paris 1981, 21–77; B. Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, paperback edn, Notre Dame IN 1964, esp. 44–82; S. Ferruolo, The Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and their Critics, 1100–1215, Stanford 1985. See F. Gasparri, L’écriture des actes de Louis VI, Louis VII et Philippe Auguste, Paris 1973, 14, and J. Chartrou, L’Anjou de 1109 à 1151, Paris 1928, 214–22. See the brief but suggestive comments in Arnoux, Clercs, 54. See Actus pontificum Cenomannis in urbe degentium, ed. G. Busson and A. Ledru, Archives Historiques de Maine II, Le Mans 1901, 397–422 and 422–42 for the lives of Hildevert of Lavardin and Guy of Etampes, esp. pp. 424–5 on Guy’s intellectual background and qualities. For literary classicism, PL clxxi, cols. 9–1447 for Hildevert’s letters and poems. See also various passages in the Actus Cenomannis, esp. p. 455 on beauty and fading images at the beginning of the Life of Bishop William de Passavant. For astoundingly classical building at Le Mans, see the nave of the cathedral rebuilt between 1134 and 1158. See also the accounts of the previous late eleventh-century cathedral in Actus Cenomannis, esp. p. 393, and of the buildings of William de Passavent, esp. pp. 465–6, with their emphasis on pulchritudinis, and the mention of a palace ‘painted with images you would have thought alive’, an Ovidian topos, and a house designed as a square within a circle. For further

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Plate 2. Abbey of Josaphat, fragments Photograph courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art Plate 1. Chartres cathedral, west front, south portal, showing the liberal arts Photograph courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

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I have called this a cultural miasma. It is far harder to grasp than the defined careerist vocational theology and canon law of the Paris schools, by whose masters some of its proponents were doubtless dismissed as mere ornamental latinists. The Latin of Geoffrey’s friends Baudry of Bourgeuil, and above all Hildebert of Lavardin, and of Geoffrey of Vendôme, who fought off Geoffrey’s attempts to impose episcopal authority on his abbey, is undoubtedly ornamental.14 Though not everyone within this cultural nexus wrote elegant Latin. The Life of St Bernard of Tiron, dedicated to Geoffrey of Lèves, and written in the 1130s by Geoffrey Grossus, a monk of Tiron, who had perhaps had connections with Chartres, is so gracelessly plodding that one suspects that the author’s nickname reflects his Latin rather than his figure. The eremetic monastic reformers of the western forests, of whom Bernard of Tiron was one, however bad their Latin, and however suspect their theology and unorthodox their church practice might have seemed to some, are an integral part of this literary and theological culture.15 It is a culture far more diffuse, richer and more varied than that of the Paris schools, and there is a risk that one is only able to define it as not Parisian scholasticism. Geographically too it is that which lies between Normandy, Paris and almost the Loire itself. It is centred on margins. Abelard felt he soon outgrew what the Loire had to offer, but he was not the only Breton who was enticed by it as a prelude to his studies in the Paris schools; Guy of Etampes was another.16 Abbot Suger went there for what he regarded as his intellectual formation.17 And Arnulf, too, careerist that he was, gravitated to the household of Geoffrey of Lèves at Chartres. Arnulf’s most distinguished fellow protégés in Geoffrey’s entourage were Samson Mauvoisin, dean of Chartres and later archbishop of Reims, and Geoffrey’s nephew Goslen, who succeeded him as bishop of Chartres.18 Both men were effective ecclesiastical politicians, as Arnulf doubtless felt himself to be, rather than theologians. Arnulf would have absorbed from the Chartres episcopal entourage a strong sense of the central importance and the weighty responsibility of the bishop, under the ultimate authority of the pope, for the proper running of the church, and indeed what we would call society. It was not that other northern French bishops disagreed, but as an intellectual position it was articulated with particular clarity, by both Ivo and Geoffrey, not least in the

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discussion of the description of buildings in the Actus Cenomannis, see L. Grant, ‘Naming of Parts: Describing Architecture in the High Middle Ages’, in Architecture and Language: Constructing Identity in European Architecture, c.100– c.1650, ed. G. Clarke and P. Crossley, Cambridge 2000, 46–57, esp. 54–6. For Baudry, PL clxvi, esp. cols. 1182–1208 for his epitaphs and eulogies, classicising in both form and content. For Geoffrey of Vendôme, PL clvii, cols. 33–290, and the discussion of his writings cols. 11–28; and see P. D. Johnson, Prayer, Patronage and Power: The Abbey of La Trinité, Vendôme, 1032–1187, New York 1981, 121–2. For eremetic monastic reform in general see H. Leyser, Hermits and the New Monasticism: A Study of Religious Communities in Western Europe, 1000–1150, London 1984. For Abelard on the Loire, see ‘Historia Calamitatum’, in Letters of Abelard and Heloise, pp. xvi and 3. For Guy, see the account of his career in Actus Cenomannis, 424–5. L. Grant, Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France, London 1998, 81–3. For Samson, see Gallia Christiana, ed. P. Piolin et al., 16 vols., Paris 1715–1865, viii, col. 1199, and ix, cols. 84–5; for Goslen, ix, cols. 1141–1156.

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preambles to their acta. It was also particularly appropriate at Chartres, for both bishop and bishopric were invested with a widely accepted if indefinable special prestige, and royal authority was usually conveniently distant.19 One of Arnulf’s own acts for the protection of churches possessed by the cathedral of Chartres in the diocese of Lisieux opens with a resounding statement of the responsibilities of episcopal office: ‘Episcopalis officii ratio postulat jura et possessionis ecclesiam que infra terminos commisse nobis a deo potestatis constitute sunt diligenti patrinocinio confovere et ab ipsis omnem arcere molestiam et injuriam removere.’20 Clearly Arnulf had been an apt pupil; but presumably one of his tasks as Geoffrey’s clerk was the framing of episcopal acta. It is usually suggested that Arnulf spent the 1120s at Chartres with Geoffrey. By 1133 he had gone to Italy, presumably Bologna, for, as Arnulf put it, ‘his long-desired study of Roman Law’.21 Soon thereafter, he met Ralph of Diceto, when Ralph was studying in Paris, and it is generally assumed that Arnulf too was a student in Paris at the time.22 Our evidence for the fact that Arnulf had joined Geoffrey’s staff, and that he was in Italy in 1133, comes from the dedication of his invective against Bishop Gerard of Angoulême, in which he describes himself as currently Geoffrey’s humble and devoted clerk, combining that with his prebend as archdeacon of Sées.23 I am increasingly convinced that Arnulf, after preparatory schooling at Sées, had already undertaken his major studies at Paris before he became Geoffrey’s clerk. Indeed, the whole point of a Paris education was to turn him into the perfect amanuensis to just such a bishop as Geoffrey. Arnulf’s invective against Gerard of Angoulême is an unattractively vicious piece of polemic, but the focussed, tight, tricky rhetoric seems redolent of what we know of Parisian disputation; though the elegance and resonance of his Latin – so very unlike that of Geoffrey Grossus – suggests that he had also profited from reading someone like Hildebert. One might guess, indeed, that Arnulf developed his long-held desire to study Roman Law while working for Geoffrey. Ivo’s two great summas of canon law must have made the episcopal household at Chartres very aware of such matters. Since Arnulf describes himself as at present Geoffrey’s clerk, it is possible that Geoffrey sent him to Italy for appropriate further training, and supported him there. Geoffrey himself had made several visits to Rome, including one long visit in the late 1120s to resolve the various crises in the Capetian church.24 Perhaps he took Arnulf with him. The Morigny Chronicle notes that Popes Calixtus, Honorius, and Innocent had always held Geoffrey as a friend and confidant – ‘semper amicum et familiarem’.25 Geoffrey could easily have arranged for his young

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Geoffrey’s perception of the role of the bishop is more fully discussed in Grant, ‘Geoffrey of Lèves’, 49–50. Cartulaire de Notre-Dame de Chartres, ed. Eugène de Lepinois and Lucien Merlet, 3 vols., Chartres 1865, i, 149–50, no. li. See also the discussion by Barlow in Arnulf Letters, p. xxxiii. Arnulf, ‘Invectiva’, 85. Arnulf Letters, p. xvii. Arnulf, ‘Invectiva’, 85. RHF, xv, 330–1. Chron. Morigny, 68.

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clerk and protégé to study canon law, probably in Bologna, and perhaps through contacts of his old friend, Honorius II, who had himself been a canon lawyer there. Because of his closeness to the reformist post-Investiture papacy, Geoffrey played a pivotal role in the decision of the French church to accept Innocent II in 1130 and, in the obverse, the campaign to discredit the anti-pope Anacletus.26 He was sent, along with St Bernard, to convert the obdurate Milanese; and as papal legate to Aquitaine he had to counter the powerful and pervasive influence of Gerard of Angoulême, who gave unwavering support, in a most inconveniently old-fashioned way, to the pope who had been canonically elected. Geoffrey was required to ceremonially smash and reconsecrate all altars consecrated by Gerard during his long incumbency.27 The great letter against Anacletus sent by the Carthusians via a Cistercian abbot to the Council of Reims in 1130 was addressed to Geoffrey, and he it was who read this long diatribe to the assembled clergy.28 Perhaps Arnulf wrote his own notoriously vicious invective against Gerard and Anacletus at Geoffrey’s behest – he was after all Geoffrey’s clerk. Certainly, Arnulf writes that had he been present, he would have thrown himself into working alongside Geoffrey as his faithful minister in the business of his legation.29 Arnulf would also have found himself the faithful minister to a prelate who made a fundamental contribution to the success of the early stages of the reform of monastic and canonical life. Geoffrey’s foundation of L’Aumône was, in 1121, the second Cistercian house in northern France. It was founded from Cîteaux, whose abbot, Stephen Harding, was Geoffrey’s friend.30 Geoffrey was also close to the western monastic reformers, Robert d’Arbrissel and Bernard of Tiron. Before he became bishop, as a prepositor of the cathedral, Geoffrey had overseen the transfer of key properties to ensure the establishment of Tiron.31 The lives of both monastic reformers speak of Geoffrey with gratitude and respect; and, as we have seen, Geoffrey Grossus’s life of Bernard of Tiron is dedicated to Geoffrey, and was written at Geoffrey’s bequest.32 Both reformers had benefited from Geoffrey’s support, but Geoffrey owed his successful assumption of the bishopric to them, for Count Theobald had disputed Geoffrey’s election, and it was Robert and Bernard who persuaded him to a wiser course.33 In his support for the idea that canons should live a communal life under a rule based on a letter of St Augustine, Geoffrey followed his distinguished predecessor, St Ivo, who had given the concept institutional shape and regularity, certainly as far as northern Europe was concerned. Both Ivo and Geoffrey successfully

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See the discussion in Grant, ‘Geoffrey of Lèves’, 52–3. Chron. Morigny, 74–5. Chron. Morigny, 61. Arnulf, ‘Invectiva’, 85. Gallia Christiana, viii, instr. cols. 419–20, no. 7. Grossus, ‘Vita Bernardi’, col. 1413. Grossus, ‘Vita Bernardi’, col. 1370. Andrew of Fontevraud, ‘Vita Altera Beati Roberti de Arbrissello’, PL clxii, cols. 1064–5; letters of Pope Paschal II in Cartulaire de Notre Dame de Chartres, i, 124–5, no. 36, 125–6, no. 37. See also Grant, ‘Geoffrey of Lèves’, 47–8.

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transformed colleges of secular canons or old Benedictine monasteries into houses of Augustinian canons. Both Ivo and Geoffrey tried unsuccessfully to impose regular communal living on the chapter at Chartres. Arnulf, and indeed his predecessor, his uncle John, tried to impose it on the chapter at Lisieux, which proved equally recalcitrant.34 In 1127 or 1128 Bishop Stephen of Paris, the most intransigently reformist of Geoffrey’s episcopal colleagues, tried to force the chapter of Notre Dame in Paris to adopt the customs of the new Augustinian house of St Victor on the outskirts of the city. This was not just unsuccessful; it contributed materially to the collapse of stability in Capetian church and state, and was one of the many disputes that Geoffrey went to Rome to resolve.35 The one success was the reform of the cathedral chapter of Sées, with the institution of the customs of St Victor, and the introduction of several canons from the Parisian house, by Bishop John, who was Arnulf’s brother, with the committed support of Henry I, in 1131.36 Geoffrey of Lèves had been present four years previously in 1126 at the consecration of the new cathedral church at Sées,37 which was after all a neighbouring see, and it is tempting to see the imposition of Victorine rule at Sées as reflecting Geoffrey’s influence. The consecration doubtless provided a setting conducive to discussions among like-minded churchmen; it was perhaps the moment at which Geoffrey recruited young Arnulf to his household. But why did Bishop John turn to St Victor, which was only one of many possible variants of canonial rule? Given the importance of Chartres for the development of the regular canonial movement, and Geoffrey’s close connections with Arnulf and his brother, we might have expected one of the Chartrain houses to have served as a model, as happened elsewhere in Normandy, for instance at St Gilles at Pont Audemer, or at Corneville.38 Geoffrey knew the abbey of St Victor well, as he knew everyone who mattered in the north French church, and he is among the many reformist prelates remembered in the St Victor obituary.39 But as far as I can see, he himself imposed and encouraged Chartrain rather than Victorine canonial rules. Arnulf himself says, in a letter written three decades later, that Bishop John chose canons from St Victor on the authority of Geoffrey’s close friend, Pope Honorius II: this is indeed the official line taken in the acts of both Bishop John and Henry I confirming the new arrangement.40 Honorius himself had been a regular canon, of the house of S. Maria in Reno in Bologna, though that still in itself does not explain the choice of St Victor. It may seem of small moment that Bishop John introduced canons and a rule from St Victor as opposed to any of the other possibilities. But it established a

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For Ivo’s attempt, see Arnoux, Clercs, 52; for Geoffrey, Arnulf and John, see Robert of Torigny, ‘Chronica’, in Howlett, Chronicles, iv, 149, and Arnulf Letters, p. xviii. Grant, Abbot Suger, 132–4. See the discussion in Arnoux, Clercs, 39–53. Orderic, vi, 366–7. Arnoux, Clercs, 52. A. Molinier, Obituaires de la Province de Sens, 4 vols., Paris 1902–23, i, 538. Arnulf Letters, 56: this is a letter to Pope Alexander III emphasising papal involvement in the see, Arnoux, Clercs, 48–9.

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link and a pattern for other Norman houses of regular canons. Victorines were soon established at Eu and Cherbourg, and by 1160 a distinguished Victorine scholar, Achard, was bishop of Avranches. Arnulf himself was little less than entranced by St Victor. In the end it was where he retired, died and was buried. I wonder whether it was Arnulf himself who chose the Victorines for Sées, though he judged it politic to take cover behind Honorius. If that were so, it would buttress my case that Arnulf had already studied in the Paris schools in the 1120s before becoming Geoffrey’s clerk. If his time as Geoffrey’s clerk served to confirm Arnulf in his attitudes to church reform, and the responsibilities of the bishop, it must have confirmed too that a bishop who hoped to present himself and his entourage as a beacon of culture and refinement should not neglect the lapidary arts. Geoffrey inherited a cathedral that had been rebuilt on a vast scale in the eleventh century by the revered Bishop Fulbert, and was widely regarded as one the greatest buildings north of the Alps. Since his cathedral offered no scope for rebuilding, and his predecessor had just finished a splendid new stone episcopal palace, Geoffrey turned his attention to the foundation and construction of the family abbey of Josaphat. Charters show Geoffrey retaining simultaneously in the 1120s four or five master masons and carpenters, men of sufficient status to act as witnesses.41 The fragmentary remains show it to have been a richly decorated example of local architectural traditions (plate 2). However passionately supportive Geoffrey was of the new eremetic monasticism, when it came to his own family mausoleum, he favoured Benedictine prayers and richly sculpted stones. All his family, clerical and lay, male and female, were buried, not just in the church but in the choir. Perhaps to give propriety to this slightly out-dated licence to laity, Geoffrey established two levels of donor to the abbey, those whose gifts were accepted and recorded in charters in the chapter house, and those, of either sex, who, after this ceremony in the chapter house, were ‘given the benefit of the society of the brothers’, after which they would proceed into the church itself, where their gift, and their charter would be accepted at the high altar.42 Then in 1134, Fulbert’s great cathedral was damaged by fire,43 and it fell to Geoffrey, probably working closely with his dean, Samson Mauvoisin, to undertake the rebuilding. Parts of his works to the huge crypt remain, and most famously the west front, with its exquisite west portals, and some glass from its windows (plate 3). These survived the next fire in 1194, only because they were separated from the main interior of the nave by a massive western block with upper chapels, of which one can see traces on the interior. This western block, with its richly painted windows and column-figured portals, is in conception and execution very similar to Abbot

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Cartulaire de Notre-Dame de Josaphat, ed. C. Metais, 2 vols., Chartres, Société Archéologique d’Eure et Loir, 1812, 3, no. II for Geoffrey’s foundation act of 1119: no. IX, 19–20 is a pancarte of 1123 signed by Hubert, Rainer, William and Durand, cementarii, who sign two of the included acta, and by Achard cementarius and Ralph and Vital faberi, who sign once; no. X, 20–23, act of 1123, signed in the chapter house at Josaphat by ‘Hubertus et Martinus et Guillelmus et Garinus Durandi, lapidicini ecclesie’. Cart. Josaphat, pancarte of 1123, no. IX, 15–20, esp. 18–19. Orderic, vi, 438–41.

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Plate 4. Lisieux cathedral, narthex, looking east into the nave Photograph courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art Plate 3. Chartres cathedral, west front Photograph courtesy of the Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art

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Suger’s narthex at Saint Denis. Suger’s western block was finished by 1140, though we do not know when it was begun; and it is usually assumed that Geoffrey at Chartres was following the lead of his friend and colleague at Saint Denis, though that is by no means certain. What is certain is that another example of this type of resplendent twin-towered western block with figured portals and upper chapels was also built at the cathedral of Reims, by Samson Mauvoisin when he became archbishop there in the 1140s.44 The Frenchness of the cathedral church at Lisieux that Arnulf rebuilt in the 1160s and 70s is well known. There is no evidence of masons working in a Chartrain idiom – Arnulf appears to have engaged an architect and masons from the Lower Oise. But one aspect of Arnulf’s cathedral does quote Geoffrey’s cathedral at Chartres, and his old colleague Samson Mauvoisin’s cathedral at Reims, for Arnulf too provided his cathedral with a substantial western narthex, probably with upper chapels (plate 4). Archbishop Rotrou of Rouen clearly found it striking, for he built a similar and even more lavish new western narthex at Rouen, for which he begged, borrowed or stole Arnulf’s specialist portal sculptors.45 If Arnulf returned from his study of Roman law in Italy with new skills to continue as Geoffrey’s ‘faithful minister’ and clerk, he would have been in Chartres to watch, perhaps even to suggest themes for, the great new work. Arnulf, like his mentor, would have appreciated its emphasis on the place of the liberal arts in the scheme of the universe, because the overriding message of the new west front is the universality of the undivided catholic church at the Second Coming of Christ: few themes could have been closer to the hearts of Arnulf and his mentor as they led the attack on the schismatic anti-pope and Gerard of Angoulême, his ‘instrument in Gaul’.46 I started working on this paper thinking of Geoffrey as Arnulf’s mentor, that is to say as someone who had an overwhelming influence on a young clerk who was effectively pursuing his studies at Chartres during his formative years. As I wrote it, I found my views of their relationship changing. I think that Arnulf had already undergone his formative education in Paris, perhaps in the mid 1120s, before being taken on as a clerk, a ‘faithful minister’, as Arnulf puts it, probably in the late 1120s. Geoffrey would have found the slightly pushy young man, with his modern education, his ability to write tracts or letters and his closeness to the Victorines, an invaluable asset, and seems to have been prepared to send his clerk for further studies in Roman Law in Italy. Arnulf gained immeasurably from working so closely with the leading churchman in northern France, a man with strong contacts with the reformist papacy, and with the leaders, particularly the first-generation leaders, of monastic reform, though Arnulf’s own connections

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See discussion in Grant, Abbot Suger, 271–2. For Samson’s building at Reims, see P. Kurmann, La façade de la cathédrale de Reims, Lausanne, CNRS, 1987, 42–3. As far as the dates of the west front at Chartres are concerned, we know that they post-date the 1134 fire, and that works were well under way in 1144, when both Robert of Torigny and Hugh of Amiens, the archbishop of Rouen, mention the cart cult there, see W. Sauerlander, Gothic Sculpture in France 1140–1270, London 1972, 383. See Grant, Architecture and Society, 85–9 for a discussion of the building of Lisieux cathedral nave, and 91–3 for discussion of the Lisieux and Rouen portals. Arnulf, ‘Invectiva’, 85.

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were naturally with the reformers of his own generation, with Clairvaux rather than Cîteaux. Looking at Geoffrey’s cultural milieu and background fills out Arnulf’s. But it also points up the difficulty of defining it, and the differences between the milieu of the north-west, and milieu of the Parisis. By and large, in spite of his stint in Geoffrey’s household, Arnulf responds to, and had perhaps already been formed in, the latter. And it points up too the problems of medieval biography: Arnulf wrote so much, and through those writings we feel we know him; Geoffrey wrote nothing that has survived. Perhaps, unlike Arnulf, he never felt the need to justify himself. Refined, able, bringer of concord, his very qualities condemn him to the role of a sort of historians’ Macavity, while we are left to apprehend the usual suspects, Arnulf, Suger, Abelard, Peter the Venerable, Robert of Arbrissel, and not least, the subject of another chapter in this volume, St Bernard.

12 The Empress Matilda as a Subject for Biography1 MARJORIE CHIBNALL

S

HE WAS UNIQUE among the women of her own age: she was both a woman and the crowned head of a western kingdom who ruled in her own right.’2 ‘Bernard Reilly’s description of Queen Urraca of Léon-Castilla, a slightly older contemporary of the Empress Matilda, brings out the limitations on the power of early medieval queens consort, such as Queen Emma, Queen Edith or the wives of William I and Henry I (both Matilda). The great exception was Eleanor of Aquitaine, queen first of France and then of England, but she was in addition heiress of Aquitaine. Among the formal and official sources for any western ruler, male or female, at that time the most plentiful belong to the years when power was exercised, either as ruler of the kingdom or duchy, or as regent. A number of queens were regents for young sons or absent husbands; but even so the number of acta issued in their name was relatively small. The authority of the Empress Matilda varied greatly during her lifetime. Betrothed at the age of eight to the Emperor Henry V and married just before her twelfth birthday, she never had any estates of her own, apart from her dower lands, and these have yielded only a handful of charters of donation to religious houses.3 As daughter of the king of England and consort of the Emperor, she sometimes appeared to witness or confirm their charters.4 During the years of her struggle with Stephen for the English throne she issued charters and writs in her own name, either as her father’s lawful heir or as ‘Lady of the English’. Though the justice of her claim was never confirmed by coronation, her authority was accepted and her writs ran in parts of the kingdom and her claim was strong enough for her charters to be preserved. She had little interest as countess of Anjou in the affairs of her second husband’s county; but after the succession of her son Henry she ‘

1 2 3 4

I am grateful to the participants in the conference and especially to Professor Edmund King for their helpful comments. Bernard F. Reilly, The Kingdom of Léon-Castilla under Queen Urraca 1109–1126, Princeton 1982, 353. S. Muller and A. C. Bouman, eds., Oorkonden van het sticht Utrecht tot 1301, 5 vols., Utrecht 1920–59, i, 302, 318. For example Regesta ii, 919; G. Meyer von Knonau, Jahrbücher des deutschen Reiches unter Heinrich IV und Heinrich V, Leipzig 1890–1909, vi, 340–1; vii, 142–3.

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sometimes acted as his regent in Normandy. All this gives some importance to the wording of her charters, which were issued in differently organised chanceries or writing offices during her chequered career. Even so, such records would have been very much more abundant for a male ruler. Chronicles, even when numerous, were slanted in the interests of the writers. Among the contemporaries of the Empress, the author of the Gesta Stephani changed sides during the civil war, and Henry of Huntingdon frequently revised his history.5 Good new modern editions have helped to clarify the dates at which key passages were written; but even the best editions can only rarely provide sufficiently fine dating to show the day-to-day movements of individual during times of great crisis, such as the month of December 1135, immediately after Henry I’s death. So the biographer has to look for supplementary material, or venture into controlled speculation to attempt to understand the movements, let alone the character and ability, of the protagonists. The supplementary material includes dedications, inscriptions and epitaphs, all with their limitations, and less material exists for early twelfth-century queens than for those in the later middle ages. There are no portraits and few personal letters. Something can be made of any artefacts that survive, and even of buildings, though these are full of traps for the unwary. The watchword is always Caveat lector. Matilda’s changing status as the wife of the Emperor in Germany and north Italy, and as a claimant (only partially accepted) of the English throne, influenced the way she was treated by different chroniclers. Her title was derived from her first husband. The seal which she used all her life carried the inscription ‘Regina Romanorum’ – ‘queen of the Romans’; it was the equivalent of the title ‘Rex Romanorum’ sometimes used by her husband, the Emperor.6 There may have been some doubts about the validity of her imperial coronation in Rome, since the pope had fled the city and only a legate, who was later excommunicated for claiming the papal title, was available to crown her. There was, however, no doubt that her husband had been crowned by Pope Pascal II (acting under duress), and at that date his coronation could confer an equal status on his wife. The title ‘Matildis imperatrix’, which she adopted in all her charters after at least 1126 (though she did not change her seal) was a proud reminder of her personal status when, after her second marriage, the alternative would have been to call herself countess of Anjou.7 Her queenship was derived from the years she spent helping her first husband in the arduous task of ruling a loose conglomeration of states in Germany and north Italy. The German court was probably the most formal and magnificent in western Europe in the early years of the twelfth century. It was there that Matilda learned the status and duties of a queen that she remembered all her life. Protocol, respected in Germany if rarely put to the test elsewhere, gave the king/emperor precedence over any other ruler. So to Matilda it

5 6 7

Gesta Stephani, pp. xx–xxi; Huntingdon, pp. lxvi–lxxvii. M. Chibnall, The Empress Matilda, Oxford 1996, 70. M. Chibnall, ‘The Charters of the Empress Matilda’, in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy, ed. George Garnett and John Hudson, Cambridge 1994, 276–98, at 277–9. Subsequent reference: ‘Charters of the Empress’.

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was natural that, even as a widow, she should not rise to greet her uncle, King David of Scotland, though others might attribute it to pride.8 The different approaches of the chroniclers to the Empress were determined not simply by her changing status, but also by their somewhat stereotyped views of a woman’s proper sphere of authority. Her right to rule her household, including her military household, and to administer her estates, however extensive, was generally accepted.9 When she acted as regent while her son and heir was a minor or her husband a captive her active participation in public business (within limits) was not resented. But those who went too far and acted ‘in a masculine way’ were loudly condemned by their opponents. During a disputed election in Flanders, when the countess Richilde of Hainault was trying to secure the succession of her adult son Arnold against Robert the Frisian, she was said to have acted ‘with womanly cruelty, in a way not customary for a woman’, and was alleged to have been ‘sly and quarrelsome, carried away by female rage’.10 Her crime was simply to have tried to exercise direct power, which was regarded as a man’s affair.11 This was far from being a new attitude. Indeed the Roman historian Polybius wrote in similar terms of the conduct of the masterful Illyrian queen, Teuta, when she was ruling directly at a time of disputed succession. Polybius alleged that, when one of the Roman ambassadors sent to negotiate with her lost his temper and made a disparaging remark that reached her ears, she acted ‘with womanish passion and unreasoning anger’ and arranged for the insolent envoy to be murdered on his homeward journey.12 So it is difficult to take entirely at their face value the disparaging terms used by the author of the Gesta Stephani to describe Matilda’s hostile reception by the Londoners when she approached the city hoping for coronation.13 To the writer she was bad tempered and haughty, and was acting in a masculine way. Certainly she was a proud woman, who expected to be shown the respect due to an empress. Perhaps she even remembered her rapturous reception by the city of Canossa, when she entered it with her husband in 1116 and was welcomed as the new young Matilda who might take the place of the old Countess Matilda.14 This raises the question of how much a hostile chronicler’s description should be taken literally, any more than the praise of the German chroniclers who found

8 9

10

11

12 13 14

Empress Matilda, 25–6; Gesta Stephani, 120–1. Shulamith Shahar, The Fourth Estate: A History of Women in the Middle Ages, London and New York 1983, passim; M. Chibnall, ‘Women in Orderic Vitalis’, HSJ 2, 1990, 105–21; reprinted idem, Piety, Power and History in Medieval England and Normandy, Ashgate 2000, ch. V. Subsequent reference Piety, Power and History. Lambert of Ardres, Historia comitum Ghisnensium, ed. John Heller, MGH SS xxiv, Hanover 1879, ch. 51 (p. 586), cited by Georges Duby, ‘Women and Power’, in Cultures of Power, ed. Thomas N. Bisson, Philadelphia 1995, 69–83, at 73–5. The position was very different for a woman acting as regent for a young son; see St Bernard’s letter to Queen Melisende of Jerusalem after the death of her husband Fulk, urging her to ‘show the man in the woman’ (J. Leclercq, C. H. Talbot and H. M. Rochais, S. Bernardi Opera, 8 vols. in 9, Rome 1957–77) viii, 297–8 (ep. 354). John Wilkes, The Illyrians, Oxford 1992, 159–60. Gesta Stephani, 120–3. MGH SS xii, 409, De adventu imperatoris et regina.

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‘the good Matilda’ beautiful and pious.15 Any attempt to understand her needs to take account of her actions and the events of her remarkable life, as far as they can be ascertained. The inconsistencies in the sources can be countered partly by the critical use of materials from earlier or later periods. These can make it possible to appreciate what may have been said in unreported discussions. One technique has been frequently used by historians of all kinds, not merely biographers. As Paul Hyams commented, ‘Maitland’s instinct, when confronted by absences, was to fill them with patterns borrowed from better documented moments of a later period.’16 The question of female succession was of crucial importance in Matilda’s life, and the chroniclers who described the attempts of her father to arrange for a satisfactory succession once she was left as his sole surviving legitimate child give only fragmentary and inadequate accounts of meetings when the question must have been discussed. Even when the words used have been recorded, the assumptions behind them are among the commonest challenges to any historian’s powers of interpretation. The second quarter of the twelfth century was a time when exact rules of succession in England had not been formulated; to add to the uncertainties of the late Anglo-Saxon period, the Norman conquest had brought an added complication by linking England to the duchy of Normandy. Neither William Rufus nor Henry I was the eldest son of the Conqueror, and their rights in Normandy, complicated by the French king’s claim to fealty, were precarious during Robert Curthose’s lifetime. What mattered was the practical ability to seize power and secure formal recognition with coronation and unction. Whatever the rights and wrongs, a king once crowned and anointed could be dislodged only with great difficulty and the approval of the Church. This was to be amply illustrated during Stephen’s reign. There were, however, no precedents to indicate the exact rights of a female heir to succeed. Further questions were the age at which a minor could hope to succeed, and the possibility of joint rule. In neighbouring countries the rights of minors were usually favoured, though Matilda’s son Henry, who was not quite three years old, was exceptionally young. Joint rule by a father and son was acceptable in both France and Scotland, and minors as young as eight were able to inherit.17 Neither country had to face the question of a female heir for many years, and then they took different decisions. By the end of the thirteenth century the child Margaret, the ‘maid of Norway’, was accepted as a rightful heir to the Scots throne; but she grew up in Bergen and died before reaching Scotland and being inaugurated as queen.18 Later France explicitly excluded women from the succession.19 In England the

15 16 17 18 19

Epkonis de Repkan, Breve Chronicon Magdeburgense in Scriptores Rerum Germanicorum, ed. I. B. Menckenius, iii, Leipzig 1730, col. 356. Paul Hyams, ‘Maitland and the Rest of Us’ in The History of English Law. Centenary Essays on ‘Pollock and Maitland’, ed. John Hudson, Oxford 1996, 215–41, at 215. The Charters of King David I, ed. G. W. S. Barrow, Woodbridge 1999, 5–8; ‘David of Scotland’, in idem, Scotland and its Neighbours in the Middle Ages, London and Rio Grande 1992, ch. iii, 51. G. W. S. Barrow, ‘Kingship in Medieval England and Scotland’, in Scotland and its Neighbours, 23–44. Ferdinand Lot and Robert Fawtier, Histoire des institutions françaises au Moyen Age, ii (Institutions royales), Paris 1958, 17–19.

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rules of succession were set out for the first time by Edward I in 1290. On his death his eldest son was to succeed to the throne, and if he died without heirs then his other sons in order of birth; if the male line failed, the succession would pass to the king’s eldest daughter and her heirs, and then to his other daughters.20 Had such a rule existed in 1135, Matilda’s right as the king’s daughter would have overridden Stephen’s as the son of the king’s sister. Instead, in the uncertainty, King Henry had to deal with the problem by securing the oaths of his vassals to accept Matilda and her sons. The chroniclers are not entirely in agreement on what was said during these oath-takings and how the vassals interpreted their obligations when the king died. There was much better documentation when the question next arose in the sixteenth century. There is even one earlier hint in the Scottish debate over the position of the ‘maid of Norway’. During negotiations between the Scots regents and Edward I about a possible marriage between the six-year-old Edward of Caernarvon and the slightly older child Margaret, the Scots were careful to safeguard the independence of both the queen and the realm of Scotland should the marriage take place.21 Marriage was clearly a key issue when Henry VIII’s daughter Mary Tudor was recognised as rightful heir to the English throne. A further complication at that time was religion, since Mary was determined to restore Catholicism. A catholic husband might involve England in undesirable foreign entanglements. Mary was urged to ‘ponder inwardly’ the danger of taking a foreign husband. When she still insisted on a marriage with Philip of Spain, agreement was given with safeguards. The final settlement specified that Philip ‘should not lead away the queen out of the borders of her realm unless she herself desired it’. Some Spaniards suggested that he ‘might take control of war and make up in other matters impertinent to women’. The senior Spanish officials and the English (especially Stephen Gardiner) felt that in any case he should wear the Crown Matrimonial only as long as Mary lived.22 Taken together with the stipulations of the Scots in the Treaty of Bingham, it is clear that when female succession actually occurred in both England and Scotland the most contentious issue was the position of the queen’s husband. By comparison, it is inconceivable that the rights of Matilda’s husband should not have been considered, probably before and certainly after she married Geoffrey of Anjou, her father’s choice. Geoffrey figures surprisingly little in the recorded negotiations, though there is one note of a possible stipulation. Bishop Roger of Salisbury complained after the marriage had taken place that only Robert earl of Gloucester, Brian fitz Count, and John bishop of Lisieux had been consulted about it.23 New oaths to Matilda and her heirs were taken after the

20 21 22 23

Rymer, Foedera, The Hague 1727–35, ii, 742. Treaty of Bingham, translated by G. W. S. Barrow, ‘A Kingdom in Crisis: Scotland and the Maid of Norway’, in SHR 69, 1990, 120–41. See Glyn Redworth, In Defence of the Church Catholic. The Life of Stephen Gardiner, Oxford 1990, 290 n.12, 296, 306, 310. Historia Novella, 8–10; Huntingdon, 708–10 thought that the oath to Matilda had implied a promise of joint succession. There is no suggestion anywhere that any oath was taken to Geoffrey (Empress Matilda, 56–60).

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marriage; yet apparently no oaths were taken to Geoffrey. That he resented the uncertainty is shown by his quarrel with his father-in-law about his own rights in the border castles that formed part of Matilda’s dower. There can be no doubt, whatever may have been said during the unrecorded discussions, that King Henry left vague one of the issues later shown to have been particularly important when a woman was accepted as heir to a throne. Henry may have believed that he would survive until a grandson was old enough to inherit. If so, it was an error fatal to the settlement. Geoffrey of Anjou was in no position to give quick and effective support to Matilda after her father’s death. He did not know Normandy or the Norman barons; he was regarded with suspicion, and his repeated efforts to bring Angevin forces to help Matilda failed because his troops could not be restrained from ravaging and rousing popular hatred. Matilda had to depend on ready acceptance by the Anglo-Norman baronage, and it was not forthcoming. At times when the sources provide little or no evidence about the movements and intentions of individuals, material from other periods is of little or no help. Much happened in the three weeks between Henry I’s death at Lyons-la-Forêt on 1 December 1135 and the coronation of Stephen as king of England at Winchester on 22 December.24 Certain facts are clear; the speed with which Stephen, who was in his wife’s county of Boulogne when the king died, acted; the immediate response of Matilda and her husband when the news reached them in Anjou, and the attempt of the barons including Robert of Gloucester, who were at the king’s death-bed, to offer the crown to Stephen’s elder brother Theobald of Blois. For Matilda’s movements the evidence of the Norman chroniclers, Orderic Vitalis and Robert of Torigny, is important;25 for her intentions there are some indications in the language of her earliest charters. In determining how far she was in touch with her half-brother Robert of Gloucester and the other Norman magnates some speculation is almost unavoidable. The question is just when and why she decided that it was impossible for her to reach the seacoast, let alone England, in order to press her claim, and that therefore she must wait in the strong fortress of Argentan until a more favourable time. Her immediate action was to enter Normandy with a few troops supplied by her husband. She was received by Wigan the Marshall as his liege lady and put in charge of the castles of Argentan, Exmes and Domfront. One of her earliest charters was issued at Argentan, with her half-brother Reginald of Dunstanville and two of her Angevin officers as witnesses. Beginning, ‘Mathildis imperatrix, Regis Anglorum filia’, it is clearly early but not necessarily as early as December 1135. It granted a piece of land in the Caen road (in Argentan) to Robert loricarius, a hauberk maker.26 Matilda, convinced that she was her father’s heir, was taking control of her inheritance and preparing for war. Another charter for the monks of Savigny may be earlier and is even more significant. Addressed to the forester of Savigny, it instructed him to allow the monks of Savigny to have and

24 25 26

R. H. C. Davis, King Stephen, 3rd edn, London and New York 1990, 16–18. Orderic, vi, 454–6, 486, 528; Torigni, 128. Regesta, iii, no. 567.

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hold their forge and other rights given to them by her predecessor, King Henry, and insisting on her right and duty to protect them as part of her demesne. The only witness was Robert of Courcy and it was issued at Falaise.27 And here I must correct a mistake I made in trying to date the charter. I thought that it could not be earlier than the unsuccessful siege of Falaise in 1138, on the grounds that Matilda was never at Falaise before then.28 I failed to realise that in all probability the charter itself is the evidence that she was at Falaise, almost certainly in late December 1135. This is the only likely date for Robert of Courcy, who had been Henry I’s steward but went over to Stephen very soon after his coronation, to have been in charge of the castle and to have assumed that Matilda was lawfully entering her inheritance. Robert of Gloucester is known to have gone to Falaise in obedience to his father’s deathbed instructions to take enough money from the treasure there to pay the members of the king’s household and his stipendiary soldiers. According to Robert of Torigny, when the news of Stephen’s coronation in Winchester reached Normandy Robert of Gloucester was at Falaise, and he then gave up the castle after removing a great part of the treasure.29 This must have happened in late December, when Matilda could have been at Falaise. If so, Robert would have had little choice but to advise her to return to Argentan (only about a day’s ride away) and wait with her base in the strong castle there until he was in a position to help her. Had he not accepted Stephen, even with reservations, Stephen could have confiscated his estates and left him powerless before he could have reached England. Such a meeting would go some way towards explaining Robert’s conduct: not until 1137 was he in a position to renounce his homage to Stephen and then he went to the help of Matilda. The exact dating of the movements of both Matilda and Stephen is important in assessing her ability to act independently when, for the first time in her life, she had the chance of doing so. Even then she was not fully independent; until she could win over enough Anglo-Norman magnates she had to rely on such troops as her husband could spare from Anjou to augment her own modest band of household knights. And Geoffrey had to secure the support of neighbours on the frontiers of Normandy and Anjou, notably Robert of Mortagne, Theobald of Blois and Robert of Tosny, to prevent an attack on his rear when he led his forces into Normandy.30 Matilda had the castles of her dower, of which Argentan was the furthest advanced in Norman territory. But unless the Norman lords were prepared to accept her as her father’s heir she was virtually powerless, and Stephen’s race from Boulogne to Winchester cut out her claim.31 Once he was a duly crowned and anointed king she could not replace him unless he were deposed or persuaded to resign. The only authority capable of deposing him was the pope.

27 28 29 30 31

Regesta, iii, no. 805. ‘Charters of the Empress’, 296. In a brief note to the reprint of this paper in Piety, Power and History, ch. XIII, 296, I suggested the possible correction that is explained here in greater detail. Torigni, 129; Orderic, vi, 448. Torigni, 128; M. Chibnall, ‘Normandy’, in Edmund King, The Anarchy of King Stephen’s Reign, Oxford 1994, 93–115; reprinted in Piety, Power and History, ch. XIV. Davis, King Stephen, 16, 17.

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Stephen’s brother Henry, bishop of Winchester, who had persuaded the reluctant archbishop of Canterbury and a handful of barons at Winchester that the oaths they had taken to Henry I were invalid, probably saw that papal approval would be necessary to avert any charge of perjury. An immediate appeal by Stephen to the pope had the desired effect; by early April he was able to produce a letter from Innocent II recognising him as king.32 Here again knowledge of the exact sequence of events is important in order to interpret Matilda’s motives and movements. When she entered Normandy there was no obvious need for her to seek papal support. She considered herself her father’s heir and her recognition in her Norman castles seemed to support that assumption. If even Henry’s steward, Robert of Courcy, received her at Falaise without hesitation (as I have argued), she had no reason to question the loyalty of others until she heard the news of Stephen’s coronation and the support he had received in Normandy. So, although there is some evidence that an Angevin bishop, Ulger of Angers, was at Pisa with Pope Innocent II in January 1136 when Stephen’s envoys arrived, he would not have been in a position to put in a formal plea on Matilda’s behalf. Later, in 1139, he represented her when her carefully prepared appeal was heard by Innocent at the Lateran Council; but by then the pope was unwilling to do more than recognise Stephen’s position provisionally and defer a final decision.33 Matilda’s only hope was to force Stephen’s resignation, either by diplomacy or by defeat in battle. So within a few weeks of Henry’s death the stage had been set for a long and bitter struggle. Matilda was to learn by experience what the exercise of power involved, and during those years of learning she sometimes made mistakes. It would be much more difficult to fault her on her first actions in December 1135. One attempt has been made, perhaps inevitably after the onset of women’s studies in the late twentieth century. Dr van Houts had suggested that, because Matilda was in the early stages of pregnancy, she ‘stayed put and thereby forfeited her chance of becoming queen of England in her own right’, adding that she may have been too sick to cross the Channel, or her husband might have feared that she would lose the unborn child.34 This statement was put forward without the support of any evidence; but it was seriously made and requires explicit refutation. Very little is known of how far the movements of queens at this date may have been restricted by their pregnancies; and speculation, even when legitimate, is unlikely to be productive. Later in the Middle Ages personal letters and more detailed records give some evidence, particularly in France, where sons were essential as heirs to the throne. Even a woman as active and indomitable as Anne of Brittany, married successively to Charles VIII and Louis XII, is known to have reduced her activities during a long series of pregnancies and miscarriages in her vain attempts to bear a male child. On the other hand Louis XI’s daughter, Anne

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Regesta, iii, no. 271; Empress Matilda, 68–9. For a summary of the dispute see The Letters of Peter the Venerable, ed. Giles Constable, 2 vols., Cambridge MA 1967, ii. Appendix C, 252–6. E. M. C. van Houts, ‘The State of Research: Women in Medieval History and Literature’, JMH 20, 1994, 277–92; reprinted in History and Family Tradition in England and the Continent 1000–1200, Ashgate 2000, ch. XIII.

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of France, regent in all but name during the minority of her brother Charles VIII, was so determined to stay near to the heart of government that she accompanied him to war, even though doing so brought on a miscarriage.35 But there is no evidence that Matilda, who had travelled to Rome and over much of western Germany with her first husband, had ever allowed pregnancies to restrict her movements. All that is known of her character and courage, even during hostilities and hair’s breadth escapes from sieges, suggests that even if she had realised that she was pregnant (her son William was not born until late July 1136) this would not have prevented her from hurrying to claim her inheritance. There is positive evidence in the wording and dates of her first charters and in her movements recorded by Norman chroniclers that, far from ‘staying put’, she moved as far as possible and was unable to reach the Channel coast. She already had two healthy sons and even in fifteenth-century France that would have been enough to satisfy any father. It is almost unthinkable that Geoffrey would have been concerned about the possible loss of a child who might in any case have been a daughter. It was the amazing speed of Stephen’s first movements and the attitude of the Norman barons that limited Matilda’s movements from the first. Besides this, Matilda’s known actions and also her intentions as far as they may be conjectured show that she fully appreciated the importance of coronation. Indubitably crowned as regina Romanorum at the age of eight, she had announced her title in the charters she issued in Germany, both on her seal and in the intitulatio. As for the title ‘Empress’, its legality might have been questioned in papal circles, but she herself firmly believed or wished to believe that the ceremonies carried out in Rome by cardinals of dubious status were valid. When Robert of Torigny described her dignity he wrote that her father had objected to her burial in the abbey of Bec, saying that it was inappropriate that his daughter, an empress who had more than once worn the imperial crown while being led by the hands of the pope through the city of Rome, should be buried in a monastery, however renowned.36 The only likely source for this garbled information was either Matilda herself or someone in her entourage. Later, whether or not she knew of her father’s rush for coronation immediately after the death of his brother, she knew that Stephen’s coronation had placed her at a serious disadvantage. She never acknowledged the validity of his claim, as her charters show. She always treated the royal demesne as hers to give, and dealt with Stephen’s donations to religious houses by making the same donations to the original recipients of Stephen’s favours. But she needed to receive coronation and unction from a properly recognised bishop or legate to secure the kingdom in the eyes of the Church. This is, of course, conjecture, but it goes a long way towards explaining her determined advance to London in 1141 for coronation. In spite of her victory at Lincoln and her acceptance as ‘lady of the English’ her position was still insecure.37 Her rejection by the Londoners may have been 35 36 37

Pauline Matarasso, Queen’s Mate, Ashgate 1999, passim. See the Interpolations of Robert of Torigni in Jumièges, ii, 246–7. Some historians have thought that Matilda anticipated her coronation by using a seal with the legend REGINA ANGLORUM; but this has been refuted. For detailed references, see ‘Charters of the Empress’, 280.

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due to her refusal to grant them concessions, as even the judicious William of Newburgh later thought;38 but even so the situation was precarious. Neither Geoffrey of Mandeville nor the legate, Henry bishop of Winchester, was wholly reliable; and Stephen’s wife Matilda was encamped with her armed forces and was ravaging the country on the other side of the river Thames.39 As a wife attempting to free her captive husband, Queen Matilda could rely on the approval of Archbishop Theobald and the Church. After the Empress had to flee for her life and forego coronation she pursued Stephen relentlessly in the papal court; though she never secured his removal she prevented his son being recognised as heir to the throne.40 Very soon after her failure she began to work for the recognition of her son Henry as heir. By that time she had learned to profit from the mistakes she had made in judging what was possible. But there is nothing in the evidence to suggest that she did not do all in her power to reach England and be crowned queen immediately after her father’s death. However reasonable it may be to speculate about the medical of psychological condition influencing the career of an individual, there is a point beyond which speculation should not go in the face of positive evidence. Perhaps the art of writing medieval biography is to form a clear impression of the developing character and ability of an individual from positive evidence, and then describe the events of his or her life in the light of controlled speculation. This is an art in which Frank Barlow, notably in his biographies of William Rufus and Thomas Becket, always excelled. It is a pleasure now to be able to join in an expression of appreciation of his work.

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Newburgh, 41. Gesta Stephani, 122–5. Empress Matilda, 141, 147–8.

13 The Gesta Stephani EDMUND KING

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HE HISTORIAN of the reign of King Stephen (1135–54) cannot reasonably complain either of the volume or of the quality of the chronicle sources available for study. The two great chroniclers of the Anglo-Norman age, William of Malmesbury and Orderic Vitalis, lived through less than half of the ‘nineteen long winters when Christ and his saints were asleep’, but in that time they saw a succession dispute broaden into civil war, and they recorded the king’s capture at Lincoln on 2 February 1141. The main news stories, such as ‘the arrest of the bishops’ in June 1139, attracted wide attention and we feel that we can see how news travelled. When we come to the end of the reign and look at the terms on which a peace was made in 1153–54 we have the same sense that we have enough different viewpoints to allow us to write a political history that is more than a narrative. There is a wide range of annalist sources also, written not just within the Anglo-Norman regnum, but also way beyond its borders.1 There is, however, only the one text that has come down to us as a biography. This is the Gesta Stephani. It is a text that has had an adventurous history. It is first recorded when it was first printed, by André Duchesne in 1619, in a volume which contained also the Ecclesiastical History of Orderic Vitalis.2 As Duchesne noted, it was the work of an unnamed historian, who was a contemporary and who took the king’s part. ‘I give this from an old, but an imperfect and truncated text belonging to the bishop of Laon, kindly obtained for me by the vicar general of the diocese.’ The bishop was Benjamin de Brichanteau.3 The text was next edited by R. C. Sewell for the English Historical Society in 1846.4 By this time certainly, and probably much earlier,

1 2 3

4

On the various sources reference should be made to Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in England c.550–c.1307, London 1974, and to the relevant introductions to NMT and OMT editions. ‘Gesta Stephani Regis Anglorum et Ducis Normannorum Incerto Auctore Sed Contemporaneo’, in Historiæ Normannorum Scriptores Antiqui, ed. André Duchesne, Paris 1619, 926–75. Benjamin de Brichanteau, bishop of Loan, 1612–19, elevated through the patronage of his uncle, Cardinal La Rochefoucault: Joseph Bergin, The Making of the French Episcopate, 1589–1661, New Haven and London 1996, 587–8. He was a poor steward of the library resources of Ste-Geneviève, Paris, of which he was concomitantly abbot: Pierre Féret, L’abbaye de Ste-Geneviève et la congrégation de France, 2 vols., Paris 1883, i, 180. Gesta Stephani Regis Anglorum et Ducis Normannorum Incerto Auctore Sed Contemporaneo, ed. Richard Clarke Sewell, London 1846.

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the Laon manuscript had disappeared.5 Sewell in his edition had to use Duchesne’s text, as did Howlett, though more critically, in his Rolls Series edition in 1886.6 Two translations had appeared in the intervening period.7 Howlett’s remained the standard text until after the Second World War, when the Gesta Stephani became one of the earlier volumes to appear in the series Nelson Medieval Texts.8 This was then under the editorship of V. H. Galbraith and R. A. B. Mynors. As Mynors explained: ‘Duchesne’s Scriptores was the inevitable basis for this new edition, and a text made from his had already been long in type, when Providence relented, and produced another manuscript.’9 Providence had been assisted by the tenacity of Mynors himself. He was working at this time towards an edition of the Gesta Regum of William of Malmesbury. This had led him to an examination of MS 792 in the Municipal Library of Valenciennes. It came from the abbey of Vicoigne, a daughter-house of St Martin of Laon. The text was a composite of writings relating to the history of Britain, including the Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth and a version of the Gesta Regum of William of Malmesbury. It needed to be examined, for the library catalogue did not identify GS as a separate text but rather as the last section of the Gesta Regum.10 It must have been a very exciting discovery. The Valenciennes text was published in 1955, at the same time as a new edition of the Historia Novella of William of Malmesbury, both under the editorship of K. R. Potter and with notes on the manuscripts by Mynors. The same text of GS was re-edited by Ralph Davis for OMT in 1976, taking account of his earlier work on the charters and chronicles of Stephen’s reign. The availability of a manuscript allowed Mynors to make some points about the structure of GS that are not open to question. There can be no question that we have the beginning of the work and the end of the work. It begins: When King Henry, the peace of his country and the father of his people, came to his last moments and paid his debt to death, this grievous calamity made the entire aspect of the kingdom troubled and utterly disordered.11

It ends: The king, after he had reduced England to peace and taken the whole kingdom into his hand, caught a slight fever and departed this life, and the duke,

5

6 7

8 9 10

11

It cannot be identified in the list of the cathedral manuscripts given in Bernard de Montfaucon, Bibliotheca Bibliothecarum Manuscriptorum Nova, 2 vols., Paris 1739, ii, 1292–9; and it was notified as missing in Thomas Duffus Hardy, Descriptive Catalogue of Materials Relating to the History of Great Britain and Ireland, 3 vols., RS, London 1862–71, ii, 241. ‘Gesta Stephani Regis Anglorum et Ducis Normannorum’, in Howlett, Chronicles, iii, 1–136. Thomas Forester, The Acts of Stephen, King of England and Duke of Normandy, by an unknown contemporaneous author, London 1853; Joseph Stevenson, in Church Historians of England, 5:1, London 1858. Gesta Stephani: The Deeds of Stephen, ed. K. R. Potter, NMT, London 1955. Ibid., p. xii. A.-F. Lièvre, Catalogue général des manuscrits des bibliothèques publiques de France 25, Paris 1894, 474–5, drawing on J. Mangeart, Catalogue descriptif et raisonné des manuscrits de la bibliothèque de Valenciennes, Paris 1860, 583–7. See now Julia C. Crick, The Historia Regum Britannie of Geoffrey of Monmouth, iii: A Catalogue of the Manuscripts, Cambridge 1989, 319–21. Gesta Stephani, 2–3.

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returning gloriously to England, was crowned for sovereignty with every honour and the applause of all.12

GS begins then with the death of Henry I and the coronation of Stephen: it ends with the death of Stephen and the coronation of Henry II. Between these dates we have a text with the very loosest of structures. There are no paragraphs. There are no dates. The only structure is the division into two books. That division takes place at the point at which Stephen is released from prison after his capture at the Battle of Lincoln: at the beginning of Book One he is welcomed by the citizens of London and so he is at the end of it.13 At the beginning of Book Two, having failed to come to a negotiated settlement, the two parties regroup and start again; at the end of the book that settlement is agreed. This is a text that covers the reign of Stephen in a more comprehensive way than any other. It is, however, ‘less a biography of the king than an account of the civil war’.14 The running heads in the Valenciennes manuscript give the title Historia / Anglorum. This is a history of the English. The running heads in Duchesne are Gesta Stephani Regis / Anglorum, et Ducis Normannorum; and Gesta Stephani has thereafter been the title of the work. This title was given it by Duchesne. It may be too much to hope that Providence will relent again, and disclose either the Laon or another manuscript, but any such would likely be listed simply as a history of England. The history that we have, which it would be perverse not to continue to call the Gesta Stephani, remains disjointed. While we have a beginning and an end, there are in Book One four substantial passages that have been lost. The loss has arisen from the loss of leaves, most likely from more than one bifolium having fallen away or having been removed. The four points where there are gaps are as follows: (i) From mid-1136, with the exile of Baldwin de Redvers, to December 1137, when Stephen and the court return from Normandy.15 (ii) In 1138, dealing with the invasions of the King of Scots, resuming with the rebellion of Robert, earl of Gloucester.16 (iii) In late 1138, including the siege of Shrewsbury, resuming with ‘the arrest of the bishops’ in June 1139.17 (iv) In 1140, resuming with the prelude to the Battle of Lincoln.18 The missing sections have been noted by editors but in discussion of the work the lacunae have been taken as read. It has not been appreciated just how damaging the loss of these disiecta membra has been. This is true both of geographical

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Ibid., 240–1. Ibid., 136–9. Frank Barlow, The English Church 1066–1154, London 1979, 21. Duchesne, Scriptores, 937: ‘Desunt Hic Aliquot Folia’. Ibid., 939: ‘Desiderantur et Hic Nonnulla’. Ibid., 943: ‘Desunt Iterum Aliqua’. Ibid., 952: ‘Rursus Hic Desiderantur Folia Duo’.

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coverage and of narrative drive. It can be argued that in terms of politics – and this work is a political history and not a biography – there are four key periods during Stephen’s reign. The first of these comes in December 1135, when Stephen was elected and consecrated as king of England; the second is what might be termed the beginning of the civil war, in 1138 and 1139, with the renunciation of homages that had already been sworn; the third is the key year of 1141, when the civil war might have been resolved by agreement, but was not; the fourth is the no less key year of 1153, when it was. The manuscript at Laon gave a full treatment only of the first of these. That now at Valenciennes added the fourth. We still lack, however, important material that would have contextualised the outbreak of civil war. We lack also – this is the final gap – a context for the Battle of Lincoln, and we are not properly introduced to Ranulf, earl of Chester. Moreover, it is clear that the missing text narrows the geographical scope of the work. We lack material on Normandy, and since the treatment of Wales was consolidated, so as not to disrupt the narrative,19 the same may have been true of Normandy also. At the very least we could have looked for an introduction to Stephen’s brother, Theobald, count of Blois, to Geoffrey of Anjou, and to the kings of France. Similarly, what we have on Scotland, though it is introduced, is not developed. Our author’s Battle of the Standard is missing. It would be a fair assessment on what we have here that the author is a ‘little Englander’, in comparison with his peers, but had we a complete text this might not be a fair assessment at all. Similarly, if we are to map the places named in the text,20 it must be emphasised that Normandy, the north of England, and Scotland, and the east of England, are for the most part missing. The identity of the author of Gesta Stephani is not known and he does not project his personality. The Gloucester chronicler and William of Malmesbury at times name their sources directly.21 GS does not. William reports Stephen as saying: ‘When they have elected me king, why do they abandon me? By the grace of God I will never be called a king without a throne!’22 It is a vivid image. GS reports the king complaining of the loyalty of Gilbert de Clare: ‘Where is his faith, his honour, where is the man who should have kept his faith to me unshaken and reckoned any swerving from his devotion to me a brand of infamy.’ The whole passage here is formulaic and, while it relates to events in 1147, it cannot be used to argue that the author was writing close to this date.23 What GS does well is to take the reader into the hall or the cloister as news from the front is received. The rebellion of Turgis of Avranches ‘seemed crazy and almost incredible to everyone who heard of it’, because of his close association with the king.24 Close to the king by birth, and for our author as for others instrumental in his securing the

19 20 21 22 23 24

Gesta Stephani, 20–3. Ibid., p. xxii. On this map no. 11, Lidelea, can confidently be identified as Hursley (Hants), in which lay Meredon, a castle of Henry, bishop of Winchester. John of Worcester, iii, 298–9; Historia Novella, 10–11, 46–7, 68–9. Historia Novella, 40–1: ‘ut ferebatur’. Gesta Stephani, 202–3 and n. 1. Ibid., 174–7: ‘quod quidem omni audienti absurdum uidebatur et prorsus incredibile’.

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throne, was Henry, bishop of Winchester.25 When the Empress landed with her brother, Robert, earl of Gloucester, in 1139, and Robert went from Arundel to Bristol, Henry of Winchester met up with him. ‘To any man of right judgement it must seem quite incredible that a brother should greet the invader of his brother’s kingdom with a kiss and let him go unharmed.’26 When Henry fitz Empress came to England in 1147 and Stephen gave him the funds to pay off his troops and return home, we are told that while ‘the king was blamed by some for acting not only unwisely but even childishly . . . I think that what he did was the more profound and prudent, because the more kindly and humanely a man behaves to an enemy the feebler he makes him.’27 The author of GS is clear in his judgements but in claiming authority for them he is reticent. It is only a portent that he claims to have seen ‘with my own eyes’.28 The author’s reticence makes his identification difficult. Duchesne was content to leave him anonymous but most subsequent editors, and several scholars working on the reign, have made suggestions as to his identity. The first suggestions were made by R. C. Sewell. In his view, the author ‘was in the camp of Stephen, possibly his own confessor’ and ‘it is not unreasonable to think that . . . the narrative was composed at the request of the king’.29 For Howlett another great figure seemed to stand out, the king’s brother, Henry of Winchester. ‘Let us see if the theory of his being a chaplain of Henry of Blois could be sustained?’30 It turned out that it could. H. E. Salter noted the close attention given to the brothers Roger and William de Chesney, and suggested that the author might be their brother, Robert de Chesney, archdeacon of Leicester and later bishop of Lincoln.31 These suggestions were reviewed in turn by K. R. Potter, who found the author difficult to pin down: he ‘shows a fair acquaintance with several English counties while giving no indication of any clear local attachment’.32 Then, so it appeared, the clouds of uncertainty were removed. Ralph Davis, in one of a series of important papers preparatory to his edition of Stephen’s charters and his biography of the king, came up with a name. For Davis there was a clear local attachment; there was a clear interest in the power of bishops; and there was a particular interest shown in one man, who was the bishop of the locality identified. This was Robert of Lewes, bishop of Bath: ‘there can be little doubt that he is the man that we have been looking for’.33 This

25 26

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

Ibid., 8–9; Historia Novella, 28–9; Chronicon Turonense Magnum, in Recueil de Chroniques de Touraine, ed. André Salmon, Tours 1854, 133. Gesta Stephani, 88–9: ‘omni sane sentienti dubium constat et prorsus incredibile, ut frater regni fraterni inuasorem cum osculo susciperet, eumque a suo prospectu ad regnum in fratrem grauius permouendum illæsum dimitteret’. Ibid., 206–7. Ibid., 52–3. Gesta Stephani, ed. Sewell, p. x. Howlett, Chronicles, p. viii. Gesta Stephani, 130–1; Eynsham Cartulary, ed. H. E. Salter. 2 vols., Oxford Historical Society 49, 51, Oxford 1907–8, i, 415 n. 5. Gesta Stephani, ed. Potter, p. xxxi. R. H. C. Davis, ‘The authorship of the Gesta Stephani’, EHR 77, 1962, 209–32, at 228; repr. in his From Alfred the Great to Stephen, London 1991, 167–90.

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paper was reprinted by Davis in his OMT edition and it forms the main part of the introductory material to that volume.34 If for Davis there was ‘little doubt’ as to the identity of the author, and some have felt that a good case has been made,35 not all have been convinced. Antonia Gransden has five pages in her magisterial survey of historical writing: the evidence for authorship was seen as ‘circumstantial’, the identification of the bishop of Bath as ‘unlikely’.36 Frank Barlow has just a paragraph, and so far as authorship is concerned just a footnote. He saw the evidence for authorship as being ‘of a rather general kind’, and suggested that ‘a canon of Salisbury with political views opposed to his bishop is at least as likely a candidate’.37 H. P. R. Finberg, whose paper on Uffculme in Devon is required reading for the politics of 1136, entered a note of demurral also, as did at least one reviewer of the OMT edition.38 Most recently Donald Matthew declines to identify the author: since he ‘does not belong in any recognisable context, it is difficult to regard him as a spokesman for any particular interest’.39 This variety of response might be thought to tell us something about the text. The author writes vividly. As Sewell put it: We are transported at once into the camp of Stephen and his Barons; we are present at his Councils; we are hurried forward in the night-march; we lurk in the ambuscade; we take part in the storming of castles, and cities. Now we stand in the wild morasses of the Isle of Ely; at another time we reconnoitre the fortifications of Bristol; from the hard-fought field of Lincoln, we are carried to the walls of Oxford; from the dungeon of the captive king, we hasten to witness the escape of the Empress during all the severities of the December night. It is one stirring series of events of personal and individual interest.40

It is the vividness of the writing that has called forth the different personal responses of editors and historians. If this is accepted then perhaps the less authority any personal response should claim. As to a particular interest in people, Davis and Salter were struck by the weight given to Robert of Bampton and Payn fitz John on the one hand and the Chesney family on the other, but there are many such and we could – and here certainly should – add to the list Henry de Tracy of Barnstaple and other lords in ‘that part of England which is called Devon’.41 As to a particular interest in place, and here specifically Bath, a comment from Howlett might still have some force. ‘His description of the Roman structures at Bath, his verbal sketch of the tower of Bampton church, might mislead us if we

34 35

36 37 38 39 40 41

Gesta Stephani, pp. xviii–xl. Most recently, Frances Ramsey, ‘Robert of Lewes, bishop of Bath: a Cluniac bishop in his diocese’, in Belief and Culture in the Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser, Oxford 2001, 251–63, at 260–2. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 188–93. Barlow, English Church 1066–1154, 21 and n. 83. H. P. R. Finberg, ‘Uffculme’, in Lucerna: Studies of Some Problems in the Early History of England, London 1964, 204–21, at 214 n. 3; Edmund King, in History 62, 1977, 99–100. Donald Matthew, King Stephen, London 2002, 130. Gesta Stephani, ed. Sewell, p. xi. Gesta Stephani, 82–5, 150–1, 210–13, 222–3 (‘illam partem Angliæ quæ Damnonia dicitur’).

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did not see that he also knows Exeter, Winchester, and the Isle of Ely.’42 There is a case to be made that the author is describing at each point where the action is, where the sieges are taking place, where the forces of the king and his opponents confront each other. Bath was one of those places. In 1138, immediately after the defection of Robert of Gloucester, the knights of the bishop of Bath captured Geoffrey Talbot. The bishop himself, captured whilst under a safe conduct, was induced to release Geoffrey, and when word of this reached the king he was angry with the bishop, who narrowly escaped deposition. GS tells the story well but it is far from being an ‘exclusive’, for it is in John of Worcester also.43 In GS the bishop is gullible, behaving ‘like a simple-minded man who believes every word, like another Jacob who lived guilelessly at home’.44 In the view of Davis this is the author writing of himself. This seems most unlikely. It is a good quality in any age to be able to tell a joke against oneself: it is a much rarer quality for those in high office to admit to naiveté. It is similarly difficult to demonstrate a particular concern with the episcopal office. Of the bishops some were too warlike, some were vigorous in pursuing offenders, most were ineffectual.45 The tone of GS is the same as that of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, written at this point by a monk of Peterborough: ‘the bishops and learned men were always excommunicating them but they thought nothing of it’.46 The bishops of the reign are a small group, with an esprit de corps and a unity that they maintained despite the differences within the kingdom: ‘though individual dignitaries followed different lords the church as a whole followed only one’.47 A series of church councils marked the key stages of the reign and of the civil war. On these, in marked contrast to William of Malmesbury, and differing also from Henry of Huntingdon, GS is all but silent. The missing text is no explanation for this. It is rather than the author shows no knowledge and no interest in this aspect of the reign. Appointments to bishoprics are not recorded, even though the appointment of the bishop of Bath at the Easter court of 1136 was clearly intended as a show-case of Stephen’s ‘concordat’ with the church.48 Stephen’s discussions with the church are not seen as integral to his election,49 and the perspective from which these discussions are recorded is not that of the episcopal bench.50 As to ‘the arrest of the bishops’ in 1139 and the subsequent council convened by Henry, bishop of Winchester, as papal legate, this is barely mentioned in GS. The bishops were guilty as charged. The author does go on to say that the arrest was unwise, but this is almost as an afterthought, and while the king does

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50

Howlett, Chronicles, p. ix. Gesta Stephani, 58–65; John of Worcester, iii, 248–9. Ibid., 60–1. ‘The simpleton believes what he is told/the man of discretion watches how he treads’: Proverbs 14:15–16. Ibid., 60–1, 74–7, 102–3, 128–9, 144–5, 154–9. ASC, 199. John of Salisbury, Historia Pontificalis, ed. Marjorie Chibnall, NMT, London 1956, 47–8. Regesta, iii, no. 46; John of Worcester, iii, 212–13. Gesta Stephani, 24–9. Barlow, English Church 1066–1154, 21 n. 83: ‘the bishops are illi, not nos’.

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penance for this the decision of the council goes in his favour: ‘any receptacles of war and disturbance in the hands of any of the bishops should be handed over to the king as his own property’.51 The two key councils of 1141 are neither of them mentioned,52 nor are Henry’s legatine council of 1143 and Theobald’s of 1151.53 The bishops are key figures as the civil war draws to a close. They write to each other as self-conscious members of a select club and we have some fine editions of their letters.54 There is little enough of this in GS. The author was unknown, said Duchesne, but the work was contemporary. As to when exactly it was written, the earlier editors did not consider this in any detail, and it was left to Davis to suggest a hypothesis, one which has found general acceptance. According to Davis the chronicle was written in two stages: ‘the earlier part of the work stretched from the beginning of the reign to about the end of 1147, and was written in about the year 1148; . . . the narrative from 1148 onwards was written after 1153; and . . . in the meantime the author had changed his sympathies and ceased to support King Stephen’.55 In this view there was a break in composition; there was a polished text, in very much the form that it has survived, which was then laid on one side and only taken up again several years later, when the succession dispute was resolved and Stephen was dead. It should be noted, though it does not invalidate Davis’s argument, that in this reading there is a considerable imbalance between the first phase of writing and the second, which stands in the ratio 85:15, without making any calculation for the four sections of material missing, which are all from phase one. What holds this first phase together, quite securely, are the forward and backward references, for instance the way that the death of Miles of Gloucester in late 1143 is foretold almost as soon as we are introduced to him.56 The actual break in composition, however, is established largely by arguments from silence or what are perceived to be changing attitudes to individuals. There are no cross-references across the years 1147–48, when there might have been expected to have been: ‘the author was apparently unaware that the bishop of Chester’ would redeem his faults by dying whilst on crusade in April 1148.57 These arguments are very far from secure and the conclusion that is based on them – ‘that the author is practising an “economy of truth” in order to cover up the fact that he has now changed sides and is no longer a supporter of the king’58 – cannot be sustained. A part of the argument that the author was no longer a supporter of the king was the fact that at just the time the break was seen to occur the young Henry fitz Empress, on both his 1147 and his 1149 visits, was introduced as ‘the lawful heir’ of the kingdom.59

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Gesta Stephani, 80–1. Historia Novella, 50–9, 108–11; Councils and Synods, with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I: A.D. 871–1204, 2 vols., Oxford 1981, nos. 142–3, ii, 788–94. Huntingdon, 742–3, 756–7; Councils and Synods, nos. 144, 150, ii, 794–804, 821–6. The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, ed. Frank Barlow, Camden 3rd ser. 61, London 1939; The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Adrian Morey and C. N. L. Brooke, Cambridge 1967. Gesta Stephani, p. xxi. Ibid., 24–5. Ibid., p. xx. Ibid., p. xxi. Ibid., 204–5, 214–15.

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Davis did not make this a conclusive point, which would prove the change of sides, since ‘this description could have been inserted in a last-minute revision of the text’.60 There are a number of such references, however; they are embedded in the text; and they must be reckoned as integral to the author’s reading of the years concerned.61 We must then ask whether the use of the phrase marks a hiatus rather than a pause, and whether it proves that after 1147 the author had ‘ceased to support King Stephen’. Here we do have to confront the limitations of biography. They are in part of our own making. In looking at the biographies of those who had in any sense a public role in the civil war, we are accustomed to look for a change of sides and to date that change of sides as closely as we can. The Empress in the summer of 1141 would date this to the day.62 But the civil war had not been settled in that year and the senior churchmen, ‘the legate and the archbishop’ in particular,63 had learnt their lessons. They would insist on unity. Theobald of Canterbury reportedly told Henry fitz Empress, when he required Gilbert Foliot, the newly appointed bishop of Hereford, to swear fealty to him, that this would be in appropriate and improper: ‘though individual dignitaries follow different lords the church as a whole follows only one’.64 Theobald and his fellow bishops would decline to crown Eustace when required to do so, making king and courtiers very angry in the process,65 but on narrow, ‘constitutional’ grounds: there was no precedent for it and the matter was under dispute.66 From that dispute they wished to keep their distance. They wished it to be settled by compromise, with ‘the right’ being transferred at the next succession. It would be accepted in 1153 that Henry was indeed ‘the lawful heir’ while Stephen remained the lawful king. The senior churchmen had been ready for some time for a settlement in these terms.67 So if we are looking for a time when a clerical chronicler, particularly if he is to be identified as a senior churchman, ‘changed sides’, we are asking the wrong question. The church never did cease to support the king. And if there is no change of sides there is no need to argue for two distinct stages of composition. There may have been but the case must be argued on other grounds. There are sections at the end of the work that seem rushed and repetitious. It is possible nonetheless that we are dealing with ‘a single literary composition’. One of the things that we know about the author of GS that he was a supporter of King Stephen. By the same token William of Malmesbury, say, was a supporter of the Empress. Up to a point. It is an interesting exercise to keep our stance as it were at the point at which agreement is reached in the autumn of 1153 and then look back to see what attitudes there are in GS that might have stood in

60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

Ibid., p. xx. Ibid., 204–5, 206–7 (1147), 214–15, 222–3, 224–5 (1149). Regesta, iii, nos. 275, 393, 634. This is the shorthand of William of Malmesbury, Historia Novella, 118–21. Historia Pontificalis, 47–8. Gervase of Canterbury, Historical Works, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., RS, London 1879–80, i, 150–1 (‘vehementer irati’). Historia Pontificalis, 85–6. And see now the sensitive treatment of Frank Barlow, ‘Theobald (c. 1090–1161), archbishop of Canterbury’, in Oxford DNB, liv, 216–20. Diceto, i, 296.

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the way of this agreement. They are not easy to find. If we look at the treatment of the succession dispute, we find that the author has a clear point of view but he is not partisan. The beginning of the work is a fine set-piece explaining the reasons why Stephen was elected and crowned as king of England.68 At whatever distance of time the final text was written it is completely sharp as to the case that was made in December 1135. It might even seem to dramatise the best source which we have for that case, which is the letter of Pope Innocent II, undoubtedly genuine, picking up its themes in confirming Stephen’s election.69 In GS the competing claim is not brushed under the carpet and the king’s opponents are not caricatured. The case for the Empress is made and it is refuted, constanter; the emphasis is not on Henry I’s changing his mind but on the forced oath.70 We come back to the oath when we are introduced to David, king of Scots, rex pectoris mansuetudi, the first who had sworn it: he acts in a principled way, for in his view Stephen had seized the kingdom unjustly.71 David of Scots was responding to ties of kinship. The king’s opponents are described as ‘the children of King Henry’.72 The Empress herself, so identified in most contemporary chronicles,73 is consistently referred to in GS as ‘the countess of Anjou’, and we can have some confidence that this reflected the usage at Stephen’s court.74 When the Empress’s chance seemed to have come again, after Stephen’s capture at the Battle of Lincoln, GS gives the case against her in the most spirited of terms.75 He is very sharp. He is also precise. We have, by way of ‘control’, witnesses who were close to the two chief supporters of the Empress, Robert of Gloucester and Miles of Gloucester. They say exactly the same thing: ‘she would not listen to them’, and so the opportunity to resolve the succession dispute was lost.76 The year 1141 saw the whole political process brought into disrepute and all political commentators, in the Anglo-Norman world and beyond, bemoaned the fact.77 The idea of consensus can be maintained if we now turn to look at the character that was given to the king, for GS, if it is not a biography, still sees the king as its central point of reference. GS represents the king in the early months of his reign as ‘affable and amenable to all of whatever age’, good-natured, conciliatory; ‘in many affairs he saw himself not as superior to his men but in every way their

68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Gesta Stephani, 2–15. Richard of Hexham, in Howlett, Chronicles, iii, 147–8; Edmund King, ‘Stephen of Blois, Count of Mortain and Boulogne’, EHR 115, 2000, 271–96, at 296. Gesta Stephani, 10–13. Ibid., 52–5. Ibid., 12–13, 46–7, 72–3, 96–7, 98–9, 102–3, 150–1. Historia Novella, 26–7; Richard of Hexham, in Howlett, Chronicles, iii, 147; Torigni, 137; Huntingdon, 738–9. Gesta Stephani, 46–7, 86–7, and passim; this is the usage also of Orderic, vi, 534–5, 540–1, 546–7. Gesta Stephani. 120–1, in particular, lands a series of heavy punches: denial of the rights of property; degradation of her supporters; refusal to take advice. John of Worcester, iii, 296–7; Historia Novella, 100–1. Gesta Stephani, 136–7; Historia Novella, 110–11; John of Worcester, iii, 304–5; Orderic, vi. 550–1; Herman of Tournai, The Restoration of the Monastery of Saint Martin of Tournai, ed. Lynn H. Nelson, Washington DC 1996, 34; Otto of Freising, The Two Cities: A Chronicle of Universal History to the Year 1146 A.D., ed. Charles C. Mierow, rev. edn, New York 2002, 429.

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equal, sometimes actually their inferior’.78 This is the characterisation of William of Malmesbury also.79 We have divided counsels brought out no less clearly in GS than in other chroniclers, starting at the siege of Exeter. We have the flashes of temper, characteristically at those who broke the protocol of the court and at office-holders at every level who were seen as not doing their job. The repeated insistence on the proper guarding of the ports provides the context for the outburst reported by John of Worcester.80 It is the irony of Stephen’s kingship that a man who placed so much emphasis on courtly behaviour should be remembered for a series of high profile arrests at court.81 GS is the first point of reference here and is the only place where a layman arrested speaks for himself. He had not been given any notice of the business, he had not had any opportunity to take advice from his men, was the complaint of Ranulf, earl of Chester, in 1146.82 This fairness characterises the work as a whole. It is far from the case that the king’s supporters are praised while those of the Empress are criticised. The author can be very critical of individuals but he speaks as he finds. Miles of Gloucester sins and is punished for it, but he is an energetic leader and in the world of chivalry was widely admired.83 His elevation to an earldom gave pleasure to all.84 His comments on Brian fitz Count, not to be taken too literally, are in a similar vein.85 Miles of Gloucester’s son, Roger, is well spoken of;86 not so, John the marshal, ‘that scion of hell and root of all evil’, or Philip, son of Robert of Gloucester, ‘a perfect master of every kind of wickedness’.87 We are in the Gesta Stephani in a world of consensus, of conventiones,88 which is inhabited by men ‘of sound judgement’. The author’s exact place in that world is, as has been seen, difficult to establish. It is not the case that the evidence of the manuscripts suggests a connection with the Boulonnais.89 If it suggests anything at all it is rather a connection with London.90 It is perhaps surprising, granted the range of suggestions that has been made as to authorship, that a London connection has not featured at all. It is with deliberations in London, ‘the capital, the queen of the whole kingdom’,91 that the work starts and, as support for Stephen fell away elsewhere, London would be the centre of what government he could exercise and what intelligence he could gather. The emphasis

78 79 80 81

82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., 22–3. Historia Novella, 28–9, 32–3. Gesta Stephani, 84–5, 86–7; John of Worcester, iii. 268–9. John of Salisbury, Policraticus: Of the Frivolities of Courtiers and the Footprints of Philosophers, bk vi, cap. 18, ed. Cary J. Nederman, Cambridge 1990, 120: after the arrest of the bishops, ‘no one subsequently approached his court securely’. Gesta Stephani, 196–7. Ibid., 18–19, 24–5, 90–7, 148–9, 158–61. Ibid., 128–9. Ibid., 134–5. Ibid., 160–1, 172–3. Ibid., 168–9, 180–1. John Meddings, ‘Friendship among the aristocracy in Anglo-Norman England’, ANS 22, 2000, 187–204. Howlett, Chronicles, p. viii; Matthew, King Stephen, 131. Crick, Summary Catalogue, 321, where it is noted that parts of the Valenciennes manuscript contain material found in manuscripts from Merton Priory and Southwark Priory. Gesta Stephani, 4–5, 12–13.

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given to election by the Londoners, the way the reader is introduced into their counsels, is unique in this source.92 So also is the sympathy shown to what has been called ‘the new communal aspirations’ of the Londoners.93 The same sympathy is shown to all townspeople and we find cives even in quite small boroughs.94 GS speaks authoritatively of sieges and battles,95 and of all the sieges it is that of Winchester, ‘the second place in the kingdom’,96 in which the Londoners were actively involved,97 which is most closely and accurately observed. ‘This was a remarkable siege, nothing like it was ever heard of in other times.’ It was remarkable because it was a siege within a siege: ‘the roles of the combatants were reversed in so far as the inner besiegers of the bishop’s castle were themselves very closely besieged on the outside by the king’s forces’.98 The dramatic events in London earlier in the summer are no less vividly and immediately described.99 While most chroniclers refer to the Empress’s being driven out of London, GS presumes that we know the distinction between London and Westminster. The bells toll and the citizens come rushing out of the city gates, ‘like thronging swarms from beehives’.100 We may well feel that the author heard the bells still as he wrote and indeed that he might have written within sound of them. It would certainly be possible to add to the already long ‘list of suspects’ a monk or canon of one of the London houses, with connections at court and some experience as a confessor. Yet we cannot be sure. The only safe judgement remains that of Duchesne, who had in his hands the earliest known manuscript: alius sine nomine historicus . . . certi contemporaneum ipsius regis et partium eius fautorem.

92

Gesta Stephani, 4–7; cf. Historia Novella, 28–9; Huntingdon, 700–3; John of Worcester, iii, 214–15; Richard of Hexham, in Howlett, Chronicles, iii, 144. 93 May McKisack, ‘London and the succession to the crown during the middle ages’, in Studies in Medieval History Presented to Frederick Maurice Powicke, ed. R. W. Hunt, W. A. Pantin, and R. W. Southern, Oxford 1948, 79. In 1141 the Londoners came into council as representatives of ‘what they called the commune of London’, but they were only recognised ‘as in effect magnates’: Historia Novella, pp. lviii–lix, 94–5. 94 Gesta Stephani, 112–13, the sack of Lincoln in 1141, cf. Historia Novella, 86–7 (it was their own fault). There are cives/civitates at Barnstaple (Devon), Bridport (Dorset), Cirencester (Glos), Wareham (Dorset), Winchcombe (Glos): Gesta Stephani, 82–3, 222–3, 138–9, 144–5, 94–5 and n. 5. 95 Barlow, English Church 1066–1154, 21 (‘he knew what he was talking about’). 96 Gesta Stephani, 8–9 (‘secundum dumtaxat regni sedem’). Exeter came in fourth place: ibid., 32–3. 97 Ibid., 128–31; their involvement is noted also in Historia Novella, 102–3; Savigny chronicle, in RHF xii, 781 (‘liberatus a burgensibus Londoniæ’). 98 Ibid., 130–1. 99 Ibid., 120–1 (the citizens thought that the good times had returned), 122–3 (they were in deep trouble), 126–7 (they admit the queen into the city). 100 Ibid., 124–5.

14 Writing the Biography of Roger of Howden, King’s Clerk and Chronicler JOHN GILLINGHAM

T

HE DIFFICULTIES faced when writing biographically do not need rehearsing and are an important theme of this book, especially when the subject is neither a king, queen nor major ecclesiastic. In the case of an author who wrote over a longish period we should, however, at least be able to trace some aspects of the development of an individual mind over time. The fact that Roger of Howden chronicled contemporary events from 1170 to 1201, and in enough detail to fill five Rolls Series volumes, raises these hopes.1 Moreover the fact that he dealt with the years between 1170 and 1192 twice over, once more or less contemporaneously in the work known as the Gesta regis, and once when he revised his narrative of those years in the Chronica that he began to compose after 1192, means that we are given a further opportunity to see how his ideas and values had, or had not, changed in the intervening years. But what do we know about his life? If we know very little about that, then we cannot write any sort of biography in the sense of relating his words to his life. William Stubbs, the great editor of his works, wrote: ‘Of the life of the compiler, editor or author of this work, Roger of Hoveden, but few facts are known, and to these I am sorry to confess that I cannot add a single one.’ What Stubbs knew was that the author of the Chronica was the parson of Howden and a royal clerk who was known to be in the service of Henry II in 1174 and 1175 and again in the late 1180s. He also believed that after Henry’s death in 1189 Roger retired from public life, and that it was in retirement that he wrote his chronicle.2 We still know nothing for certain of his education. The Chronica is attributed to Master Roger of Howden in manuscripts as early as BL Arundel 69 and Inner Temple 511.2.3 But a passage in the Gesta regis implies that he did not think of

1 2 3

Gesta, vols. 1 and 2, and Chronica, vols. 2–4. See Chronica, i, pp. xiii–xxiv and Memoriale fratris Walteri de Coventria, ed. W. Stubbs, RS 1873, ii, pp. xc–xciv. For the date at which Roger entered the king’s service see below, pp. 213–14. Stubbs dated Arundel 69 to before 1213, ii, xi n. 3. See also D. Corner, ‘The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts of Roger of Howden’s “Chronica” ’, EHR 98, 1983, 297–310, here 298–9. Inner Temple 511.2 is dated ‘not before 1216’, and by implication very soon after then in Catalogue of Manuscripts in the Inner Temple, ed. J. Conway Davies, Oxford 1972, 207–10.

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himself as magister. According to this, on 1 June 1175 Henry II dispatched ‘unum de clericis suis, Rogerum de Hovendun nomine’, on a tour of a vacant churches, and Archbishop Richard of Canterbury sent ‘magistrum Rodbertum de Hinglisham, clericum suum’, with him.4 None the less Roger was described in the certificate issued by Archbishop Roger of York which instituted him as parson of Howden as a man of integrity and learning (‘honestatis ipsius et scientie’).5 The likelihood is that he was educated in the school at York. His connections with York were clearly very strong – and would affect much of what he wrote, not just his account of the quarrels involving Archbishop Geoffrey of York.6 It is to Frank Barlow that we owe the important first step in taking what was known about Roger beyond what had been known to Stubbs. More than fifty years ago now he added some facts of the sort generally considered crucial to any biography: the date of the subject’s death, i.e. perhaps late in 1201, certainly before Michaelmas 1202, and the identification of his father.7 The fact that, as Barlow proved, Roger’s narrative of 1201 was written when not far from his death lends an obvious sense to what Stubbs had already seen as an increasingly intense credulity.8 More significantly, Barlow not only showed that Roger succeeded his father Robert as parson of Howden, but also that he did so despite Alexander III having explicitly forbidden the granting of the church of Howden ‘to anyone at the behest of any lay power and in particular not to Roger son of the Robert who now holds it’.9 Either the pope had been ignored or he had been persuaded to change his mind, perhaps on the intervention of the king or archbishop. Evidently in the early 1170s Roger had powerful friends. The timing of his acquisition of the parsonage of Howden suggests that it was not, as had always been thought, Bishop Hugh du Puiset of Durham who was his patron at that time, but Roger of Pont L’Evêque, archbishop of York, Thomas Becket’s great enemy. After he acquired the parsonage he was a rich man.10 But we know little or nothing about his domestic or private life there. In his Itinerarium Kambrie Gerald de Barri tells a story that may or may not relate to Roger: In the church of Howden the tomb of St Osana, sister of King Osred, projected rather like a wooden seat, and one day the parson’s mistress rather rashly sat down on it. When she wished to get up, she discovered that her bottom was stuck to the wood and could not be freed. A crowd gathered, her clothes were torn, her body laid bare, and her blood flowed as she submitted to the fierce discipline of the lash. But not until she had suffered the penance, and had 4

5 6 7 8 9 10

Gesta, i, 91–3. Roger carried Henry’s letter summoning the electors of Norwich, Abingdon, Grimsby, Croyland, Thorney, St Benet of Hulme, Westminster, St Augustine’s at Canterbury, Battle, Hyde at Winchester, Abbotsbury, Muchelney ‘and some others’ to appear before him at Oxford on 24 June. If Roger himself visited all these and got back to Oxford by 24 June he must have ridden fast. In the event the vacancies were filled at a great council at Woodstock at the beginning of July. Most recently printed in EEA 20 York 1154–81, ed. Marie Lovatt, Oxford 2000, no. 17. J. Gillingham, ‘The Travels of Roger of Howden and his Views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh’, ANS 20, 1998, 155–6; repr. in my The English in the Twelfth Century, Woodbridge 2000, 74–5. Frank Barlow, ‘Roger of Howden’, EHR 65, 1950, 352–60. Chronica, iv, pp. ix–x. Papsturkunden in England, ed. W. Holtzmann, Berlin 1935, ii, no. 148. Combining this with the certificate of institution indicates a date of 1173–4 for Roger’s acquisition of Howden. For the parsonage’s ‘princely revenues’, Frank Barlow, Durham Jurisdictional Peculiars, Oxford 1950, 89.

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shown by her many tears and prayers that she was truly remorseful, was she freed by the divine hand and allowed to leave.11

The fact that Gerald tells this story only in the third version of the Itinerarium, written c. 1214, and not in an earlier edition composed while Roger was still alive, makes it tempting to speculate that it does relate to Roger in some way. But in what way? Is this a tale about Roger’s mistress? Or about his father’s mistress, even Roger’s own mother? Perhaps all that can be said is that there is nothing in his writings to suggest that Roger himself was particularly troubled about the sexual and marital life of the clergy.12 But if we do not have the information to write a biography in the sense of relating the public to the private man, we can at least attempt to use it and his writings to relate two different sides of the public one, the chronicler and the royal clerk. As a royal clerk whose work remains the most important single source for the administrative and constitutional history of the reigns of Henry II and Richard I, Roger has long been regarded as a civil service historian – and still is. Robert Bartlett describes him as ‘the first civil service historian in English history whose work survives’; David Corner sees his chronicle as the work ‘of a committed bureaucrat’.13 Yet with their implications to the twentieth- or twenty-first-century ear of an office-bound existence, words such as ‘bureaucrat’ or ‘civil service historian’ are not the first terms that spring to mind if we consider the earliest known episode in Roger’s official career. In October 1174 the king in Normandy sent him to England, with instructions to go with Robert de Vaux, sheriff of Cumberland, to meet the brothers Uhtred and Gilbert of Galloway in order to draw them into the king’s service. But by the time they met Gilbert late in November, Uhtred was already dead and Gilbert accused of murdering him. Moreover the terms Gilbert offered involved renouncing his allegiance to King William of Scotland and expecting Henry to protect him. The two envoys decided they could not make such an agreement until they had spoken with Henry himself. When they did so, he was against making any sort of peace with the Galwegians.14 Envoys such as these were men who were required to ride hard and at journey’s end were expected to speak effectively, exercising political skill and judgement. They needed the qualities attributed by Jordan Fantosme to two of King William’s envoys, William de Saint-Michel and Robert de Huseville: ‘both wise men; they have often and in difficult times given proof of courage; they are skilled in

11 12

13 14

Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 24–5. Apart from prohibitions contained within documents of ecclesiastical legislation that Roger copied verbatim, I think that the subject only comes up once, in 1181 when, at urging of King Henry, the archbishop of Canterbury ordered the clergy of Lincoln to give up their mistresses, Gesta, i, 280. This may have been an oblique comment on the fact that since 1173 the diocese of Lincoln had been under the care of its bishop-elect, Henry’s illegitimate son Geoffrey. In one of his few additions to the Historia post obitum Bedae, Roger summarised the nice, but utterly conventional, story of a saintly man, in this case Archbishop Thomas II of York, refusing sex when his doctors advised him that no other medicine would save his life, Chronica, i, 168–9. Robert Bartlett, England under the Norman and Angevin Kings 1075–1225, Oxford 2000, 631; entry on Roger of Howden in the Oxford DNB, xxviii, 463–4. Gesta regis, i, 80. For anti-Scottish feeling within Galloway at this time see Richard Oram, The Lordship of Galloway, Edinburgh 2000, 200ff.

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delivering appropriate speeches in powerful courts’. Sent to the court of Louis VII, they deliver their message ‘coolly and dispassionately so that the nobles of France understand it clearly’.15 Early in his ‘public’ career Roger had been entrusted with this kind of responsibility. In 1953 Lady Stenton published the charter that demonstrated that Roger, parson of Howden, was present at the siege of Acre. Thanks to this she was able to show not only that in 1191 Roger was still being entrusted with serious political and diplomatic responsibilities, since he evidently returned from crusade in the company of King Philip II of France, but also that he was the author of the Gesta regis Henrici et Ricardi previously known under the name of ‘Benedict of Peterborough’.16 Howden’s Chronica, it has been observed, contains ‘no direct biographical detail and little can be deduced from a narrative remarkable for its unimpassioned presentation of controversial events’.17 But in the Gesta not only did Roger mention himself twice, but at times a very different authorial voice emerges: passionate, involved, critical. In the Gesta, for example, he referred to the malice of the papal legates sent to deal with the aftermath of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1171. Rewritten in the 1190s the word malice has been omitted.18 In his account of the 1173 rebellion in the Gesta he wrote, ‘and now the fury of the traitorous English people exploded’, followed this up with a list of the names of traitors and of the castles they held, and ended with the comment that although many seemed to be loyal to Henry, they were so only prave et ficte. When in the 1190s he rewrote his account of the rebellion all this was left out. What makes the omission of the list of English traitors so pointed is the fact that he retained several other lists of ‘the traitors’ of 1173, of rebels from Brittany, Anjou, Normandy and Poitou, but not this one.19 By the 1190s the English historian had no wish to rake over old English sores. Even in the Chronica, Howden’s voice retained a critical edge when on the subject of the forest law. Thus he noted that in 1175 ‘the king sued all the clergy and laity of the kingdom who, during the war, had committed forest offences, and exacted fines from them all, even though Richard de Lucy warranted that those actions had been done with his and the king’s permission by a writ de ultra mare’. But this is dispassionate when compared with the Gesta’s much longer and more dramatic account of the council at which Henry’s voluntas overrode the protests of his own justiciar.20 In the Gesta he used strong language about the papal legate who allowed Henry to impose forest law on the English clergy: ‘Behold the limb of Satan! See how Satan’s satellite behaves! How suddenly, when he sees the wolf coming, the shepherd turns thief and abandons the flock committed to his care!’ Rewritten in the 1190s, he merely recorded what the

15 16 17 18 19 20

Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. and trans. R. C. Johnston, Oxford 1981, laisses, 37, 40 and cf. laisses 28–33. Doris M. Stenton, ‘Roger of Howden and Benedict’, EHR 68, 1953, 574–82. Barlow, ‘Roger of Howden’, 357. Cf. Stubbs, ‘a passionless, colourless narrative’, Chronica, i, p. lxix. But for qualification of this see below, p. 219. Gesta, i, 24; Chronica, ii, 28–9. Gesta, i, 47–9; Chronica, ii, 47–55. Gesta, i, 94; Chronica, ii, 79.

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legate did and made no comment.21 The wolf, of course, was Henry II, and the clergy to whose sufferings Roger in the Gesta drew particular attention were those of Yorkshire, above all of St Peter’s York; in the Chronica this local grievance has been edited out.22 The author of the Gesta was evidently perfectly capable of composing a dramatic narrative. Many examples could be chosen, but for reasons of space one will have to do.23 William of Keynes claimed that he held his barony not of Earl Robert of Leicester but directly of the king (in capite). He made this claim pravo usus consilio because he wanted to please the king who hated his lord. At the 1177 council of Northampton the earl listened to the claims and then, while protesting that they were false, chose not to dispute them but rather to throw himself, that barony and all his estates entirely on Henry’s mercy, saying he wished to do nothing against the king’s will. Henry II, knowing perfectly well the motives of the earl’s enemies and their reliance on his hatred of him, was moved to mercy and restored all his estates except Mountsorrel and Pacy. In the Rolls Series edition of the Gesta the events of the council take up a page; in the Chronica they were reduced to a single dry and laconic sentence that does not reveal where Roger’s sympathies had lain: ‘the king restored to Robert earl of Leicester all his lands on both sides of the sea, as he held them fifteen days before the war began, with the exception of the castles of Mountsorrel and Pacy’.24 It is tempting to associate the change in Roger’s tone with a change in the circumstances of his life. Having retired to his parsonage after Henry II’s death, he was no longer caught up in events and was able to take a cooler view. Like Stubbs, Lady Stenton believed that the absence of any mention of Howden in the government records of the 1190s meant that after his return from crusade he was no longer in ‘public service’.25 Yet by treating his crusade narrative as a journal of his travels she had opened up an alternative approach to his biography, and one which has since then been taken much further. In 1983 David Corner argued that Roger transferred to the service of Hugh du Puiset in September 1189 and returned to it again after his return from crusade. This hypothetical addition to Roger’s biography depended not on the discovery of new documents but purely and simply on the basis of close analysis of his narrative. This approach showed that Roger’s chronicles ‘can be used as evidence for the author’s nonhistoriographical activities at the times at which they were written, and how crucial such a knowledge of the chronicler’s other interests is to an understanding

21 22 23

24

25

Gesta, i, 105; Chronica, ii, 86. Gesta, i, 99. For another example compare the Gesta’s narrative of an 1175 episode in the troubled relationship between Henry II and his heir, the Young King, with the bland civil service minute that is the Chronica’s summary: Gesta, i, 82–3; Chronica, ii, 71. Gesta, i, 133–4; Chronica, ii, 118. Roger’s language does not suggest to me that the whole scene had been stage-managed in advance; if anything it suggests that the king himself was among the earl’s enemies who were outmanoeuvred that day by so theatrical a recognition of his royal dignity. Roger often alludes to Henry II’s enduring hatred for those – such as Earl Robert – who had rebelled in 1173–4. Stenton, ‘Roger of Howden and Benedict’, 581. He appears as a justice of the forest for the northern counties in the pipe rolls for 1184–5, 1186–7, 1188–9, and for the last time in 1189–90.

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of the historical record he produced’.26 In 1997 and 1999 I took this beautifully economical and circular method further still, arguing that Roger continued to serve as an envoy for both king and bishop – it would be a mistake to make a sharp distinction between the two – until shortly before his death.27 Yet the idea that at some stage Roger retired to his parsonage remains an attractive one.28 With so much more now available to write Roger’s biography, in the rest of this chapter I shall focus more directly than hitherto on the crucial question for the construction of a biography of whether or not he ever retired from public life. There is no doubt that in one respect Roger remained in 1201 what he had been ever since 1170: a chronicler dedicated to the court of the king of England. Alone among his contemporaries, he always made a note of where the king held his Christmas court. He did this for every year between 1169 and 1200, with just one exception – Christmas 1192, when he knew no more than that Richard was a prisoner in Germany.29 Not surprisingly it looks as though he was more accurately informed about the location of the king’s Christmas court when it was held in England than when the king was abroad.30 He also took a great deal of trouble to record the dates and places of almost every royal Channel crossing, beginning in 1170 when he noted that Henry II disembarked at Portsmouth on 3 March, and ending in 1201 when he noted that John embarked at Portsmouth on 14 May, landed on the Isle of Wight, and that although the queen entered another ship and sailed to Normandy, it was not until a few days later that John himself made the crossing.31 In all he recorded no less than twenty-eight Channel crossings, eighteen by Henry, four by Richard, six by John, and in many cases he gave both the exact date and ports of embarkation and disembarkation. The detail and consistency of his record is such as to suggest that there was something odd about those rare occasions, 1180, 1182 and 1200, when he did not.32

26

27

28

29 30

31 32

D. Corner, ‘The Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi and Chronica of Roger, Parson of Howden’, BIHR 56, 1983, 126–44, the quotation on 126. That he was actually a member of the bishop’s familia was doubted by G. V. Scammell, Hugh du Puiset, Cambridge 1956, 146–8, and more recently by M. G. Snape, EEA, Durham 1153–1195, Oxford 2002, p. xli. Gillingham, ‘The travels’, 157–62, 167; John Gillingham, ‘Historians without Hindsight: Coggeshall, Diceto and Howden on the Early Years of John’s Reign’, in King John: New Interpretations, ed. S. Church, Woodbridge 1999, 1–26. According to the Oxford DNB, the Chronica was written when Roger, having left the service of the king, was ‘much more regularly resident in his parish’. ‘He went on the Third Crusade before, it can be presumed, retiring to his Yorkshire parsonage’, Bartlett, England 1075–1225, 631. But he learned that the king spent Christmas 1193 at Speyer, Chronica, iii, 203–4, 228. Thus he seems to have been wrong about Christmas 1173 when he placed the court at Caen whereas Torigni had Bur (Gesta, i, 63, Torigni, 262), and about 1180 which he put at Le Mans whereas Torigni had Angers (Gesta, i, 269, Torigni, 294). He was certainly mistaken about the Christmas court of 1189 which he placed at Bur, whereas charter evidence indicates it was held at Lyons-la-Forêt (Landon, Itinerary of Richard I, 23), as indeed does Ambroise, History of the Holy War, ed. M. Ailes and M. Barber, Woodbridge 2003, lines 246–9 and hence also the Itinerarium, ed. W. Stubbs, RS 1864, Bk ii cap. 6. Gesta i, 3, Chronica, ii, 3, iv, 164. Roger’s rather full account of events in Normandy in July 1173, Gesta, i, 47–50, suggests that it is also odd that he – and Robert of Torigni – should have missed the flying visit to England that Henry is alleged, on the basis of entries in the pipe roll for 1172–3, to have made in that month. My inclination is to suspect that historians since R. W. Eyton have been misled by vagaries in exchequer accounting procedures. For discussion of this point I am indebted to Nicholas Vincent and Judith Everard.

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For the period up to 1189, this is no more than we might expect from the author of a ‘court diary’ for Henry II’s reign, but if in retirement in Yorkshire, how could he have obtained such detail about the king’s itinerary? No doubt quite easily. Walter Map described Henry I’s itinerary as characterised by ‘very regular changes, arranged long beforehand, and publicly known (communiter auditas . . .) thanks to the predictability of his journeyings (pro certitudine viarum suarum) a market was able to follow Henry I’s household and ensure that it was at all times well supplied’.33 This was evidently regarded as good practice, and one that Henry II was mostly – despite the notorious complaints of Peter of Blois – able to follow. We might imagine that after a Channel crossing the chancery announced that the king had just safely crossed the sea and gave notice of when and where he planned to hold major councils and courts during the next few months. No doubt with his good contacts among the king’s clerical staff, even in retirement Roger would have had access to the ‘court circular’.34 Yet there is one indication that in the early part of his career as a court chronicler he set a standard that he was unable to maintain. In the twelve years from 1170 to 1181 he recorded where the king held his Easter court in every year but three (1171, 1174 and 1180). After 1181, however, it was not until 1192 that he next recorded where the king held his Easter court – and this was a truly noteworthy occasion since that year the court and the army were in tents outside the ruined walls of Ascalon.35 That Roger should also record the Easter court at Northampton in 1194 is only to be expected since, as David Corner showed, he was there himself.36 Much less to be expected is the fact that he then recorded the place of the king’s Easter court for every one of the last four years of his life, from 1198 to 1201.37 He was much less assiduous about the other religious feasts. He noted the king’s Whitsun court just four times: 1175, 1177, 1179 and 1199; the events at Whitsuntide 1189 as Henry II’s position collapsed were so dramatic that Roger could not but record them.38 He noted Candlemas (the Purification of the Virgin Mary, 2 February) four times: 1170, 1175, 1177, and 1201.39 (I do not count his mentions of Candlemas 1191 and 1194 because in those years newsworthy events occurred that day.40) Given that he so rarely recorded where the king was at Candlemas, why did he trouble to make the perfunctory note – on the very first page of his chronicle (Gesta, i, 3) – that in 1170 ‘the king

33 34

35 36 37 38 39

40

Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. and trans. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors, Oxford 1983, 438. I owe the term ‘court circular’ to the inventiveness of Nicholas Vincent. As Stubbs noted, ‘the wonderful coincidences in chronological details which may be traced in contemporary writers who had no apparent communication with one another, as, for instance, Hoveden, Gervase and Ralph de Diceto’ imply ‘a publicity in the conduct of affairs, which we are accustomed to connect almost exclusively with the existence of newspapers’, Gesta, i, p. xiv. Chronica, iii, 180, Ambroise, lines 8409–20. Corner, ‘The Gesta Regis’, 143. Chronica, iv, 46, 87, 114, 160–1. Gesta, i, 91, 175, 240; ii, 66; Chronica, iv, 91. Gesta, i, 3, 81, 138; Chronica, iv, 157. The very thin evidence for Marian devotion at the courts of Henry II and his sons has been nicely fattened up in N. Vincent, ‘King Henry III and the Blessed Virgin Mary’, in The Church and Mary, ed. R. N. Swanson, Woodbridge 2004, 129–32. Gesta, ii, 155–6; Chronica, iii, 232–4.

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was at Sées for Candlemas’? Why indeed did he begin his historical record with the Christmas court of 1169? Was 2 February 1170 the date at which Roger became a royal clerk? But if the number of references to Candlemas and Whitsun courts is too small to do much with, this does not apply to Easter. The varying frequency with which he recorded Easter does not suggest a two-stage career divided at 1189x91. On the contrary it implies a more complex pattern in his relationship with the royal court – not as close in the 1180s as in the 1170s, and noticeably closer again towards the end of his life. Even during the 1170s, when he was at his most meticulous in recording Easter courts and when the Gesta most closely approaches the character of a court diary, there are gaps. Anne Duggan has pointed out that Roger’s confused and misdated account of the dramatic events at Avranches and Caen in May 1172 that marked Henry II’s reconciliation with the Church after Becket’s murder cannot have been the work of someone who was there.41 Sometimes we can see where Roger was during one of these gaps. The fact that he has nothing to say about events at court between 30 September 1174 and January 1175 fits well with his mission to Galloway. Can the fact that he missed the Easter courts for 1171 and 1174 be explained in a similar way? The Gesta itself suggests an obvious reason for the omission of Easter 1174. It is very detailed about events in the north of England during the first half of the year, including the campaigns waged by the army of Yorkshire and by Archbishop Roger of York’s military household, but brief and vague on what Henry II was doing in France.42 Evidently Roger was not at court and it may even be that in the turbulent political circumstances of the time no ‘court circular’ sent out in Normandy reached the north of England. Similarly his omission of the Easter court for 1171 is part of a long gap in Roger’s coverage of the king’s actions from those three days in January when, having heard of Becket’s murder, he ate nothing and spoke to no one, until 3 August 1171 when he landed at Portsmouth.43 What he does report for these months, and in some detail, is the embassy which Henry sent to the papal curia – a mission that included the archbishop of Rouen, the bishops of Lisieux, Evreux and Worcester, Richard Barre ‘et quidam alii de clericis et familiaribus regis’.44 This does not, of course, prove that Roger himself was attached to that mission. But he was evidently not at court. Equally if Roger was at or close to the royal court in 1180 it becomes difficult to explain why his annal for this year contains the uncharacteristically vague statement that Henry ‘crossed to Normandy before Easter’ and then no record of where the king was at Easter.45 Presumably the fact that in 1180 Alexander III

41 42 43

44 45

A. Duggan, ‘Ne in dubium: The Official Record of Henry II’s Reconciliation at Avranches, 21 May 1172’, EHR 115, 2000, 643–58. Gesta, i, 64–9. Gesta, i, 14, 24–5. Diceto gives 6 August as date of landing, Opera Historica, i. 347. For information on Henry’s vigorous actions in Normandy during the first seven months of 1171 we depend upon Torigni, 249–52. Gesta, i, 16–22. The next item contains news from Spain, which might well have been picked up at the curia, a clearing-house for news from all over Latin Christendom. Gesta, i, 245.

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made Roger, archbishop of York, legate for Scotland means that envoys from the archbishop had gone to the curia. It looks as though the controversial question of York’s authority over the Scottish church had again become urgent as a result of the disputed election to St Andrews.46 In this situation it is hard to imagine how Archbishop Roger would not have sent, with the king’s approval, an envoy to the curia. Roger of Howden, with his experience in the business of Galloway and his allegiance to both king of England and archbishop of York – both of whom claimed some kind of superiority over Scotland – would have been an obvious choice. As it happens, from 1180 onwards the Gesta and Chronica contain the texts of numerous papal letters relating to the affairs of the Scottish church and one way of explaining their presence there would be that Roger himself had been involved in procuring them. Of course a royal clerk who remained at Henry II’s court would also be in a good position to obtain copies of such letters; after all, in 1180 Alexander III also wrote to Henry, asking him to persuade the king of Scotland to back down.47 But then why the omission of the Easter court and the vagueness about the Channel crossing? It is what Roger does not say that is often most revealing.48 In many respects Roger’s entry for 1182 is similar. It makes no mention of the Easter court and gives only an approximate date for the king’s transfretation.49 Indeed the whole annal contains only two precise dates: Lucius III’s absolution of King William of Scotland at Rome on 11 March and his consecration of John Cumin as archbishop of Dublin on 21 March at Velletri.50 The dispute over St Andrews continued to rumble on throughout the year and into 1183; most likely Roger was at the curia again during 1182–3 (presumably sent there by Henry II since Archbishop Roger died on 21 November 1181).51 The king of England would have insisted on providing escorts for men who travelled through his realm on Scottish business.52 The parsonage of Howden was very conveniently situated for a clerk going to and fro between the English court and Scotland. Taken as a whole, the structure of the Gesta suggests that in the 1180s Roger, while still in the king’s service, was away from court more often than he had been in the 1170s. It is not evident that the content and tone of Roger’s writings changed significantly in the 1190s. True, he was increasingly concerned with events in northern 46

47 48

49 50 51

52

Hence Alexander instructed Archbishop Roger to impose an interdict on Scotland and excommunicate King William unless the king accepted John ‘the Scot’ as the properly elected bishop of St Andrews, Gesta, i, 263–4. Gesta, i, 263, 265–6. See also Gillingham, ‘The Travels’, 159–61 (The English in the Twelfth Century, 79–81). As Lady Stenton pointed out, until the discovery that Roger was on his way to Acre at the time, it had ‘never been easy to understand why neither Benedict nor Howden made any attempt to indicate clearly the course of events in England in the early part of 1191’, Stenton, ‘Roger and “Benedict” ’, 578. The account of Henry’s hopes and mood as he waited for a fair wind suggests that for this crossing Roger’s source was a good story rather than an official record, Gesta, i, 285. Gesta, i, 286–7. Gesta, i, 289–90, 293–4. For Roger at the curia in 1183 see J. Gillingham, ‘Events and Opinions: Norman and English Views of Aquitaine c.1154–c.1204’, in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine, ed. C. Leglu and M. Bull, Woodbridge 2005, 79–81. See Gesta, i, 264 for a papal legate travelling to Scotland ‘cum conductu domini regis Angliae’, and Chronica, iii, 244–5 for Roger’s detailed knowledge of the arrangements for escorting and entertaining the king of the Scots in England.

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England. But in part this was simply because more seemed to be happening there, most disturbingly the massacre of the Jews of York in March 1190.53 What really turned out to have continuing news value, however, was the appointment of Geoffrey as archbishop of York in 1189. Even a chronicler who remained at court throughout the 1190s would inevitably have learned a great deal about events at York and Durham thanks to Geoffrey’s extraordinary gift for quarrelling with kings, bishops and the canons of his own cathedral. These northern quarrels figured prominently in the politics of both royal and papal court until the end of Roger of Howden’s life and beyond.54 On the other hand some of the detail in his descriptions of incidents in and around York Minster is more readily explicable if he was himself nearby at the time. From 1189 up to the death of Hugh du Puiset there are three periods when it looks as though he was based in the north: the first from July 1189 to June 1190;55 the second between January and September 1194;56 and finally from January 1195 until Bishop Hugh’s death at Howden on 3 March 1195.57 And after Hugh’s death? Roger probably remained in the north until Archbishop Hubert Walter’s visit to York, which he reported in detail, in June 1195.58 But his entry for 1195, full of Yorkshire and Durham items for the first half of the year, contains nothing similar dated between 15 June and Christmas. We now know that he went to Scotland. Archie Duncan has shown that a Melrose charter witnessed by Roger of Howden can be place-dated to Melrose in the autumn of 1195. Indeed he demonstrated that Roger was now a canon of Glasgow, presumably a consequence of his long involvement with Scottish politics.59 Roger’s report of Hubert Walter’s presence at York at Christmas and at Northallerton on 29 December 1195, when Philip of Poitou was elected bishop of Durham, suggests that he had by then returned to England, doubtless to report developments in Scotland to the minister ruling England.60

53

54

55

56

57 58 59 60

Gesta, ii, 107–9. Between 1170 and 1189 only the rebellion and Scottish invasions of 1173–4 and (perhaps) the death of Archbishop Roger of York can be said to have brought incidents in the north of England into ‘national’ prominence. Thus Geoffrey’s refusal to install the king’s choices as dean and treasurer of York until he had himself received the pallium ensured that as the royal court travelled to Canterbury, Dover and France in the winter of 1189–90 the turbulent politics of York Minster went with it, Gesta, ii, 91–2, 99–101. These quarrels still figure largely in the last pages that Roger wrote in his own hand, Chronica, iv, 174–5. Except for those weeks when he accompanied Bishop Hugh of Durham to the coronation (September 1189) and to Canterbury and Dover (December 1189). On Howden in Hugh’s retinue at Dover in December 1189 see D. Crook, ‘The Archbishopric of York and the Extent of the Forest in Nottinghamshire in the Twelfth Century’, in Law and Government in Medieval England and Normandy, ed. G. Garnett and J. Hudson, Cambridge 1994, 330. For Roger’s movements in spring and June 1194 see Corner, ‘Gesta Regis’, 143–4. In 1192, after his return from crusade, he may have followed Hugh du Puiset to France and then gone on to the curia again, Gesta, ii, 240–6, Chronica, iii, 170, 172. Ibid., iii, 278–85. Ibid., iii, 284–5, 293–8. A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Roger of Howden and Scotland, 1187–1201’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, ed. Barbara Crawford, Edinburgh 1999, 135–59, 139. Chronica, iii, 308. For Roger’s part in the negotiations for a marriage between Richard I’s nephew Otto and King William’s daughter Margaret – negotiations which he alone reported – see Gillingham, ‘The Travels’, 157–8 (The English in the Twelfth Century, 77–8).

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From this point onwards the frequency of his references to incidents at Durham, as well as to the rights of the bishop and priory of Durham, suggests that Roger was closer to the new bishop than he had been to Bishop Hugh.61 Under 1196, for example, he recorded the ordination of Philip as priest at Durham on 15 June 1196, the grant of a mint at Durham, and the promotions showered upon Philip’s nephew Aimeri later that year. For 1198 he noted no less than five items of local business involving either Bishop Philip of Durham, or his nephew Archdeacon Aimeri.62 Other items of Philip of Durham’s business, some fairly inconsequential such as where he spent the Easter of 1201 (St Jean d’Angély on his way to Compostella) are recorded for 1199, 1200 and 1201.63 It has been plausibly argued that Bishop Philip must have been one of Howden’s informants.64 But being close to the bishop of Durham does not necessarily mean that he stayed in the north. Whereas Hugh du Puiset had become a great regional magnate, with ambitions of being the justiciar of the north, Philip of Poitou, the companion of Richard’s crusade and captivity, was one of the king’s closest advisers and his interests remained international. He headed embassies to Rome in 1197 and to Germany in 1198.65 Roger’s entries for the years 1196 to 1200 are full of news from abroad. The bulk of the long annal for 1196 deals with the war in France and events in Scotland. Although episodes in the quarrel between Archbishop Geoffrey and his chapter also figure prominently, they all took place either at the papal curia, or at the king’s court in France, or at the court of Hubert Walter in England, usually London.66 The entry for 1197 is almost entirely concerned with the business of the king’s court and ‘foreign affairs’ – events in France, Italy, Ireland, the German crusade and the death of Henry VI – and contains not a single event that took place in the north of England. The fact that in 1198 Roger began that sequence of four years when he again recorded where the king held his Easter court points to a renewal of close contact with the government that is borne out by the rest of his long entry for that year.67 His entry for 1199 is dominated by the business of the great courts, first Richard’s, then John’s, finally Pope Innocent III’s. There are certainly a few items of northern business which could well reflect eyewitness reports – for example his description of the exultant mood in which the canons of York returned from a visit to the king’s court in 1198.68 On the other hand the five items of Durham business in 1198 do not suggest he spent long in the north – only one, the bishop’s blessing of the abbots of Sallay and Byland at Howden on 11 October 1198, is precisely dated.69 Of the other four we are told only that they occurred ‘in this same

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62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

When writing about Hugh his tone was generally cool, but he evidently admired the bishop’s stand against Henry II over the matter of Archbishop Roger’s bequests to the poor and sick, Gesta, i, 289, Chronica, ii, 265–6, and probably grew closer to him at this time. Chronica, iv, 9–10, 13–14, 39–40, 55, 68–70, 77. Ibid., iv, 91, 117, 140, 157, 161, 174. Corner, ‘The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts’, 309. Chronica, iv, 16–17, 37–9. Ibid., iii, 308–19; iv, 7–9, 15. Ibid., iv, 37–79, 46 for the Easter court. Ibid., iv, 44–5. Ibid., iv, 77.

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year’.70 Roger’s contacts with Bishop Philip are at least as likely to have occurred at court as in the north. If he were away from England for prolonged periods during 1196–8, it would help to explain the structure of his entries for these years, the mistakes he made about events in England and Normandy and his remarkable account of the circumstances of the election of Pope Innocent III.71 The death of Richard brought to the throne a king who took the court to the north with unprecedented frequency. This left its imprint on Roger’s chronicle. When he tells us that on 25 January 1201 King John stayed at Cottingham with William de Stuteville, next day with John Crassus at Beverley, and that he had one of Archbishop Geoffrey of York’s servants arrested because he had refused to let the king have any of the archbishop’s wines, we are reminded of how close Beverley and Cottingham are to Howden.72 Yet his account of John’s visit to York in 1200, indeed of the entire trip to England, is astonishingly short and vague: Meanwhile John king of England crossed from Normandy to England, and took an aid of 3 shillings from each carucate throughout England. And in Lent King John came to York, hoping that William king of Scots would come to him, as he had ordered; but the king of Scots did not come and the king of England returned to Normandy.73

Why did the recorder of royal Channel crossings give absolutely no details, neither dates nor places, of John’s crossings in February and April 1200? Evidently he was not in England or Normandy; the probability is that he was once again at the papal court.74 As for the reluctant King of Scots, he finally came to John’s court at Lincoln in November 1200; Roger’s report bears all the marks of an eyewitness account.75 From this point until its end in the summer of 1201 his chronicle reads like the work of a man based in Yorkshire, but whether he can ever be said to have ‘retired’ seems very doubtful.76 There is much to be said for seeing the last thirty years or so of Roger of Howden’s life as a coherent whole. He served three kings, Henry II, Richard and John, and three prelates, Roger of Pont L’Evêque, Hugh du Puiset and Philip of Poitou.77 His leading role on the 1174 mission to Galloway suggests that he already had some experience of royal embassies, perhaps acquired as early as 1171. He continued to be employed as an envoy until nearly the end of his life.

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Ibid., iv, 39–40, 55, 68–70. This is also the way he dated the grant of a mint at Durham, and the promotions showered upon Philip’s nephew Aimeri in 1196, as well the dispute between King William and Bishop Philip about rebuilding the bridge over the river Tweed in 1199, Chronica, iv, 13–14, 97–8. J. Sayers, Innocent III, London 1994, 8, 25; Gillingham, ‘Travels’, 165–6 (The English in the Twelfth Century, 87–8). Chronica, iv, 156–7. Ibid., iv, 107. At least he noted that John spent Easter at Worcester, ibid., iv, 114. Gillingham, ‘Historians without Hindsight’, 15–21. Chronica, iv, 140–2. He may well have been involved in escorting the king from and back to Scotland. He probably visited Scotland again at or soon after Easter 1201 and then travelled to Portsmouth in May, ibid., 18–19. ‘From the beginning of his career to its end, Roger always served two masters, the king and a powerful prelate. In this he was presumably no different from other royal clerks’, Gillingham, ‘Travels’, 167 (The English in the Twelfth Century, 89).

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Over time he built up a considerable expertise in the field of Anglo-Scottish relations. He became a canon of Glasgow and began to note where the King of Scots held his Christmas and Easter courts. Not surprisingly he began to take a more sympathetic view of the Scots, and of Scottish aspirations for independence, than he had shown when he was in the service of Archbishop Roger.78 If there was a turning point in his life and thought it was not the death of Henry II or Hugh du Puiset, but his participation in the Third Crusade in 1190–91. His own crusading experience meant that his views of those who did – or, like Henry II, did not – fulfil their crusading vows took on a new significance, and a sharper edge.79 Consider his record of where the kings of England and France spent Christmas Day 1191: Richard, king of England, in the land of Jerusalem at Al Turun des Chevales . . . Philip, king of France, having returned from the land of Jerusalem without completing his vow, spent that same day in the midst of his own dominions at Fontainebleau, safe and sound and shamelessly boasting that he was about to lay waste the lands of the king of England.80

His opinion of Philip did not mellow. In his entry for 1196 he composed a ferocious attack on him, of which the following is just a part. Philip, king of France, doomed to wickedness, prompt to imperil his soul, ready for crime, indifferent to the cause of the innocent, repudiates all justice, confounds right and wrong. He makes vice his companion, hates equity, loves iniquity, lives by slaughter, fortifies himself with bloodshed, reigns in cruelty, settles everything by death, nothing by love.81

As this passage indicates, despite what I wrote above (pp. 210–11), the character of his writing did not change much. In the 1190s his commentary on contemporary events remained passionate, involved and critical, just as it had been in the 1170s. He even criticised the all-powerful Hubert Walter more openly than any one other than Gerald de Barri.82 He often criticised Archbishop Geoffrey;

78

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81 82

Ibid., 161–2 (81–3). This explains his interest in trivial details about bishops of Glasgow. It is striking that a long section of his chronicle filled with information about events in England after the coronation of John and his new wife on 8 October 1200, nearly all of it written in his own hand, is preceded by an item recording the ordination as priest and then consecration as bishop of Glasgow of William Malvaisin at Lyons on 23 and 24 September 1200, Chronica, iv, 139–46, 156–75. However his strong reaction to the news of Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 suggests that he already felt the pull of the cross, Gesta, ii, 10–28. J. Gillingham, ‘Roger of Howden on Crusade’, in Medieval Historical Writing in the Christian and Islamic Worlds, ed. P. M. Holt, SOAS 1982, 60–75; reprinted in J. Gillingham, Richard Coeur de Lion, London 1994, 141–53. Gesta, ii, 235. When he wrote this, in 1192, he still believed that Jerusalem would be recovered. By the time he composed his account of the crusade in the Chronica he knew what its outcome was, and he blamed the French: ‘The king of England offered to vow to stay there until Jerusalem was taken, and he asked the French and the whole army to swear the same oath. But the duke of Burgundy and the French replied that they would not, nor would they remain in that land any longer, but would leave as quickly as they could, as their lord the king of France had commanded them’, Chronica, iii, 182–3, cf. 175. Ibid., iv, 4. Ibid., iv, 6, 12–13. On this see my ‘The Historian as Judge: William of Newburgh and Hubert Walter’, EHR 119, 2004, 1275–87.

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he sometimes criticised the canons of York. He judged men by their actions, so his opinions of them changed from case to case. The same was true of his opinions of kings. Although a royal clerk, he did ‘not write primarily to praise or justify the deeds of Henry II or Richard (though he approves of Richard the crusader)’.83 How then did the notion develop that he was a dour and detached author? Because when in the 1190s in the early sections of the Chronica he turned his hand to history, he took a much calmer view of the events of the 1170s than he had as contemporary chronicler. For many generations this ‘historical’ Roger of Howden was the one modern historians got to know. Not until readers were halfway through the third volume of the four-volume Rolls Series edition of the Chronica did they reach his contemporary chronicle of the years after 1192, and by this time an impression of his dullness had been firmly lodged. Since we have known that he was also the author of the Gesta, things have begun to change.84 Recently he has even been bracketed together with William of Malmesbury and William of Newburgh – not something imaginable fifty years ago – as an author who combined ‘an insatiably inquisitive mind, a well-developed critical sense, and the gift of writing lucid Latin prose’.85 But his strongly held views on the world of politics, unlike theirs, were informed by a lifetime of governmental experience in a role that took him to many different parts of Western Europe and the Mediterranean. In the life of the most widely travelled of all English medieval historians career and writings were vitally interrelated.86

83 84 85 86

Bartlett, England 1075–1225, 631. Although the murder of Becket meant that, as a man who owed much to Roger of Pont L’Evêque, he had to tread cautiously when composing the early sections of the Gesta. Bartlett, England 1075–1225, 616. Since this paper was written a powerful case has been made for identifying Roger as the author of three more works which reflect his wide geographical interests, his maritime knowledge and the extent of his travels: Expositio mappe mundi, Liber nautarum, and De viis maris. In De viis maris the description of ports and routes from eastern England to the eastern Mediterranean begins at York with a detailed account of the dangers of navigation on the Ouse and Humber. See Patrick Gautier Dalché, Du Yorkshire à l’Inde. Une ‘Géographie’ urbaine et maritime de la fin du XIIe siècle (Roger de Howden?), Geneva 2005.

15 Writing a Biography in the Thirteenth Century: The Construction and Composition of the ‘History of William Marshal’ DAVID CROUCH

T

HE WRITING of biography was not a major medieval preoccupation; unfortunately no-one told the biographer of William Marshal this when he began his work in 1224. Which is just further evidence for me that historians are born, not made. We have to begin with the Marshal biography’s uniqueness. There is no trace of any other twelfth- or thirteenth-century vernacular biography, in prose or verse. For the History there is no question of its genre . . . or barely any. It is unique in its survival, but I believe it was unique in its own day too. There was of course a contemporary Latin genre of biography with a pedigree going back to Suetonius, and there are a number of examples of it from the Marshal’s own lifetime. But the biographer of William Marshal did not live in the mannered world of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance; his work was barely influenced by its conventions. The only genre that did unmistakably influence the author was that of the roman d’aventure. This is the romance, sometimes a generational romance, based on the life-story of an imaginary or pseudo-historical hero. It is a genre which surfaces in northern France in the second half of the twelfth century as a mannered development from the more formidable epic tales such as those of William of Orange or Raoul de Cambrai. Such works include Chrétien de Troyes’ Cligés, Walter of Arras’s Ille et Galeron, and the curious Anglocentric romance of Gui of Warwick, all composed during the period from 1170 to 1200. Their influence was not, however, on the History of William Marshal’s overall construction, only on the manner of its expression. There is some evidence that the History’s author was aware of the parallels between his biography and the fictional lives of the heroes of the romance, and was possibly amused by them; but his professed methodology excluded the adoption and adaptation of fictional episodes from fictional lives. He did, however, write his work for performance – and according to one throwaway line, an evening performance – so he is continually employing the romancer’s trick of pausing to address his audience in the first person.

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His digressions about generosity, chevalerie and loyalty are more or less standard for the genre. But he differs radically from the romancer’s usual stock in his allusions to contemporary events and characters; in his commentary on the changes in aristocratic life since the Marshal’s youth, and in his assessments of historical characters. What we know of this singular man, the author of the History, is that he was called John. The rest can be summed up in a few sentences. Tony Holden’s opinion, based on the sort of French he used, is that he was originally from the Touraine, or lived there long enough for its French dialect to become his own.1 The intimate and detailed knowledge that he betrays of the topography of the city of Le Mans indicates that he knew the place well and goes some way to confirm that he had been a subject of the count of Anjou. But he also knew the duchy of Normandy, particularly the Seine valley, so we can suggest that before the 1220s he had travelled extensively in the former lands of the king of England in France. He calls himself a trouvère, meaning that he practised poetry for a living. He was clearly not a clerk, although there is some good evidence that he was literate in Latin. His theological knowledge was confined to a few commonplace scriptural allusions which he picked up at second hand; he shows a secular indifference to all but a few aspects of his subject’s spirituality. Only the Marshal’s stay in the Holy Land vaguely piqued his curiosity. He was a layman, and a layman well-versed in the vernacular literature of his time: he alludes to works like the Foraging of Gaza, the Romance of Alexander, to the Arthurian cycle, and (more curiously) to the Romance of Guy of Warwick. Whether he was a good poet is difficult for a historian to say. Anglo-Norman literary specialists (with the exception of the late Professor Legge) seem unimpressed with his abilities in verse and imagery, and I cannot really comment.2 It has been assumed in the past, by me amongst others, that he was of the same generation as the Marshal’s senior household associates. This encouraged Dominica Legge’s spurious identification of John the poet with John of Earley, the Marshal’s household banneret and eventual executor. John does on occasion speak of events in the 1180s as if he he had been there himself, and in his brief description of the Marshal’s physical appearance calls up memories of him as a youngish man, with brown hair. At first sight, therefore, he would seem to have been a man in (at least) his mid-fifties when he wrote. But there is other evidence. The most telling point is that his independent knowledge of events in recent Anglo-Norman history was quite abysmal. He cannot provide any personal context for what others have told him of events, even in the reign of John, and this is not what one would expect of a well-travelled Frenchman in his fifties or sixties. I now incline

1

2

See the edition of The History of William Marshal, ed. A. Holden and D. Crouch, trans. S. Gregory, Anglo-Norman Text Society, Occasional Publications Series 4–6, 2002–6. Reference is to the editorial material in vol. 3, which is yet to appear and in which full references for the argument of this chapter will be provided. Various forms of this paper were given at the Thirteenth-Century England Conference, University of Durham, Monday 6 September 1999, at the Medieval Seminar at Sheffield University, 5 November 2002, and at the Conference, ‘The Limits of Medieval Biography’ at Exeter University, 11 July 2003. I thank all those who offered criticism and advice on those occasions. M. D. Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background, Oxford 1963, 306.

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to the view that he was of the generation of the younger Marshal, a man in his thirties, who projected himself into the action he reported in sympathy with his informants, and for the sake of immediacy and dramatic effect. So we have this John, a Frenchman of the Loire valley in his late twenties or thirties, and a poet with (presumably) a respectable reputation, who was commissioned to write a Life of the late Earl William Marshal of Pembroke. We know that he was commissioned, and by whom, because he tells us as much in the colophon to his work. The late Marshal’s eldest son William and his executor and former associate, John of Earley, asked the author to commence his work, and supported him while he did it, so he tells us himself. When did they do so? The absence of any memoir from the late Countess Isabel, the Marshal’s widow, who died in 1220, tells us that the author did not start work immediately after the old Marshal’s death. The great Paul Meyer, the first editor of the text, provides the best clue. He noted that the section of the work at lines 1577–80 refers to the treachery of the barons of Poitou against their lords as if it were referring to a scandal of the writer’s time (by which he might be referring to the surrender by the Poitevins of La Rochelle to Louis VIII of France on 3 August 1224).3 Now in that year the second Earl William left the mainland of Britain, arriving in Waterford on 19 June, and he resided in his Irish lordships for two years, returning in 1226, in or soon after June. If Meyer’s assumption is correct, we might suggest that the earl and John of Earley decided to commission the History – a project which they had doubtless been discussing for some time already – at some time in 1224 before the earl crossed to Ireland. Indeed, it might even be suggested that the commissioning of the History was one aspect of the earl’s need to put his affairs in order before he departed to Ireland for an indeterminate period.4 It is reasonable to assume that the author, John, met and discussed the project with the earl and his namesake, John of Earley, before the earl’s departure, both to ascertain what sort of work his patron wanted, and to take down any reminiscences of the old Marshal that the earl and his household could offer. If you accept Meyer’s point about the Poitevin reference in lines 1577–80, it would indicate that the author was already at work on the early sections of the History in the second half of 1224. Why was the commission issued to John the poet? Again, a difficult question. There could be numerous explanations. Simple filial piety would certainly be at the root of the business. Reaction to the grief of bereavement might be another consideration, even though the work was not started immediately after the Marshal’s death in 1219. After all, the project might have been mooted long before commission was issued and the poet found. The work undoubtedly had direct political causes, as being a brief for the defence of the deceased Marshal against his living detractors. A very big theme of the author is the unimpeachable loyalty and faithfulness of his hero – often doubted, ever vindicated – and this preoccupation

3 4

For this campaign, D. A. Carpenter, The Minority of King Henry III, London 1990, 370–1. Carpenter, Minority, 356, points out that both Earl William and John of Earley were at work before he left for Ireland, settling problems arising from the elder Marshal’s will.

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tells us quite clearly that it was precisely that loyalty and faithfulness which was being impeached in the 1220s. A generation later, Matthew Paris tells us that the Marshal’s posthumous reputation was not unmixed, and reports particularly an occasion when Henry III is said to have upbraided the younger Marshal for what he was pleased to call the old man’s treachery in letting the future Louis VIII escape the trap in which he was caught in London in 1217. There was much else that was questionable in the old Marshal’s conduct of his affairs. A prime concern in the first third of the work is to argue against the charges that Marshal profiteered on the tournament fields of the 1170s to the extent that he neglected his prime duty as minder to the Young King Henry. Just as prominent is the defence of Marshal’s relationship with Philip Augustus after 1204. The biography devotes much space to exculpate its hero from charges of disloyalty to King John in the period immediately after his loss of Normandy. The prepared line of the Marshals on the way the elder William retained his Norman lands was that King John had given him unequivocal permission to do homage to King Philip as his chief lord in France. In 1220, in correspondence with King Philip, William Marshal the younger said just that in his father’s defence and, five years later, so also said the author of the History.5 In the History of his father, we are, I think, hearing the younger William Marshal’s protests against his father’s posthumous detractors. There may indeed have been other motives for commissioning the History, of which we know nothing. The appropriate time for the recall of a life in a liturgical society such as that of the thirteenth century was during an anniversary feast. I doubt that the History was intended – as it has been suggested that Suger’s Life of Louis the Fat was intended – to be read out in a monastic refectory during the king’s anniversary banquet. The Marshal History was not a pious work in that sense. But it might have been intended for the family’s secular celebrations in hall in the evening after they attended an anniversary mass in one of houses in the Marshal’s advocacy: indeed, the author talks of it being performed ‘this evening’. But the one motive which I think we can discount is that it was commissioned to fulfil society’s expectation that a son would promote his dead father’s memory in a verse memorial. The History is not an example of a genre of aristocratic biography. Paul Meyer thought that it was the lone survivor of just such a genre, but cannot indeed name any other survivor, other than a library catalogue reference to an alleged biography of William Longespée, earl of Salisbury, which on investigation turns out to have been no more than a copy of the known verse poem on the battle of Masourah, where Longespée’s grandson died. As I have said already, the History was unique in its generation. It will always remain something of a mystery that it was ever written at all. That it took the shape it

5

The Marshal’s son, in 1220, came out with the declaration that his father had done homage to Philip ‘having with him letters of the king of England’, see Cartulaire normand de Philippe-Auguste, Louis VIII, St-Louis et Philippe-le-Hardi, ed. L. Delisle, Société des antiquaires de Normandie, 1852, 43. The author of the History (writing five or so years later, while the issue is still very much a live one) implies much the same with his story of John’s words of permission to the Marshal in April 1205 to do homage to Philip, see History, lines 12958–66.

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did cannot I think be due to anything other than the eccentricity of its patron, and the innate historical talent of its author. Its author was settled somewhere in the summer of 1224, and was left to get on with his unique commission. I think we can be reasonably confident as to where he was put up, and that was in the Marshal lordship of Lower Gwent. There are several reasons for believing this. Firstly because it was the Marshal lordship nearest to Ireland, where Earl William (and later his brother Richard) were to be found during the period of composition, 1224 to 1226. We know of the presence of a fleet of Marshal ships based at Chepstow by which the younger Marshal commanded the Bristol Channel, and presumably communicated with Leinster, so Chepstow was the place in most immediate communication with the absent patron. Secondly, it is because of the large number of references to events and personalities associated with Lower Gwent and its immediate vicinity in the History. The biggest cluster of families mentioned in the History (the Bloets, Scudamores, Berkeleys, Columbières, Caerleons, the Avenels, the Musards and Rochfords) belong to Lower Gwent or Gloucestershire. Also, the author is well clued in to the history of the struggle between the Marshals and the native dynasty of Morgan ap Hywel over possession of Caerleon, and gives a long aside over the war between William Marshal and Morgan in 1217. It can be no coincidence that throughout the period of the author’s composition, and especially while he was at work on his final sections in the summer of 1226, the younger Marshal was pursuing his claims and eventually recovered Caerleon against Morgan in the curia regis.6 Thirdly, as I will be exploring later, there is reason to believe that the Marshal family archive was located in Lower Gwent, and I suggest that one of the author’s principal sources was that very archive. And lastly, there is the fact that the only Latin historical work that the author is known to have used was, in the 1220s, in the library of Gloucester abbey, on the other side of Dean from Chepstow. So let us imagine John settled into a chamber in Chepstow castle, with a nice outlook from the cliff top over the slow, brown river Wye and the water meadows beyond. Following Meyer’s reasoning, he did get stuck straight in, and was drafting verses as early as the autumn of 1224. By February 1225, only six months later, a huge burst of enthusiasm had brought him up to line 15,000 of an eventual 19,000-line poem, up to the elder Marshal’s Irish exile and the battle of Bouvines. But the flow died away, and he wrote little or nothing for quite a while, and his first phase of composition peters out in a genealogical aside about the Marshal’s childen and their marriages. By March/April 1226 he was working again and had passed line 16250. He was at line 17250 during the summer of the

6

Morgan lost Caerleon to the Marshals until 1223, when it was taken into the king’s hands, and then restored again to the Marshals in 1226. Morgan recovered it against Earl Richard Marshal in 1236 when he was able to exploit the difficulties the earl had caused the king and held the castle until his death in 1248, Patent Rolls, 1216–25, 352, 363; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1232–47, 26, 160; Close Rolls, 1234–37, 350, 374, 381; Excerpta e Rotulis Finium ii, 31. The fact that the author makes such a feature of the Marshal family’s right to possess Caerleon may well indicate that he was writing at a time just before or just after its recovery by Earl William Marshal (II) in August 1226, Patent Rolls, 1225–32, 59.

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same year, and the renewed activity may have something to do with the impending return of his patron from Ireland. Material in the text that could be described as the young Earl William’s recollections of the Lincoln campaign might indicate that he completed or revised much of that passage (lines 16224–17030) in the early or late summer of 1226, after the earl’s return. The extensive treatment of the deathbed scene (lines 17948–18978) certainly includes details which indicate the young earl was one of the author’s chief sources, as possibly also does the reports it contains of posthumous tributes to the elder Marshal at the French court. This and other evidence (notably a commemorative notice late in the text of the recently departed Earl William Longespée, who died in March 1226) indicate that the author had finished at least the first draft of his work in the summer or early autumn of 1226. How had he found his material? This is the question I want to ponder during the rest of this chapter. The origins of some of his material are quite fascinating to speculate on. He had no easy task. No-one was alive in the mid 1220s who remembered the early career of William Marshal, and indeed, the author could not employ living witnesses of any time earlier than the 1180s, when William Marshal was already approaching late middle age. A lesser man might then have simply glossed over the first half of the Marshal’s life and taken him up in midcareer. Not so John, our author. He clearly felt the need to tell the whole story of a life, if he must write a biography. And it may be that the more obscure the period the more determined he was to penetrate it. He had the historian’s talent to make every speck of evidence tell. His patrons might well have insisted on this in any case, but no amount of insistence could have produced the devoted exploitation of the unlikely source material John used. When we look for the author’s use of documentary sources, it soon becomes very clear that he had one special and almost unique source, especially for the early period. For various reasons, which will be made clear, that source can only be a Marshal family archive containing several classes of document. This is first hinted at by the section lines 3379–3424, a curious interlude which tells us of a tournament partnership the Marshal consented to enter into with the Flemish knight, Roger de Jouy, by which they split their takings which, as the author assures us, amounted to 103 captured knights between the Whitsuntide and Lent of a particular year. How did he know, and how could he be so precise? The transaction was written down – we are told – by Wigan, the clerk of the Marshal’s then master, the Young King, perhaps as a piece of private job-work. Wigan is a clerk whose existence is otherwise witnessed by Exchequer records. The only deduction can be that the author had in front of him the old account rotulet in which Wigan the clerk recorded the self-same transaction, which the Marshal had retained, and which was absorbed into the records of his camera as he employed and organised his own household in the last years of the reign of Henry II. One can even guess at the nature of the document from the description given by the author: a bald list of names and ransoms under perhaps an opening Latin heading along the lines of ‘compotus per manum Wigani clerici domini regis Henrici filii Henrici regis militum captorum, etc.’ This was indeed raw material. Another significant fragment is found in lines 4457–4796, heralded by the author’s gleeful comment: ‘At this point our story becomes full of detail’ (line

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4443). He then launches into a long list of dignitaries whom he claims attended the great tournament at Lagny held early in November 1179.7 We find from line 4539 that the poet had an escrit in front of him from which he was copying, and although at another point he says that he had the names ‘as told to me by those who were there and saw them’ (lines 4476–8), he is simply personifying the author of the self-same escrit. I have suggested elsewhere that the best way to account for this document is as an early form of tournament roll, organised by nation, perhaps with complimentary couplets about each participant, which may well be quoted directly in some sections.8 This is not a unique instance of such a document, although such a one is not attested again until the roll compiled for the state tournament – sponsored by Philip III of France at Compiègne in 1279. The author spares us nothing of the Lagny list, despite, as he says, being aware of the dangers of becoming boring (lines 4451–6). He is so scrupulous in reproducing it, that, even though he disagrees with the placing of the count of Soissons at the end of the list of French magnates at Lagny, because he is a count, nonetheless he keeps him in the same place in his own, as he says (lines 4536–40). The list is most important in the hints it gives us of the early development of a tournament literature under the patronage of the higher aristocracy in the second half of the twelfth century.9 It would seem most likely therefore that the author had before him a souvenir rotulet prepared for those who were at Lagny and desired a permanent memento of their place in the greatest tournament of the age. This rotulet was stored in the Marshal’s camera, where the author found it over forty years later, and used it to extend his poem. Time and again, we find in the History significant passages that are either explicitly derived from household record material, or which are very likely to have been. There is evidence of the use of material acquired in the course of the Marshal’s public career, and from quite an early period. The author, for instance, cites testimonials which the Marshal obtained from the court of the king of France to present to Henry II on rejoining the court of the king’s eldest son in 1183 (line 6609). Did they still exist in the Marshal record repository, and had he seen them? At line 12896 we find an account of the terms of the peace made between the Marshal and King Philip Augustus. It parallels very accurately the copy of the actual agreement still in the Archives Nationales, so much so that it is most likely that the author had in front of him the Marshal’s portion of the cirograph. Similar material has to have been drawn from the Marshal’s correspondence as a public figure. We find in line 13376 the author citing the king’s demand that the Marshal hand over to Thomas of Sandford custody of his younger son, Richard Marshal. The parallels between the text of the History and the text of the copy of the surviving writ indicate that the author had seen the latter. In lines 14205–10 we find reference to a letter of Bishop John de Gray to the Marshal 7 8 9

It should be pointed out that the list of names the source gives is entirely consistent with those who might have been present at Lagny in November 1179, and it cannot be faulted by internal inaccuracies. D. Crouch, ‘The Hidden History of the Twelfth Century’, HSJ 5, 1993, 116–17. See below for the suggestion that the author also drew on a lost ‘Tournament List’ detailing the great tournaments of the late 1170s and early 1180s.

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accusing him of sheltering William de Briouze, a traitor to the king, and demanding he surrender Briouze to him. Again, there is the suspicion that the author had seen this letter and was quoting from it. Very little in the History can be traced to the Latin and vernacular historiographical tradition that so distinguishes England in the twelfth century, and in which the Marshal himself makes a debut in Howden’s account of the 1173 rebellion. The author’s dogged use of whatever he had to hand, including archive material in Latin, does tell us that if he had known of such materials, he could and would have used them. It follows that he had no contacts who were able to advise him on this sort of source and make the necessary volumes available. The author had little apparent connection with the world of Latin humanistic writing, although not none. When he pauses early in his work to give a physical description of his hero, he might have been doing what William of Malmesbury and Gerald of Wales frequently did, in imitation of Suetonius’s treatment of the Caesars. I’m tempted to speculate that we may be seeing there the criticisms of a learned layman or clerk to whom he had submitted his work during its composition, who told him that such things were necessary in biography. There is, however, one exception and it is in its way very significant, although it is only peripheral to the construction of the History. In the author’s busy search for material to use about the life of the Marshal’s father, he made use of one identifiable earlier historian, the chronicler who was the interpolator and continuator of John of Worcester, a writer known to have been working from St Peter’s abbey, Gloucester (MS now Trinity College Dublin 503).10 The author’s account of John Marshal’s flight from the Angevin rout of Winchester in 1141 and his subsequent entrapment in the burning abbey of Wherwell, Hants, is drawn from this Gloucester source. It takes and conflates two distinct episodes in the Gloucester text: the flight of the Empress and the burning of Wherwell, identifying Marshal with the ‘John the Empress’s supporter’ who was trapped in the abbey. From these sources the author constructs a highly inaccurate episode (for no-one fleeing with the Empress could have ended up at Wherwell) which made John Marshal the hero of that very black day, saving the Empress and sacrificing himself in a rear-guard action. This is not to say that John Marshal was not the John at Wherwell, just that in his determination to use to the full the source he had encountered, the author of the History got a little carried away. The significance of this exceptional use of the great Anglo-Norman historical tradition lies in the known location of the text used: it was composed and apparently remained at Gloucester abbey. Gloucester was a town which in the reigns of Richard and John was something of a focus of the local political activity of William Marshal; it was where he assembled a council to arrange for a regency on behalf of the young King Henry III. That alone might have been a reason for the author to pursue his researches there, but the close proximity to Gloucester of the centre of power in the Marches of the younger William Marshal, at the great castle of Chepstow in Netherwent, must also be significant. The use of historical material from Gloucester abbey is one more indicator that the author based himself 10

John of Worcester, iii, pp. xl–l.

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in the period of his composition of the History in the southern March. It was likely that the Marshal family archive and treasury was to be found here, and we may recall at this point the fact that when the Marshal wished to have brought to him on his deathbed the silk palls he had bought in Palestine; it was to Chepstow that he sent for them. Where the treasure was, there also one might expect to find the record repository which our author used to the full. We cannot really know if the author spent two years in a chamber at Chepstow castle composing his biography of the late Marshal, but the likelihood is that it was there he based himself a lot of the time, collecting memoirs and stories, perusing the miscellany of family documents which were kept in its treasury and talking to local knights. It would have been a convenient base for necessary travel: across to Ireland, up the Severn valley to Gloucester, and even further afield too (the detailed and coherent topographical account of the battle of Lincoln indicates that the author, like Paul Meyer nearly seven centuries later, went in person to inspect the city and battlefield). We can do little more than speculate whether there are other historical sources underlying the text. There are some indications that this might be the case, indications strong enough to bring forward for consideration. The strongest evidence for such a source I call, with absolutely no authority at all, the ‘Tournament History’. It is, I think, significant how accurately and well the author recounts a dozen or so of the Marshal’s principal tournaments between 1175 and January 1183 (with a particular concentration on the period 1178–80). Occasionally citing an escrit which he has before him, he describes tournament after tournament, giving precise indications about locations (always mentioning the site in terms of its lying between two noted settlements). Many sites which he locates were places on the borders of distinct principalities, exactly where one would expect tournaments to be fought. On occasion he gives sufficient material to allow us to cross-check his chronology, and when he does, his sequence checks out. Putting these indications together it is worth tentatively suggesting that the author was employing a chronological and discursive list of tournaments fought across northern France in the heyday of the Young King Henry, and possibly commissioned by the same king to record for ever the achievements of his martial youth (significantly for the existence of this source, the History barely mentions tournamenting after the Young King’s death). If this were the case, it may be that the old Marshal had taken and kept this source as a memento of the man whom we know he regarded as his most beloved master to the end of his days. In time that source was used by our author, a most fortuitous resource which allowed him to devote long stretches of his composition to the doings of the Marshal on the great tournament circuit of his military prime in Henry II’s reign. It is worth suggesting that the contemporary tournament career of Baldwin V of Hainault, reported with equal precision by Gilbert of Mons, may rest on a similar source: an early form of sports journalism. Such are the indications of a documentary foundation to the Marshal biography. But the bulk of the author’s material was from oral sources. The History is self-consciously a work drawn from memory, and this in itself marks it out as a work of importance to historiographers. Because of the author’s lack of concealing artistry – or refusal to conceal – the underlying episodic structure of

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reminiscence is open to inspection in certain parts of the text. This is most true of the first half of the work, that which deals with the Marshal’s career up till the death of Henry II (up, that is, to line 9164). Much of the material in this part must have come ultimately from the Marshal’s own lips, for there was no-one left in the mid-1220s either in the Marshal’s family or his entourage who could themselves recollect his deeds and career in the period before the mid-1180s. The episodes concerning the Marshal’s father’s deeds in Stephen’s reign (1135–54) and the tales of the Marshal’s own childhood, squirehood, and career as a household knight have to be others’ recollections of tales the Marshal had himself told in hall and chamber. There are intriguing parallels in the construction of this first half of the work to the structure of the best-known historical work drawn from an oral tradition: the gospels of the New Testament. Form-criticism of the texts of the three synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) published in the inter-war period revealed a structure which is remarkably similar to that which underlies the History. The structure of the three gospel narratives before they move on to the Passion is episodic; the form-critics of the New Testament used the Greek word pericope to describe such brief, independent episodes.11 The comparison between the History and the synoptic gospels is only by way of a parallel. There is no reason whatsoever to think that the author consciously took Matthew, Mark and Luke as his inspiration. But the methodology of Formgeschichte has a lot to contribute to a study of the structure and origins of the History. A brief look at the pericopic structure of the early section of the History is instructive. The scriptural parallels more than suggest that in the History we are also dealing with a text which has arisen out of an oral culture, if only in part. The pericopes we find are brief and mostly self-contained, the essential characteristics of stories which have been transmitted through an oral tradition.12 Knightly society in the early thirteenth century was in many ways a literate society, but (as with society still today) there were areas – such as family history – which depended heavily on oral tradition for a sense of the past.13 Oral tradition generated brief and easily-remembered tales in order to pass on those memories which it wished to preserve down the generations. Each pericope is a self-contained and well-structured tale, inserted (usually arbitrarily with little regard for actual chronology) in an extended chronological narrative of the author’s making. The author took those pericopes which bore upon the Marshal and his father, which he had collected from his informants in

11

12 13

The word pericope (Gk ‘section’) was originally applied to one of the readings into which the Bible was divided for the purposes of the lectionary. However, since the pericopes tended to respect the natural episodic structure of the gospels (each pericope being a self-contained little tale) it was natural for form-critics like Bultmann to transfer the word to the narrative episodes themselves; for an introduction to Formgeschichte, K. E. Nickle, The Synoptic Gospels, London 1981, ch. 1. I use the term ‘pericope’ here rather than the terms ‘set piece’ or ‘rehearsed anecdote’ employed for the same purpose by some oral historians. See on this W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word, London 1982, 33–6. For a verdict on how far the written instrument and literacy had penetrated thirteenth-century society, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record, 2nd edn, London 1993, 328–34.

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the elder Marshal’s family and household, and strung them together in what seemed a likely order. As with the gospel pericopes, there is an attempt to ‘topand-tail’ each individual one so that they link together and make a plausible, if disjointed, narrative. So, for instance, Earl Patrick of Salisbury is introduced into the narrative in its account of the doings of John Marshal in Stephen’s reign and heavily routed in battle along with the king, so that the later animosity of the earl to John Marshal is more obviously accounted for. In fact, Earl Patrick never fought on the king’s side, and appears in the chronicle record as an unfaltering supporter of the Empress throughout her campaigns in England. Bridging passages were also introduced to cement together each component in the text, and provide them with a false context. Thus one passage begins with authority: ‘In the reign of King Stephen . . .’, in a way which is reminiscent of the passage in Luke 1:5, ‘In the time of Herod king of Judaea . . .’. Elsewhere in the History there are genealogical passages which offer another means to bridge pericopes (and which also have gospel parallels, cf. Matt. 1:1–17, Luke 3:23–38).14 There is some variation in the forms of pericope employed. It is indeed remarkable to find one included in the opening collection at all. It is a narrative which has little real bearing on the Marshal’s life: a story purportedly about the brief lives and linked deaths of his elder half-brothers, Gilbert and Walter Marshal. Its inclusion perhaps tells us how limited was the author’s supply of early material about his subject. The historical record is such that the story can be proved to be based on little in the way of factual content: in fact Gilbert Marshal (II) survived his brother, Walter, and lived to inherit half his father’s lands in 1166. Is the story therefore a complete fabrication, a recycled piece of journeyman verse? Is it loosely based on the chronologically close deaths of John Marshal the father, and his eldest surviving son, Gilbert (II)? Whatever the explanation, the passage in question is a pericope demonstrating that the oral traditions incorporated in the Marshal History have sometimes passed from tradition into folk-tale, with little or no historical foundation. This is less obviously the case with most of the other pericopes, which generally have a substantial historical background and value. But we must always be aware of the way that the author is perfectly well able to refashion and modify (and therefore further distance from events) the oral traditions he had at his disposal to fit his overarching biographical needs. A pericopic substructure is still evident well towards the middle of the History. The last episode which we could describe as a pericope of the oral tradition is that which tells of the Marshal’s encounter with a monk and a runaway noblewoman (allegedly of the house of Lens) and is set in 1183, while he was returning to the

14

There are structural (if not linguistic) parallels between the History and the gospel narratives and it is worth asking (if only in an aside) whether the author did not consciously or unconsciously take the gospels as one model for his work. As a genuine biography, the History had few parallels if any in the world of vernacular literature at the time, so the author may not have had much else in the way of a model to imitate. But against this suggestion would stand the objection that the author shows no acquaintance with biblical imagery and makes no conscious quotation of biblical episodes. So far as we can tell, his literacy only comprehended state and estate documents. Professor Clanchy has also pointed out to me the objection to this theory that we do not know to what extent a layman of the time might have perceived a ‘gospel’ as a unified work.

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court of the Young King (lines 6677–6868). The story’s source was self-evidently Eustace de Bertrimont, the Marshal’s squire, who plays a prominent part in the action. It had clearly been told often and in the telling had passed beyond the repertoire of Eustace himself, for the key points in the tale have become established, structured and memorable, as in any oral tradition.15 The Marshal is awakened from a roadside snooze to challenge the fleeing pair; we hear their guilty replies and the clerk’s scandalous confession of usury; there is the confiscation of the money and its surprise redistribution among the Marshal’s friends that evening. The key props are also established: the runaways wear heavy, hooded Flemish capes, as a consequence of which the Marshal catches the man, whose cape conceals his sword and his tonsure; another is the heavy money bag which the Marshal orders to be confiscated when he knows more of them, and which will be thrown down amongst his friends. There is an element of comedy in the feeble monk’s attempted physical challenge to the foremost warrior of the day (who was actually unarmed, had the monk but known it). Then there is the natural finale when the Marshal produces the moneybag and stands his friends a good meal, offering the rest to help them with their debts, while they marvel at his generosity in even leaving the recreants with horses and clothes. A brief connecting passage plugs the pericope back into the (supposedly) chronological narrative. The History is not a work that stands at the crossroads between a pre-literate and literate society. It is a work which has to depend on non-written sources for a variety of reasons, and the author is very happy to prefer documents when he can. His preference is evident in the scraps of written evidence which he has trawled up and has used in the opening section (the information from the Worcester chronicle, the account roll of Wigan the clerk). His oral sources are themselves an odd collection, and the thin soil they give the early part of his story tells us rather strikingly that the Marshal family memory in the early thirteenth century had difficulty stretching back even two generations. The History shows us that (in the case of the Marshals) medieval orality in family tradition was about the same as that of a modern family, or perhaps even less in these times when the pursuit of family genealogy is so popular. A variant form of source is the memoir, that is, the eye-witness recollections of an individual communicated directly to the author to help him write up the History. We cannot easily know how this was done in practice. The author might have recorded the facts in note form himself in an interview, or the author might have been provided with written notes by his informants. The latter is quite likely where the informant was a cleric, as for instance the material concerning the battle of Lincoln which clearly derived from Bishop Peter des Roches of Winchester. But the prevalence of clerks in lay households of the thirteenth century means that barons and knights too might have handed on to the author their own written memoirs. There is a good argument that the elder Marshal’s nephew, John

15

See the observations on the ‘set piece’ performed story as a source in, D. K. Dunaway, ‘Method and Theory in the Oral Biography’, Oral History 20, 1992, 43. J. A. Neuenschwander, ‘Remembrance of Things Past: Oral Historians and Long-Term Memory’, Oral History Review 6, 1978, 50–1, has some sceptical things to say about the trustworthiness of such ‘rehearsed’ and frequently repeated anecdotes.

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Marshal of Hockering, provided a written statement as his evidence relating to the Lincoln campaign of 1217. The author refers on more than one occasions to a ‘source’ or ‘text’ that he has used to compile his own work on Lincoln (lines 16466, 16784).16 Such sources do not generate a pericopic form of text; there is a greater element of reportage as the informant recollects and reconstructs the events which remain in the eye of his memory. On occasion, the author finds that he has before him more than one version of the same event. When this happens, he makes a point of telling us of his confusion, which might be interpreted as a lack of artistry or as a lack of a desire to seem omniscient as an author; it certainly is an indication of some internal reflection on his task. However this is, the author refrains from thoroughly collating and polishing his text, so he leaves us the joins and patches showing. As a result, we know far more about how he put his work together. An excellent example of this is again the author’s use of his sources on Lincoln, for he writes in cheerful perplexity: ‘My lords, I must add something further: those who have given me my subject-matter do not agree unanimously, and I cannot follow all of them for that would be wrong of me . . .’ (lines 16401–5).17 After the death of King Henry II, it is less obviously the elder Marshal’s own memory – as transmitted second-hand through his household – that is his chief source. The writer is rarely explicit about the other individuals through whom he obtained his information about the the Marshal’s career. Who, for instance, was that man of whom he complained that he ‘refrained from saying more on the matter’ and so truncated the tale of the Marshal and the horse thief (lines 4351–4434)? Mostly, we have to make reasoned guesses. We know of the special relationship which John of Earley and the younger William Marshal had to the project of the History; the author himself tells us. It would hardly be surprising had they contributed memories as well as money. John of Earley’s period

16

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The sections deriving from Bishop Peter would be lines 16259–63, 16311–24, 16467–16592, 16625–9, 16997–17009, and the author had accepted what surely must be the bishop’s own assessment, that he ‘that day was in charge of advising our side’ (lines 16998–9). The other person favoured by the author in his descriptions of the battle is John Marshal of Hockering – who was in the 1220s a leading household banneret of his cousin, the younger William Marshal (who in 1224 had supported John against the aggression of Faulkes de Breauté). The author unsurprisingly calls him ‘noble-hearted, worthy and loyal’ (line 17013). John’s account provides the material for lines 16413–66, 17010–20, but other details of the battle may well derive from him, as the highly significant comment on lines 16464–6 indicates, viz. ‘what he did in the battle will be related when the right moment comes, and as my written source (escrit) stipulates’. The escrit – in the circumstances – can be most readily interpreted as a memoir deriving from John himself. This little aside has a curious parallel in Thucydides’ reflections on his researches towards his history of the Peloponnesian War c. 420BC: ‘Eyewitnesses of the same occurrence give different accounts of them as they remembered, or were interested in the actions of one side or other’ (cited in Dunaway, ‘Method and Theory’, 42; see for the passage, The History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. R. Warner, Harmondsworth 1972, 47). Since it cannot be that our author had read Thucydides, we may well conclude that any would-be researcher into a past life or war from oral sources is going to encounter this difficulty: in other words, the author of the History was no historical philosopher, simply a reasonable and conscientious man brought up sharp against a common problem in the sort of task he had undertaken. For numerous parallels between the difficulties and methods of John, author of the History, and contemporary oral biographers, see D. J. Mitchell, ‘ “Living Documents”: Oral History and Biography’, Biography 3, 1980, 283–96, particularly his comments about the importance of editorial skills.

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of service as the Marshal’s squire, and then household knight, appears to have begun around 1187, and his constant attendance on his lord gave him an unrivalled post from which to observe his master’s campaigns and curial manoeuvres even if, as Antonia Gransden points out, as a squire he would have been excluded from the council chamber.18 Nonetheless, by the first decade of the thirteenth century, John of Earley was a mature household banneret and eating at top table. It is likely to have been his recollections on which much of the key detail of the Irish exile and the deathbed narrative depend (particularly the debate over the testament, of which he was executor) and perhaps more besides: the public arguments between the king and the Marshal in 1205, for instance. The Marshal’s elder sons would have been little help in this period, as they were minors who had been given into the hands of the king’s nominees as hostages for their father’s behaviour. The author is silent about any contribution from the second son, Richard Marshal, lord of Longueville in Normandy in the 1220s, but certainly in Ireland with this elder brother in 1224, and so not beyond the author’s reach. The elder brother, the second William Marshal, is undoubtedly a principal informant for his father’s campaigns in 1215–17, the problems over Caerleon and some of the deathbed details. It is likely that both he and John of Earley were the transmitters of the Marshal’s anecdotes about his early career and tournament exploits. No doubt there were others who were able to recall these, but the old Marshal’s role as affectionate parent, foster-parent and mentor to the younger William and to John of Earley makes them prime candidates for the role. *

A reasonable verdict on the author of the History is that he was a writer who had – fortuitously – the true instinct of the historian. We know nothing of his background – what other commissions (if any) he had received – but the young earl Marshal set him a historical task: to recall something of the life of the old Marshal, his father, for whatever purpose, be it filial piety, political justification, guilt, propaganda – we simply do not know the whole reason. But, whether or not he even understood why he was doing it, John, the author, performed his task faithfully and employed a recognisable research method. He collected and collated his sources from a variety of places and informants. He integrated several sources, if not seamlessly, then at least with an attempt to maintain chronological coherence.19 He produced a genuine biography, a vernacular memoir of a

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A. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, c.550 to c.1307, London 1974, 347. Gransden, Historical Writing in England, 345, 347–8, offers a positive assessment of the author’s scrupulosity. I would differ with her only over her opinion that the author had ‘considerable literary ability’, in which she echoes Legge, Anglo-Norman Literature and its Background, Oxford 1963, 306–8. It is worth noting that his self-conscious scrupulosity is predated by that of Master Wace in the 1160s who, when talking of his difficulties in matching Dudo’s account of Duke William Longsword of Normandy to the tales he had heard of the duke in his childhood, says: ‘when I have no proof of anything, I prefer to say nothing about it’. Le Roman de Rou, ed. A. J. Holden, 3 vols., Société des Anciens Textes Français, 1970–73, i, pt 2, line 1367.

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layman which is, so far as we can tell, eccentric for the times, even if not entirely unprecedented (bearing in mind the already long tradition of Latin clerical biography). The author’s integrity was compromised on occasion by his ignorance, or by his need to move his story on. Although he intended to produce a chronological account of his subject, he undoubtedly lacked the sources to do this in full. A minor, but revealing, example of this is the way that he manipulates his characters’ movements. His account of the long and involved peace negotiations between King Henry II and King Philip II in 1188–9 is compacted and truncated, either because the author could not reconstruct them, or because a full account would have jeopardised his narrative (see, lines 7751, 8069). On occasion he invents likely-sounding royal itineraries to move the action from place to place as his narrative required it (see lines 8287, 10453, 10532). This is not a major charge against him, but it does warn us that he was a man who was capable of inventing fictions to fill awkward gaps. Despite all this evident manipulation and agenda-setting by the author, we can nonetheless give him some credit for adding shade around the edges of his Marshal portrait. The courtly ethic of his day permitted the telling of stories that made his subject open to apparent ridicule. The Marshal’s humiliation at the hands of the senior knights in the skirmish at Neufchâtel-en-Bray in 1166 and his hilarious failure to capture Simon de Neauphle at the tournament at Anet in 1178 are both examples of the preservation by the author of tales the Marshal had once told against himself to amuse his friends, his household and children. Here we approach an aspect of the real Marshal: the expansive, good-humoured courtier – employing wit and humour to captivate those around him, great and small alike. There are other characteristics of the medieval aristocrat which the author recalls for us: for instance, the stern lord who ruthlessly put down unrest against him in Leinster in 1208. We see also the active and energetic soldier, master of his craft and unsparing of his enemies, their lands and their possessions. As Antonia Gransden points out, the atmosphere created by the author of the History is one that is obsessive about money and material wealth. The morality of the old Marshal in his developing career is highlighted, but the secular ends of that career are also openly on view. The author is a reliable witness to the qualities, positive and negative, of his subject. Even in his efforts to whitewash his hero, the bright patches he leaves betray where his work had been necessary. My view is that this John, the author, was a conscientious journeyman who discharged his commission with diligence and integrity. He knew the value of research, knew how to elicit information and what to do with it once he had it. He endeavoured to compile the fullest narrative possible of his difficult subject and constructed it deliberately as a chronological narrative to tell the story his patrons most desired: that is, the story of an old man they had loved and who had earned their love, a man who had risen through devoted service and his political and military talents to the rule of a kingdom, and who, in ruling it, could claim to have saved from dispossession its royal dynasty.

16 The Strange Case of the Missing Biographies: The Lives of the Plantagenet Kings of England 1154–1272 NICHOLAS VINCENT

I

N THE opening words of his Discours sur l’histoire universelle, addressed in 1681 to the French dauphin, Bishop Bossuet states that ‘When history is worthless to other men, it must nonetheless be read to princes.’1 The reasons for this, as advanced by Bossuet – in essence, that history serves both as a theatre of moral example from which the prince may learn, and as a means of imposing sense and order upon what might otherwise appear to be the patternless chaos of the past – would have been approved by many classical writers, and were as familiar at the court of the Plantagenet kings of England as they were to become at the Bourbon court of France.2 Gerald of Wales in his De Principis Instructione (issued in 1216, though much of it composed twenty years previously) declared that ‘The reading of old histories confers no mean benefit upon a lettered prince, for from such reading the prince may learn how to avoid the various outcomes and the uncertain hazard of war, hard or successive falls, as well as secret plots and conspiracies. From past events, and as if from a mirror, instructed by scripture (tanquam ex speculo, scriptura docente), he may consider which such acts

1

2

J.-B. Bossuet, Discours sur l’histoire universelle, Paris 1681, here quoting from p. 39 of the Flammarion edition, Paris 1966: ‘Quand l’histoire serait inutile aux autres hommes, il faudrait la faire lire aux princes.’ Amongst those responsible for inspiring or illuminating various of the ideas set out below, I should particularly like to thank Julia Barrow, Robert Bartlett, David Bates, James BickfordSmith, Philippe Buc, David Carpenter, Stephen Church, David Crouch, Anne Duggan, Judith Everard, Richard Gameson, John Gillingham, Lindy Grant, Jane Martindale, Richard Sharpe and Björn Weiler. See, for example, the oft-quoted preface to John of Salisbury’s Memoirs of the Papal Court, ed. M. Chibnall, NMT 1956, 3, defining the historian’s duty (c. 1164) ‘to relate noteworthy matters so that the invisible things of God may be clearly seen by things that are done, and men may by examples of reward or punishment be made more zealous in the fear of God and pursuit of justice . . . For, as the pagan says, “The lives of others are our teachers” (Cato, Distichs, iii.13); and whoever knows nothing of the past hastens blindly into the future.’ The idea of history as a theatre of example is already to be found in Bede and is a theme repeatedly expounded in twelfth-century England. For a fuller exposition of this theme, see B. Weiler, in Virtue and Ethics in the Twelfth Century, eds. I. P. Bejczy and R. G. Newhzuser Leiden 2005, 317–39.

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to undertake and which to avoid, which to shun and which to pursue.’3 From David, via Solomon, Augustus, Charlemagne and Alfred, through to the presentday sage of Highgrove, the connection between the prince and the reading and appreciation of history is undeniably strong. Amongst the Plantagenet kings, Henry II, or those very close to him, commissioned both Wace and later Benoît to rewrite in French the histories of the early dukes of Normandy and of the (mostly mythical) pre-Conquest kings of England: histories which themselves were to a large extent the product of earlier ducal or royal patronage.4 Gerald of Wales testifies to Henry II’s particular familiarity with historical literature, and it was from listening to the ‘recital of ancient British history’ (‘ab historico cantore Britone . . . antiquo’ – a phrase which defies any certain translation, but which undoubtedly implies the oral recital of history at court) that Henry II, according once again to Gerald, is said to have advised the monks of Glastonbury where to dig for the bones of King Arthur.5 It was Henry II who played a significant role in the canonisation of his sainted ancestor, Edward the Confessor, with all the attendant historical investigations that this involved, and it was Henry, again in the early 1160s, who was consulted by the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the advisability of seeking the canonisation of that other paragon of early medieval kingship, the emperor Charlemagne.6 The writing of history, as the authorities from Haskins onwards have repeatedly told us, was one of the principal diversions, indeed perhaps the crowning

3

4

5

6

Gerald of Wales, ‘De Principis Instructione’, I. 11, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 42–3: ‘Historiarum itaque lectio vestustarum litterato non mediocriter principi confert, ubi eventus belli varios et aleam incertam, casus asperos et secundos, insidias occultas et cautelas advertere poterit, et de preteritis olim actibus quid aggrediendum, quid vitandum, quid fugiendum, quidve sequendum, tanquam ex speculo, scriptura docente, contemplari.’ For the derivation of much of the first book of Gerald’s ‘De Principis’ from the anonymous Moralium Dogma Philosophorum, ed. J. Holmberg, Uppsala 1929, see R. Bartlett, Gerald of Wales 1146–1223, Oxford 1982, 70. For Wace and Benoît, see E. M. C. van Houts, ‘The Adaptation of the “Gesta Normannorum Ducum” by Wace and Benoît’, in Non nova, sed nove. Mélanges de civilisation médiévale dédiés à Willem Noomen, ed. M. Gosman and J. Van Os, Groningen 1984, 115–24; eadem, ‘Wace as Historian’, in Family Trees and the Roots of Politics: The Prosopography of Britain and France from the Tenth to the Twelfth Century, ed. K. S. B. Keats-Rohan, Woodbridge 1997, 103–32. In general, for historical writing within the Plantagenet realm, see the studies by A. Grandsen, Historical Writing in England c.550 to c.1307, London 1974; N. F. Partner, Serious Entertainments: The Writing of History in TwelfthCentury England, Chicago 1977; L. Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries, Washington D.C. 1997; P. Damian-Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, Woodbridge 1999. Gerald, ‘De Principis Instructione’, I.20, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 127–8. For further evidence that it was from verse romances that two of Henry II’s leading courtiers, Richard fitz Nigel and Ranulf Glanville, acquired at least some of their knowledge of the more distant past, see J. Hudson, ‘Administration, Family and Perceptions of the Past in Late Twelfth-Century England: Richard FitzNigel and the Dialogue of the Exchequer’, in The Perception of the Past in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. P. Magdalino, London 1992, 86. For a Maurice fabulator paid 20s. by the king’s writ in the year to Michaelmas 1166, see Pipe Roll 12 Henry II, Pipe Roll Society 9, 1888, 32. For various of the men referred to in charters of Henry II as harpers (‘citharista’) or ‘king’s harper’, see The Acta of King Henry II 1154–1189, ed. J. C. Holt and N. C. Vincent, Oxford forthcoming, nos. 974–5, 1263; Pipe Roll 23 Henry II, Pipe Roll Society 26, 1905, 165. See here B. W. Scholz, ‘The Canonization of Edward the Confessor’, Speculum 36, 1961, 38–60, esp. 53n.; N. Vincent, ‘The Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings of England 1154–1272’, in Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. C. Morris and P. Roberts, Cambridge 2002, 42n.

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literary achievement, of Henry II’s highly literate court.7 Nor did this interest in history end with the king’s death. Amongst Henry’s immediate successors, Richard I sought an interview with Joachim of Fiore, the most celebrated and in some respects the most ‘scientific’ historian of his age.8 If Lady Stenton is to be believed, it was Richard who persuaded the greatest of the twelfth-century ‘court historians’, Roger of Howden, to accompany him on the Third Crusade, as a semi-official reporter.9 King John, although generally a victim of the historians’ contempt, is to be found in 1205 requesting that he be sent a history of England in French (romancium de historia Angl),10 whilst the contacts between John’s son, King Henry III, and the chronicler Matthew Paris, are so well known that they require no detailed repetition here.11 Princes read history partly in an attempt to learn from the successes and failures of their forebears, partly to revel in ancestral achievement, and partly to better shape or predict the course of future events.12 As a source of precedent, history could be used to justify a prince’s present-day actions. It was in this way that Henry II, or his apologists, sought to use the ecclesiastical history of Henry I’s reign as a tool in their negotiations with the Church, and that John and his supporters later sought to use historical precedent in their struggle to keep Stephen Langton out of Canterbury.13 As a thesaurus of examples, history could also serve prophetic ends, with the past being used as a means of predicting the

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8

9

10 11 12

13

C. H. Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’, in Essays in Medieval History Presented to Thomas Frederick Tout, ed. A. G. Little and F. M. Powicke, Manchester 1925, 71–7, esp. 77. Haskins’ judgement on the royal patronage of history is not seriously challenged by the otherwise severely revisionist approach to Henry’s literary patronage adopted by K. M. Broadhurst, ‘Henry II of England and Eleanor of Aquitaine: Patrons of Literature in French’, Viator 27, 1996, 53–84. For the ‘science’ of Joachim, see R. W. Southern, ‘Aspects of the European Tradition of Historical Writing, 3: History as Prophecy’, TRHS 5th ser. 22, 1972, 173–80. For the meeting with King Richard, see Howden, Gesta Regis, ii, 151–5, rehearsed with significant further details in Howden, Chronica, iii, 75–86, and for the differences here between the two recensions of Howden, see D. Corner, ‘The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts of Roger of Howden’s “Chronica” ’, EHR 98, 1983, 303. D. M. Stenton, ‘Roger of Howden and Benedict’, EHR 68, 1953, 574–82, esp. 579, and see more recently J. Gillingham, ‘Roger of Howden on Crusade’, in Gillingham, Richard Cœur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth Century, London 1994, 141–53. For subsequent, to my mind over speculative, attempts to trace Howden’s career and movements on the basis of the evidence presented in his chronicles, see J. Gillingham, ‘The Travels of Roger of Howden and his Views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh’, ANS 20, 1998, 151–69, reprinted in Gillingham, The English in the Twelfth Century: Imperialism, National Identity and Political Values, Woodbridge 2000, 69–91; A. A. M. Duncan, ‘Roger of Howden and Scotland 1187–1201’, in Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Renaissance Scotland, ed. B. Crawford, Edinburgh 1999, 134–58. Rotuli Litterarum Clausarum, ed. T. D. Hardy, 2 vols., London 1833–44, i, 29b. See here R. Vaughan, Matthew Paris, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1979, 3–4, 13. For history as a theatre of moral exempla, see the opinion of Gerald of Wales, cited above, n. 3, or the dedication of John of Marmoutier’s reworking of the Gesta of the counts of Anjou, addressed to Henry II, Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou et des seigneurs d’Amboise, ed. L. Halphen and R. Poupardin, Paris 1913, 165: ‘Sic nos tibi exempla antecessorum tuorum proponimus, ut, si qua bona sunt, in te nutrias ac pietatis studio que sunt nutrita custodias, si qua vero corrigenda sunt corrigas, ne tibi illud propheticum contingat: Viri impii et dolosi non dimidiabunt dies suos’ (Ps. 54:24). For Henry II’s citation of precedent from the ecclesiastical policy of Henry I, for example during the papal schism of 1159, and above all in his claim that the Constitutions of Clarendon were merely the embodiment of customs recognised under Henry I, see F. Barlow, Thomas Becket, London 1986, 98–106; Councils and Synods with Other Documents Relating to the English Church, I, part II: 1066–1204,

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likely course of the future. The desire to obtain knowledge of the future was always a princely concern, responsible not only for a large part of the prince’s fascination with history but for Henry II’s consultations with saints and astrologers, for Richard I’s fabled interview with Joachim of Fiore, and for King John’s persecution of that most unwise, because most specific, of prophets, Peter of Wakefield.14 To this extent, princes not only read history, but possessed a strong interest in the manipulation of its writing. It is this phenomenon, the princely manipulation of historical writing, that inspires the remarks that follow. Why, if the manipulation of history was so significant to them, did the kings of England from 1154 through to 1272 fail to commission anything approaching an ‘official’ historical record of their own activities? Why, in particular, did they fail to follow the example set both by their Anglo-Norman predecessors and by their rivals in Capetian France, all of whom had come to appreciate and to cultivate the writing of a particular form of history: the royal biography cast in panegyric mould? Some of my remarks will no doubt appear to be mere banalities dressed up as matters of sublime profundity: an occupational hazard of all historians who read or respect the French. Some may help us to understand why the modern-day historians of both France and England write so very differently on the nature of French or English kingship. All are offered in tribute to a historian who has sought, throughout a long and distinguished career, to discern the particular and the personal behind the masks imposed upon kings and bishops by their medieval biographers. At the outset it may seem presumptuous, even preposterous, to claim that Plantagenet England, after 1154, was bereft of a tradition of royal biography. We have, after all, a heroic life of Henry II’s father, Geoffrey of Anjou, produced at Marmoutier in the 1170s or 80s, apparently as an offshoot of the officially sponsored rewriting and reworking of the Gesta of the early counts of Anjou: a project that seems to have continued at Marmoutier and Loches for some years after Henry II’s accession as king.15 In a similar vein, we have the rewritings by Wace and Benoît of the histories of Henry II’s maternal Norman and English predecessors.16

14

15

16

ed. D. Whitelock, M. Brett and C. N. L. Brooke, Oxford 1981, 835–8 no. 154, 852ff no. 159. For King John’s use of the precedent set by Bishop Wulfstan in the dispute over Langton’s promotion, see F. M. Powicke, Stephen Langton, Oxford 1928, 84–8; E. Mason, ‘St Wulfstan’s Staff: A Legend and its Uses’, Medium Aevum 53, 1984, 157–79. For the significance of the role of historical writers in establishing precedents in light of Henry II’s legal reforms, see Gransden, Historical Writing, 220–1. For the saints and prophecy concerning the Plantagenets, see Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Plantagenet Kings’, 32–3. For astrology, see the extraordinary horoscopes cast to predict political events of the early 1150s, tentatively attributed to Adelard of Bath and cited as evidence for the contacts between Adelard and the future Henry II: J. D. North, ‘Some Norman Horoscopes’, in Adelard of Bath: An English Scientist and Arabist of the Early Twelfth Century, ed. C. Burnett, Warburg Institute Surveys and Texts 14, London 1987, 147–61, whence R. Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, Cambridge 1989, 121; L. Cochrane, Adelard of Bath: The First English Scientist, London 1994, 93–4. For the life of Geoffrey and the reworked Gesta of the Angevin counts (printed together in Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 162–231), see J. Bradbury, ‘Geoffrey V of Anjou, Count and Knight’, in The Ideals and Practice of Medieval Knighthood III, ed. C. Harper-Bill and R. Harvey, Woodbridge 1990, 21–38, and S. Farmer, Communities of St Martin, Legend and Ritual in Medieval Tours, Ithaca 1991, 78–95. For a commentary on Henry and Eleanor’s patronage of all three, see Broadhurst, ‘Literature in French’, 56–9, 70–2.

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We have, even from before Henry’s accession as king, at least two panegyrics addressed to Henry, by Osbert of Clare and by Ailred of Rievaulx, in which Henry’s royal ancestry is quite deliberately held up for admiration.17 We have the enigmatic Draco Normannicus, a Latin verse history of the dukes of Normandy from the beginnings to 1169, whose purpose and ‘plot’ are as baffling as those of any of the more sprawling epics of Shelley, but which undoubtedly treats Henry II and his achievements with a respect bordering on sycophancy.18 We have Jordan Fantosme’s French verse chronicle of the war between Henry II and his elder son, complete with an introduction that to some, but not all, modern writers has suggested Henry II as the poem’s dedicatee.19 We have, admittedly from a later date, but reflecting sources of the 1190s, a laudatory account of Richard I’s actions on crusade, disseminated in both Latin and French.20 Above all, spanning the reigns of both Henry and Richard, we have the histories written by men very close to the court: Roger of Howden, Gerald of Wales and Ralph of Diss. These, it is sometimes supposed, are representative of a wider tradition of officially sponsored Plantagenet ‘court history’. A number of general points need to be made here. To begin with, very few of these Plantagenet histories were written under direct royal patronage. The Vita of Count Geoffrey, for example, was dedicated not to Henry II but to Bishop William of Le Mans, in whose cathedral city Geoffrey lay buried.21 The Draco, whatever its credentials as a panegyric either of Henry II or of the Empress Matilda, appears to have been written outside the court, perhaps with the intention of winning Henry II over to the cause of the imperial party in Frederick Barbarossa’s disputes with Alexander III.22 Those histories that do carry a dedication to the king, or to some member of his immediate entourage, are almost invariably histories not of Henry II’s own reign, but, as with Wace’s Roman de Brut, supposedly dedicated to Eleanor of Aquitaine, or his Roman de Rou begun c. 1160 with a joint dedication to both Henry and Eleanor, of the more distant Norman or English past.23 The only exceptions here appear to be the Irish histories

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The Letters of Osbert of Clare, Prior of Westminster, ed. E. W. Williamson, Oxford 1929, 130–2, no. 38; Ailred, ‘Genealogia regum Anglorum’ in PL cxcv, cols. 711–38. Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 589–757. Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. R. C. Johnston, Oxford 1981, 2–3; for a perhaps justified dismissal of the theory of the poem’s commissioning by, or dedication to, Henry II, see Broadhurst, ‘Literature in French’, 59–60. ‘Itinerarium peregrinorum et gesta regis Ricardi’, in Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, ed. W. Stubbs, 2 vols., RS 1864–5, vol. 1, closely related to the French verse epic by Ambroise, L’Estoire de la guerre sainte, ed. G. Paris, Paris 1897. For the most recent, though controversial, attempt to suggest which of these versions, Latin or French, was copied from the other, see F. Vielliard, ‘Richard Cœur de Lion et son entourage normand. Le témoignage de l’estoire de la guerre sainte’, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Chartes 160, 2002, 5–25. Chroniques des comtes d’Anjou, 172. As noted by Diana Greenway in a review of Shopkow, History and Community, in The Merry Rose, 99.01.12, online journal at http://merryrose.atlantia.sca.org/. Broadhurst, ‘Literature in French’, 56–8, 70–2, noting that the supposed dedication of the Roman de Brut to Eleanor is known only from a later claim (c. 1200) by La
amon, and appears in no surviving copy of Wace’s work.

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of Gerald of Wales (the Expugnatio, dedicated to the future King Richard, before 1189, and the Topographia dedicated to Henry II); the verse chronicle of Jordan of Fantosme, and the chronicle of Robert of Torigny, perhaps intended for presentation to King Henry in 1184. None of these works, let it be noted, can in any way be considered as a biography of the king. Gerald’s Irish books, although they carry fulsome praise for the king’s achievements, in the case of the Expugnatio ending with a eulogy that may well have been separately composed and which together with similar eulogies composed for the king’s sons, may help to explain Gerald’s first entry into service as a royal chaplain, survey only a small part of Henry II’s reign, either chronologically or geographically.24 Fantosme, although apparently writing in the hope of a reward from the king, refers to Henry II in less than a quarter of the verses which he devotes to the rebellion of 1173–4, far more of which are taken up with the person and actions of King William of Scotland.25 Robert of Torigny was writing quite deliberately in the tradition of the universal chronicle, in which Henry II’s achievements were to be set in the context of events elsewhere, in France, the Empire, or the Holy Land.26 The Mont St-Michel, and almost certainly holograph, manuscript of Robert’s chronicle emphasises this point in its layout, in which the names of the reigning sovereigns of the Empire, France and England are written in red across the head of each new page, their respective regnal years being supplied immediately after the year of the incarnation in the heading to each successive annal.27 In any case, the supposition that Torigny’s chronicle was intended for presentation to Henry II is no more than that: a supposition, unsupported by any contemporary preface or letter of dedication.28 Ralph of Diss and Roger of Howden, like Torigny, were also to a great or lesser extent writing in a tradition of universal chronicle, in which the events of Henry or Richard’s reign formed merely one part of a much broader picture. As with Torigny, their chronicles were arranged according to the years of the incarnation, rather than reign by reign or regnal year by regnal year. The universalism of both

24

25 26

27

28

Expugnatio Hibernica. The Conquest of Ireland, by Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. A. B. Scott and F. X. Martin, Dublin 1978, with a dedication to Richard count of Poitou at 20–5, and a eulogy of Henry II at 124–33. Gerald states (pp. 228–9) that he was specially assigned by Henry II in 1185 to accompany the king’s son John into Ireland. However, he does not, as has sometimes been supposed, claim to have been sent as an official reporter or historian to John’s expedition. Henry II and his deeds appear in only 49 stanzas (nos. 1, 9–13, 15–21, 52, 157–74, 201–17) of the 217 stanzas identified by Johnston in his edition of Jordan Fantosme. For the text of Torigny’s ‘Chronica’, through to the 1140s little more than a digest of Sigebert of Gembloux and William of Jumièges, see Howlett, Chronicles, vol. iv. For discussion of Torigny’s sources and purpose, see Shopkow, History and Community, 47–9, 163–71; E. M. C. van Houts, ‘Le roi et son historien: Henri II Plantagenêt et Robert de Torigni, abbé du Mont-Saint-Michel’, CCM 37, 1994, 115–18. Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale MS 159, for example at fol. 217v, where the annal beginning at Christmas 1167 (whence Howlett, Chronicles, iv, 234) records that this was the 16th year of Frederick Barbarossa, the 31st of Louis VII and the 14th of Henry II. Although cited by Haskins, ‘Henry II as a Patron of Literature’, 75, n. 9, and repeated by several subsequent writers as a certain fact, the supposed presentation of the chronicle to Henry II in 1184 is merely a surmise raised by Delisle in his edition of the ‘Chronica’: Chronique de Robert de Torigni abbé du Mont-Saint-Michel, 2 vols., Rouen 1872–3, i, p. xlvi.

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Torigny and Diss has been generally recognised by modern writers.29 Howden, by contrast, is often assumed to have written a chronicle entirely focused upon the deeds of the Plantagenet kings, his model being the gesta form adopted by earlier historians of the rulers of Normandy, Anjou and England, itself adapted from the monastic or ecclesiastical tradition of recording the gesta of successive popes, bishops or abbots.30 The first recension of Howden’s chronicle, it is true, goes under the name of the Gesta Henrici Secundi, but this only on the basis of a generic title supplied to an early manuscript, apparently copied at the request of abbot Benedict of Peterborough (d. September 1193), in which Howden’s chronicle was preceded by the genealogy of Henry II composed before 1154 by Ailred of Rievaulx, the whole collection being described in a hand of c. 1200 as the Gesta Henrici Secundi Benedicti abbatis.31 In reality, like his second and much expanded recension, described in one early copy as a Chronica, Howden’s Gesta lacks either a dedication or a definite title in any of the early manuscripts.32 Howden’s so-called Gesta opens not with Henry’s birth or with his accession in 1154, but, apparently in media res, with the Christmas court of 1169. True, we are almost immediately told that Henry’s escape from shipwreck, crossing the Channel to England in March 1170, was the result of direct divine intervention, God having looked with mercy upon his familiar one (famulus suus), King Henry. But even here, Henry is presented as a sinner whom God wished to bring to repentance, rather than as the hero of a panegyric.33 Elsewhere in the Gesta, we are left in no doubt of the diabolic origin of many of the king’s initiatives, as for example in 1175, when the papal legate’s decision to allow the application of forest law to the clergy is described by Howden as the legate’s becoming the tool of Satan in his surrender to King Henry, ‘the wolf’.34 In his Chronica, composed in the 1190s, Howden even goes so far as to question the legitimacy of the Angevin claim to the throne of England, reporting a rumour that the Emperor Henry V, Matilda of England’s first husband, far from having died in the 1120s had in fact merely retired from the world.35 Since the legitimation of the ruler’s 29

30

31 32

33 34 35

For Diss, see Grandsen, Historical Writing, 230–4. For the general tradition into which these works fit, see K. H. Krüger, Die Universalchroniken, Typologie des Sources du Moyen-Age Occidental 16, Turnhout 1975. For the Gesta form in general, see E. M. C. van Houts, ‘Historical Writing’, in A Companion to the Anglo-Norman World, ed. C. Harper-Bill and E. M. C. van Houts, Woodbridge 2003, 104; M. Sot, Gesta Episcoporum, Gesta Abbatum, Typologie des Sources du Moyen-Age Occidental 37, Turnhout 1975. BL MS Cotton Julius A xi, as described by Stubbs in Howden, Gesta Regis, i, pp. xxi–xxiii. For the title Incipiunt Chronica Magistri Rogeri de Houedene attached to the early copy in BL MS Arundel 69, and for the absence of any contemporary title from the even more significant early copies in BL MS Royal 14.C.2 or Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Laud 582, see Stubbs in Howden, Chronica, i, pp. lxxiv–lxxxii. In general for the vital significance of contemporary titles in establishing an author’s true intentions, see B. Guenée, Histoire et culture historique dans l’occident médiévale, Paris 1980, 200–11. Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 3–4, the passage on Henry’s divinely aided escape being unusual in Howden’s work for including two direct quotations from scripture (Ps. 136:4 and Ezekiel 33:11). Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 105, omitted from the later recension in Howden, Chronica, ii, 86. Howden, Chronica, i, 181, not in the source from which Howden copied much of his material from before 1154, as noted by Stubbs in Howden, Chronica, i, pp. xxxiv–xxxv. The story of Henry V’s survival appears independently in Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium, ed. M. R. James, C. N. L. Brooke and R. A. B. Mynors. OMT 1983, 480–3, and in Gerald of Wales, ‘Itinerarium Kambriae’ II.11, whence Gerald, ‘De Principis Instructione’, III.27, both printed in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, vi, 139–40; viii, 300.

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claim to rule, and in particular the demonstration that the ruling duke or king was the rightful successor to his illustrious ancestors was one of the principal themes of the gesta style of Anglo-Norman and for that matter Angevin group biography, from Dudo of St-Quentin, via William of Jumièges through to Robert of Torigny’s reworking of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum in the 1130s, Howden’s departures from this tradition must be accounted quite extraordinary.36 For a chronicler who is supposed to have been working under official sponsorship, Howden is both remarkably critical of the Plantagenet dynasty, and remarkably ignorant even of such matters as Henry II’s paternal ancestry. Twice in his account of events in Jerusalem, Howden declares that King Fulk was the uncle, rather than (as was in reality the case) the grandfather of Henry II.37 Far from presenting a ‘life’ of Henry II, in the way that Otto of Freising set out, under direct imperial encouragement, to write the Gesta of Frederick Barbarossa, or that so many contemporaries wrote the Gesta of particular bishops or abbots, Howden’s work, in both recensions, is deeply affected by the tradition of universal chronicle;38 a very large part of Howden’s so-called Gesta concerns Henry II hardly at all, but instead deals with events in the Holy Land or Rome, for much of the 1180s almost to the exclusion of events within the Plantagenet dominion. I shall return in due course to what I suspect was the initial inspiration for Howden’s recording of the events of Henry’s reign. Meanwhile, I would not deny that like their close contemporaries, Gervase of Canterbury and Gerald of Wales, and like the later historians writing at St Albans – Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris – both Ralph of Diss and Roger of Howden relied conspicuously upon royal documents: laws, treaties, newsletters, mandates to royal officials, the last will and testament of Henry II (recited by both Gerald and Gervase), and other such ‘state papers’, either supplied in full transcript within the body of the text, or preserved as a separate appendix of sources, as in the case of Howden’s appendix of assizes or Matthew Paris’s ‘Additamenta’.39 Access to, even the recital of, ‘official’ papers does not, however, in itself provide proof that a particular history was royally ‘sponsored’. Matthew Paris undoubtedly had access, via Alexander of Swerford and others, to royal records, without this leading us to suppose that Paris wrote as an officially sponsored ‘court’ historian.40 In the case of the twelfth-century historians, the very fact that, as John Gillingham has

36 37 38

39

40

For the gesta as dynastic legitimation, see E. M. C. van Houts, ‘The “Gesta Normannorum Ducum”: A History Without an End’, ANS 3, 1981, 106–18, esp. 110–15. Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 330–1. Otto of Freising, it is true, is extraordinarily digressive in his insertion of all manner of wider philosophical and theological debates into his account of the emperor’s life. For a not entirely convincing attempt to suggest that these digressions were conceived of as a quite deliberate aspect of the story of Frederick’s reign, see K. F. Morrison, ‘Otto of Freising’s Quest for the Hermeneutic Circle’, Speculum 55, 1980, 207–36. Paris, Chronica Majora, vi, and for Howden’s ‘Laws’, copied into BL MS Royal 14.C.2. but never printed in extenso as a single collection, see Howden, Chronica, i, pp. lxxv–lxxvi; J. C. Holt, ‘The Assizes of Henry II: The Texts’, in The Study of Medieval Records: Essays in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. D. A. Bullough and R. L. Storey, Oxford 1971, 85–106; D. Corner, ‘The Texts of Henry II’s Assizes’, in Law-Making and Law-Makers in British History, ed. A. Harding, London 1980, 7–20. For Paris’s sources, see Vaughan, Matthew Paris, esp. 13–18: H.- E. Hilpert, Kaiser und Papstbriefe in den Chronica Majora des Matthaeus Paris, Publications of the German Historical Institute, London 1981.

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so cleverly shown, official newsletters had to be ‘planted’ on Roger of Howden in the 1190s suggests that although at one time ‘of’ the court, Howden, like Ralph of Diss, was writing after he had ceased in any real sense to be a ‘courtier’ himself.41 As with the German emperors, or indeed as with any itinerant monarchy up to and including the eighteenth-century Hanoverian kings of England, the itinerant Plantagenet kings had to keep their subjects informed both of their proposed itinerary and of their continued well-being.42 Unless the royal itinerary was announced well in advance, it would have been impossible for suitors to find their way into the king’s presence. Without the continual release and broadcast of news, especially of good news, it would have been all too easy for those in the remoter parts of the Plantagenet dominion to assume either that the king was dead or that his writ had ceased to run.43 To this extent, much, though by no means all, of the information recorded by Howden of Henry II, both of the king’s itinerary, and of the progress of particular meetings or military expeditions, would have been available to anyone sufficiently interested to collect and digest the regular bulletins that issued from the court. Such activity does not argue direct royal sponsorship of the chronicles into which such official ‘state papers’ were paraphrased or copied, any more than we can suppose that the letters of Henry II, sometimes very embarrassing letters, copied into the various collections of Becket correspondence and thence transmitted to chroniclers such as Wendover and Paris, argue direct royal sponsorship of the Becket letter collections or of Wendover or Paris’s often extremely damning accounts of Plantagenet rule.44 Above all, whatever their relationship to the authorised version of royal news disseminated from the court, it is clear that none of the chroniclers who wrote of the Plantagenet kings can be considered to have written anything resembling what we would now recognise as royal biography. If a model for such chronicles existed, then that model lay in the tradition of history passed down from classical times to Eusebius, Orosius, to Bede, to Sigebert of Gembloux, and to Hugh of Fleury; a model heavily influenced in Christian Europe by the Old Testament tradition of recording the deeds of the kings

41

42

43

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J. Gillingham, ‘Royal Newsletters, Forgeries and English Historians: Some Links between Court and History in the Reign of Richard I’, in La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204): Actes du colloque tenu à Thouars du 30 avril au 2 mai 1999, ed. M. Aurell, Poitiers 2000, 171–86. An acquaintance with the writings both of Lord Hervey and of the Duc de Saint-Simon, I would suggest, is an essential prerequisite of any historian hoping to understand the dynamics of the Plantagenet court. For the proclamation of the king’s intended movements, see Walter Map’s account of the ‘good kingship’ of Henry I (De Nugis Curialium, 438–9, 470–3), which surely serves as the basis of the famous and far less flattering description of the court of King Henry II by Peter of Blois, ‘Epistolae’ 14, in Petri Blesensis Bathoniensis archidiaconi Opera Omnia, ed. J. A. Giles, 4 vols., Oxford 1846–7, i, 42–53, esp. 50–1 (‘si rex alicubi perendinare promiserit, maxime si regiam vox praeconia publicaverit voluntatem . . .’). For Becket letters copied into Wendover and Paris, mostly from versions in the earlier chronicle of Ralph of Diss, but including the highly embarrassing letter to the archbishop of Cologne (Diu desideravi) otherwise known only from the Becket letter collections proper, see Paris, Chronica Majora, ii, 229–31, 239–40, 247–9, 275.

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of Judea.45 The Anglo-Norman chroniclers, especially those working within a monastic environment, held Bede in great reverence: as the very model of how history should be written.46 Since Bede, following Eusebius, chose to cite much of his documentary evidence in full, so the twelfth-century chroniclers acquired a predilection for copying out historical documents. Since Bede himself was profoundly influenced by his knowledge of the Old Testament kings, and since Bede favoured the wider picture of the rise and fall of dynasties to the more narrow presentation of individual royal biography, it is perhaps not surprising that the twelfth-century chroniclers preferred to write of the Plantagenet kings as a collective entity, rather than to compose biographies of individual kings and queens. The Plantagenets themselves, when they spoke or read of kingship, may well have had Old Testament precedents very much in mind. When Henry II declared, as reported by Peter of Blois, that he had read in the Old Testament that many great men sought vengeance against their enemies, and that kings had a right to be angry just as God was angry, it was surely the anger of Saul or David that he had in mind.47 English kings aspiring to wisdom or majesty listened with equanimity to the comparisons that were made between their own merits and those of King Solomon.48 When King John, before the portal of the church of Fontevraud, was instructed on the fate of good or bad kings by St Hugh of Lincoln, it was surely the images of Old Testament kings, cast into hell, or raised up to paradise, that he had before his eyes.49 Even the king’s critics resorted quite naturally to Old Testament comparisons, whether it be John of Salisbury, supplying Henry II and his courtiers with pseudonyms derived from scripture, or Gerald of Wales likening the adulterous and hard-hearted Henry II to Pharaoh.50 As V. H. Galbraith long ago pointed out, with the exception of an often standardised and

45

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47

48

49 50

For Bede’s use of Old Testament models, see J. McClure, ‘Bede’s Old Testament Kings’, in Ideal and Reality in Frankish and Anglo-Saxon Society, ed. P. Wormald, D. Bullough and R. Collins, Oxford 1983, 76–98. For Bede’s use of classical Roman models, particularly in the rhetorical assumptions according to which his narrative was shaped, see most notably R. Ray, ‘The Triumph of Greco-Roman Rhetorical Assumptions in Pre-Carolingian Historiography’, in The Inheritance of Historiography, 350–700, ed. C. Holdsworth and T. P. Wiseman, Exeter 1986, 67–84. See here R. H. C. Davis, ‘Bede after Bede’, in Davis, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, London 1991, 1–14; A. Gransden, ‘Bede’s Reputation as a Historian in Medieval England’, in Gransden, Legends, Traditions and History in Medieval England, London 1992, 1–29. Peter of Blois, ‘Dialogus inter regem Henricum secundum et abbatem Bonevallis’, ed. R. B. C. Huygens, Revue Bénédictine 68, 1958, 98–100, ascribing to the king the words ‘Lego in veteri testamento duces, reges etiam et prophetas frequenter de hostibus suis gravissimam sumpsisse vindictam. . . . Natura sum filius ire, quomodo igitur non irascar? Deus ipse irascitur.’ For the significance of the image of Solomon in the Laudes as recited before English kings, see Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 37. See also the attempt by Peter of Blois (‘Dialogus inter Henricum secundum et abbatem Bonevallis’, 100–1), to use Solomon as a model of the prince who acts wisely rather than out of anger. Adam of Eynsham, Magna Vita Sancti Hugonis, ed. D. L. Douie and D. H. Farmer, 2 vols., 2nd edn, OMT 1985, ii, 140–1. For John of Salisbury’s use of scriptural pseudonyms, see A. Saltman, ‘John of Salisbury and the World of the Old Testament’, in The World of John of Salisbury, ed. M. Wilks, Studies in Church History Subsidia 3, Oxford 1984, 343–63, and for the image of Pharaoh, see Gerald, ‘De Principis Instructione’, II.4, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 165, with remarks on the ambiguity of this image by Saltman, ‘John of Salisbury’, 347–8. See also Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, 420–3, citing Proverbs 29:12: ‘An unjust king has none but wicked servants.’

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moralising obituary notice, the chroniclers were as little interested in the psychological or personal characteristics of twelfth- and thirteenth-century rulers as Bede had been in interested in the psychology of Oswald or Penda, or as the Jews had been subtle in their delineation of the psychology of their own good or bad kings.51 It is important to notice here that although it was the biblical and Bedan tradition of chronicle writing that proved triumphant in the Plantagenet realm, this was by no means the only tradition of writing on kingship that might have been adopted. To begin with there was a hagiographical strain, associated more with the Gospel tradition of writing of Christ than with the Old Testament style of kingly chronicle, that could potentially have been enlisted in writing the lives of England’s kings. For a religion at whose very foundation lay four books of biographical reportage, and which via the lectionary encouraged the recitation of countless hundreds of the lives of the saints, it would surely be perverse to suggest that medieval Christianity in any way discouraged the writing of biography. Nonetheless, in England at least, there seems to have been a reluctance after 1154 to draw direct comparison between mere secular princes and either Christ or the saints. Otto of Freising might apply the words of St Luke (Luke 1:66), ‘What manner of child shall this be’, to his account of the youth of Frederick Barbarossa, just as elsewhere imperial propagandists sought to enlist even the three Magi of the Gospels as witnesses to the imperium both of Christ and of the German emperor.52 In the Plantagenet realm, however, it is noticeable that even those historians most interested in prophecy tended to avoid the biblical prophecies of Daniel or Revelation, instead enlisting the aid of the entirely secular utterances attributed to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin.53 The frequency with which historians, from Roger of Howden, via the southern French continuator of Richard of Poitiers to the Draco Normannicus, sought to apply the prophecies of Merlin to particular events and personalities in Plantagenet history, supplies further proof, if proof were needed, both of the close association between history and prophecy, and of the extent to which, by the 1150s and 60s, it was Geoffrey of Monmouth who was responsible for the dominant imagery of kingship within the Plantagenet realm.54 It was Geoffrey of Monmouth indeed, albeit that he died 51 52

53 54

V. H. Galbraith, ‘Good Kings and Bad Kings in English History’, History 30, 1945, 119–32, reprinted in Galbraith, Kings and Chroniclers: Essays in English Medieval History, London 1982, ch. 2. Otto of Freising, ‘Gesta Friderici’, I. 26, ed. R. Wilmans, MGH SS xx, Hanover 1868, 366, and for the imperial manipulation of the image of the Magi, see B. Hamilton, ‘Prester John and the Three Kings of Cologne’, in Studies in Medieval History presented to R. H. C. Davis, ed. H. Mayr-Harting and R. I. Moore, London 1985, 177–91. Only rarely do English chroniclers resort to Christological metaphors when writing of the Plantagenet kings, as for example when Richard of Devizes, ed. J. T. Appleby, NMT 1963, 39, states that Richard I was greeted by those besieging Acre with as much joy as if he had been Christ himself returning to earth. As noted by Southern, ‘History as Prophecy’, 168–9. Besides the examples cited by Southern, and the very frequent citations of Merlin by the Draco Normannicus (for example in Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 600, 605, 654, 663), note the way in which both BL MS Royal 14.C.2 and BL MS Arundel 69, two of the earliest manuscripts of Howden (Chronica, i, pp. lxxiv–lxxv, lxxx), have been marginally annotated, almost certainly by Howden himself, as and when events suit the prophecies of Merlin, as described by Corner, ‘The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts of Roger of Howden’s “Chronica” ’, 304–7. Note too the various appearances of Merlin in southern French chronicles noted by Vincent, ‘King Henry II and the Poitevins’, La Cour, ed. Aurell, 129n.

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many years before Henry ascended the throne, who contributed to one of the most vivid prevailing images of Henry II and his sons, through Henry’s picturing of himself as an eagle torn apart by its disobedient brood.55 Even the title of Stephen of Rouen’s Draco Normannicus appears to derive from the dragons prophesied by Geoffrey’s Merlin.56 That it was Merlin rather than Daniel or St John of Patmos who was enlisted as house prophet to the Plantagenets nonetheless supplies an important indication of the way in which Plantagenet pretensions soared far less high than those of the German emperors. Beyond the Gospels or hagiography, there was another model of biography, widely disseminated in the twelfth century, which might have been enlisted in writing of the Plantagenet kings, but which seems quite deliberately to have been avoided. This was the model supplied by Suetonius, refashioned by Einhard in his life of the emperor Charlemagne, and passed down via Asser and William of Malmesbury to the later twelfth century.57 That Suetonius was widely known in the Anglo-Norman realm, and not just via the florilegia but in undiluted form, can hardly be doubted. Of the twenty or so surviving manuscripts of Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars preserved from before 1200, nearly half are associated with ecclesiastical libraries in England, Normandy or Anjou.58 Not only had William of Malmesbury adopted Suetonius as a model in writing the lives of the early Anglo-Norman kings, but there were closer links still between Suetonius and the Plantagenet court.59 One copy of the Lives undoubtedly belonged to the courtier bishop, Philip of Bayeux.60 Others were to be found in the libraries of Glastonbury,

55

56 57

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Gerald, ‘De Principis Instructione’, 3.26, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 295–6, where Gerald also applies the words of the Old Testament prophet Micah (7:5–6) to relations between Henry II and his sons. As noted by M. Gibson, ‘History at Bec’, The writing of History in the Middle Ages, ed. R. H. C. Davis and J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, Oxford 1981, 181. For Suetonius in the Middle Ages, see G. B. Townsend, ‘Suetonius and his Influence’, in Latin Biography, ed. T. A. Dorey, London 1967, and especially M. Innes, ‘The Classical Tradition in the Carolingian Renaissance: Ninth-Century Encounters with Suetonius’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3, 1996–7, 265–82, who argues that Carolingian contacts with Suetonius were far more extensive than the supposedly unique encounter between Einhard and a lone manuscript of Suetonius at Fulda, an opinion that directly contradicts that of F. Brunhölzl, Geschichte der Lateinischen Literatur des Mittelalters, Munich 1975. See here the census of manuscripts by B. Munck Olsen, L’Etude des auteurs classiques latins aux XIe et XIIe siècles, 4 vols., Paris 1983–9, ii, 569–77, listing just over 20 complete manuscripts surviving from before 1200, of which at least 8 are definitely of English or Anglo-Norman provenance. For the relative significance of Suetonius in the twelfth century amongst those classical historians whose works were still copied, second only to Sallust and well ahead of the virtually unknown Livy and Tacitus, see L. B. Mortensen, ‘The Texts and Contexts of Ancient Roman History in Twelfth-Century Western Scholarship’, in The Perception of the Past, ed. Magdalino, 99–116. For William of Malmesbury, see M. Schütt, ‘The Literary Form of William of Malmesbury’s “Gesta Regum” ’, EHR 46, 1931, 255–60; J. G. Haahr, ‘William of Malmesbury’s Roman Models: Suetonius and Lucan’, in The Classics in the Middle Ages, ed. A. S. Bernardo and S. Levin, Binghampton 1990, 165–73; R. Thomson, William of Malmesbury, Woodbridge 1987, 29, 57–8, and D. H. Farmer, ‘Two Biographies by William of Malmesbury’, Latin Biography, ed. Dorey, 167. R. H. and M. A. Rouse, ‘ “Potens in opere et sermone”: Philip, Bishop of Bayeux and his Books’, The Classics in the Middle Ages, ed. Bernardo and Levin, 326, identified by S. J. Tibbetts in Texts and Transmission, ed. L. D. Reynolds, Oxford 1983, 402, with the copy still in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale MS latin 5802, apparently copied c. 1150 at Chartres, an identification not adopted by Munk Olsen.

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Rochester and Canterbury.61 Suetonius seems to have been known to both Gerald of Wales and John of Salisbury.62 Indeed both of these writers seem not only to have known their Suetonius, but at least to have heard of Plutarch: yet another classical model of secular biography, destined eventually to supplant the Suetonian model, yet largely ignored in western Europe until translated from the Greek in fourteenth-century Italy.63 As to Suetonius’s most influential imitator, Einhard, there seems again little doubt that Einhard’s Life of Charlemagne was widely disseminated in the Anglo-Norman world. Matthias Tischler’s remarkable survey of Einhard manuscripts suggests that copies of Einhard could be found by the early twelfth century in the library of William of Malmesbury (bound up with William’s copy of Suetonius), as well as in several of the major monastic libraries of Normandy and England.64 It was Einhard’s Vita Karoli together with the Vita Ludovici imperatoris that supplied the model for the so-called monk of Caen’s obituary notice of King William I, written in the late 1090s and attached to one of the later redactions of the Gesta Normannorum Ducum of William of Jumièges.65 A century later, Gerald of Wales, who may or may not have known Einhard’s Vita Karoli, nonetheless demonstrates wide-ranging knowledge of Charlemagne, whilst Henry II’s own interest in Charlemagne, evident from the fact that it was Henry who the emperor Frederick consulted over Charlemagne’s proposed canonisation, might well suggest that the tradition of Carolingian royal biography was directly known at Henry’s court.66 Altogether then, whether in the Gospels, the lives of the saints or in Suetonius, there were models in plenty available to anyone who might have wished to write lives of the Plantagenet kings. The Plantagenet realm, indeed, was more precocious than any other part of Europe, in terms of the sheer number of biographies composed to commemorate its courtiers. At the head of any list of such biographies must come the dozen or so contemporary lives of Thomas Becket written after 1170, although in the case of William fitz Stephen perhaps begun several years earlier, to commemorate Becket the royal chancellor even before his 61

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English Benedictine Libraries: The Shorter Catalogues, ed. R. Sharpe, Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues 4, 1996, 163 (B37.20), 521 (B.79.206); M. R. James, The Ancient Libraries of Canterbury and Dover, Cambridge 1903, 44 nos. 241–2 (BC3.16–17). I am indebted to Richard Sharpe for his assistance here. For Gerald, see the various citations in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 16, 23, 42, 51–2, 63–4. For John of Salisbury, see J. Martin, ‘John of Salisbury as Classical Scholar’, The World of John of Salisbury, ed. Wilks, 184–5. For Plutarch, and for the implication that John of Salisbury, and hence Gerald of Wales, knew only the pseudo-Plutarchian Institutio Traiani, 2 text in all probability invented by John whose knowledge of the true Plutarch came only at second-hand, perhaps through excerpts from the Noctes Atticae of Aulus Gellius, see Martin, ‘John of Salisbury as Classical Scholar’, 194–6; W. Berschin, Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages from Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, trans. J. C. Frakes, Washington D.C. 1988, 265–71. M. M. Tischler, Einharts ‘Vita Karoli’. Studien zum Entstehung, Überlieferung und Rezeption, 2 vols., MGH Schriften 48–9, Hanover 2001, ii, 963ff. I am indebted to Bjorn Weiler and Rolf Grosse for knowledge of Tischler. See Jumièges, i, pp. lxi–lxv, with a list of three surviving manuscripts of this, the so-called redaction B, at pp. xcvii–xcix. Gerald, ‘De Principis Instructione’, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 7, 42, 72–4, 99–100, 124–5, for the most part borrowing stories from the universal history of Hugh of Fleury. For Henry II and the canonisation of Charlemagne, see Vincent, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, 42n.

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promotion as archbishop.67 Besides the lives of Becket, we have significant lives of St Hugh of Lincoln, and by Gerald of Wales of several of the leading churchmen of his day, including the king’s bastard son Geoffrey Plantagenet, all of them closely associated with the royal court, above and beyond the more usual run of hagiographical works devoted to bishops and churchmen standing outside the immediate court circle. Of lesser courtiers, or one-time servants of the court, both John of Salisbury and Gerald of Wales wrote works that deserve to rank as autobiographies, and there is a very strong autobiographical element to the letter collection of Peter of Blois, originally dedicated to King Henry II. Peter’s early letters, I would suggest, are far better read as semi-fictionalised autobiography than they are as genuine records of the correspondence that passed between leading figures within the Plantagenet realm.68 Finally, with the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, we have one of the very first vernacular biographies of a courtier of non-royal blood to survive from any part of medieval Christian Europe and, as shown by the essay in this volume by David Crouch, clear evidence that the vernacular romance tradition also contributed to biographical writing. Why, if the tradition of biographical writing was so strong at the Plantagenet court, do we have so many biographies of courtiers but not a single biography of a reigning Plantangenet king? One answer here might be that such biographies were written, but that they have not survived. We know, for example, that Richard fitz Nigel, author of the Dialogue of the Exchequer, wrote a brief history of Henry II’s reign, the Tricolumnis, in circulation some years before 1176, in which Richard set out in three columns the affairs of the English church, the ‘noble deeds’ (insignes gesta) of Henry II, and various matters of public or private interest, including judgments of the king’s court.69 It was once, almost certainly wrongly, supposed that it was Richard’s lost Tricolumnis that underpinned the Gesta of Roger of Howden.70 In reality, whatever the nature of Richard’s Tricolumnis, there can be little doubt from its description that, like Howden’s Gesta, it was more a universal or general chronicle than a panegyric or classicised biography. Another vanished work is listed in the catalogue of poems composed by the one-time court poet Henry of Avranches as a Certamen inter regem Iohannem et barones, suggesting that early in Henry III’s reign there was someone prepared to commission Latin verses in celebration of the late King John.71 We

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For a brief conspectus of the Becket lives, see Barlow, Thomas Becket, 1–9. For the suggestion that William fitz Stephen’s life began as a panegyric to Thomas as chancellor, I am indebted to Anne Duggan. A study of the two letters in Peter’s collection supposedly sent in the name of Henry II leads me to conclude that, since neither of these can have been sent by the king, more of Peter’s letters may be literary fictions than has generally been supposed. For further considerations here, see my introduction to The Acta of King Henry II, forthcoming. The Course of the Exchequer by Richard son of Nigel, ed. C. Johnson, London 1950, 27, 77. A suggestion raised by Stubbs (Howden, Gesta Regis, i, pp. lvii–lxiii), but since generally dismissed, as by Stenton, ‘Roger of Howden and Benedict’, 576, and Gransden, Historical Writing, 221, and cf. Hudson, ‘Administration, Family and Perceptions of the Past’, 79n. The Shorter Latin Poems of Master Henry of Avranches Relating to England, ed. J. C. Russell and J. P. Heironimus, Cambridge MA 1935, pp. xix no. 30, 98.

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would do well to remember here quite how fragile our knowledge is even of those of the Plantagenet court histories that have survived. Several of our most significant sources are preserved only in single manuscript copies, including Walter Map’s De Nugis Curialium, Gerald of Wales’ De Principis Instructione, the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, and Stephen of Rouen’s Draco Normannicus.72 Others, most notably the chronicle of Geoffrey de Vigeois, survive in no manuscript at all but only as a result of their printing by early modern scholars.73 There are only two medieval manuscript copies of Fantosme’s verse chronicle and, more remarkably still, only two of Howden’s first recension, the so-called Gesta Henrici Secundi.74 Although we may be tempted to write of Plantagenet history as if all its actors were thoroughly conversant with the theories of John of Salisbury on tyranny, or of Walter Map on courtliness, a moment’s thought must tell us that, in reality, such ideas were restricted to a tiny minority even of the minority of the elite who regularly attended court. There is no more likelihood that Henry II’s court was familiar with the arguments of the Policratus than that the majority of the political elite in 1870 had read Locke, Marx or indeed anything much beyond the New Testament, the Peerage and the bloodstock notices from Tattersalls (all of them, be it noted, biographical sources, whether human or equine). The assembly of authors, books and ideas into one intellectual edifice, to be known henceforth as Plantagenet court culture, is a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than of the twelfth. Even such an intellectual magpie as Gerald of Wales seems to have known little of the work of John of Salisbury and less still of the output of Walter Map or Roger of Howden.75 Only the ubiquitous Geoffrey of Monmouth can be assumed to have been known to all. Indeed, modern writers in search of a Plantagenet

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As noted in the standard editions of all of these texts. All of these manuscripts, let it be noted, are of the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries, copied 150 years or more after the initial dates of composition. Known only from the edition by P. Labbe, Novae Bibliothecae Manuscriptorum Librorum, 2 vols., Paris 1657, ii, whence reprinted in RHF, x, 267ff, xi, 288ff, xii, 421–51, xviii, 211–23. Jordan Fantosme, ed. Johnston, pp. xliv–xlix; Howden, Gesta Regis, i, pp. xxi–xxviii, discussing BL MS Cotton Julius A xi and the fire-damaged MS Cotton Vitellius E xvii, of which there is a modern transcript by Wanley in BL MS Harley 3666. The relationship between these manuscripts and the earliest manuscripts of Howden’s Chronica is best discussed by D. Corner, ‘The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts of Roger of Howden’s “Chronica” ’, 297–310. For Howden’s output in general see D. Corner, ‘The “Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi” and “Chronica” of Roger, Parson of Howden’, BIHR 66, 1983, 126–44. The degree to which the various Plantagenet ‘court authors’ were familiar with one another’s work has been under-explored by the secondary authorities, most of whom have tended to treat one or other of these authors in isolation from the rest. For indications that Gerald of Wales may have read the Policraticus, and for material that he shares in common only with Howden and Map, see above nn. 35, 62–3. In other cases, as for example with the similarities between Peter of Blois’ classicising account of the court (Opera, ed. Giles, i, 42–53 no. 14) and that supplied by Walter Map (De Nugis Curialium, 2–25, 498–513), it is hard to believe that particular authors were not familiar with one another’s work. Indeed, Peter’s references to disputes over tablecloths, ‘Erat autem saepissime inter curiales de mapalibus gravis et dura contentio’, in Opera, ed. Giles, i, 51, may well contain a deliberate pun upon his fellow author’s name. Elsewhere, however, and given that most of these writers were products of the schools of Paris, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between themes peculiar to the Plantagenet court milieu and those that were simply part of the general intellectual climate of the age. For a conspectus here, see M. Aurell, ‘La cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204): entourage, savoir et civilité’, La cour Plantagenêt, ed. Aurell, 9–46.

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‘ideology’ would do better to look to the widely disseminated Geoffrey – available in all major libraries from Scotland south to Aquitaine – than to virtually any other writer, however intellectually ‘superior’.76 Arguably, far more writing about King Arthur was commissioned at the court of King Henry II than was ever commissioned there on the deeds of King Henry himself. It would be a brave historian indeed who suggested that an entire tradition of hagiographical, classicised or romanticised biography of the Plantagenet kings had somehow vanished without trace. To explain the absence of any such tradition we must instead look to other causes. One that immediately springs to mind is the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket.77 Too often, historians have written of the Becket conflict as if it were a distinct phase within the history of the reign of King Henry II, significant for its impact upon royal policy from 1164 to 1170 or 1172, but thereafter gradually fading from memory. This tendency, unwittingly encouraged by both Christopher and Mary Cheney with their forensic proofs of the way in which it was Henry rather than Becket’s supporters who emerged victorious after 1172, is to be seen at its most acute in the standard modern biography of Henry II.78 Here W. L. Warren assigns the Church and Becket to a sealed-off portion of an otherwise laudatory biography devoted to Henry’s secular triumphs.79 In reality, the fall-out from the Becket conflict was to be felt for more than a century after 1170, and certainly in tremors that would register high on the scale of such things for the remainder of Henry’s reign. Even as late as the 1250s, Becket’s murder was strong in the mind of the anonymous author who composed an attack upon Plantagenet kingship and particularly upon the misdeeds of King John, remembered here as the son of a king who had murdered his own archbishop.80 It was clearly still alive to the Dover chronicler, who after 1264 ascribed the victory of the barons against Henry III at Lewes to the interventions of St Thomas and St George.81 Just as clearly, a desire to lay the Becket conflict to rest informed the attempt made by Edward II’s ministers, and then by those of Henry IV, more than two hundred years after Becket’s death, to enlist

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A point drawn to my attention by James Bickford-Smith, and emphasised in the most recent attempt at a synthesis on Plantagenet political theory, by A. Chauou, L’Idéologie Plantagenêt. Royauté arthurienne et monarchie politique dans l’espace Plantagenêt (XIIe–XIIIe siècles), Rennes 2001, whatever one may make of Chaou’s attempts to demonstrate a deliberate neo-Arthurian strain at Henry’s court. 77 A suggestion put to me most forcefully in conversation with David Carpenter. 78 In particular, see C. R. Cheney, From Becket to Langton: English Church Government 1170–1213, Manchester 1956, and the remarkably influential, because remarkably perceptive, article by M. G. Cheney, ‘The Compromise of Avranches of 1172 and the Spread of Canon Law in England’, EHR 56, 1941, 177–97. 79 W. L. Warren, Henry II, London 1973, 4447ff, and note the title of Warren’s final chapter dealing with the Church (ch. 14), ‘The Restoration of Harmony’. 80 See the so-called ‘Invectivum contra regem Iohannem’, in BL MS Cotton Vespasian E iii fols. 171r–178v, supposedly written by Christ himself, esp. fol. 175v: ‘Unus autem maledictus ex illis Anglie non regibus sed regni destructoribus, me Dei filium in beato Thoma martire precioso pro libertate sancte matris ecclesie in loco sacro . . . irreverenter et crudeliter interfecit.’ For the text itself, see my forthcoming commentary, ‘Master Simon Langton, King John and the Court of France’. 81 The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, RS, London 1870–80, ii, 238, as noted also in The Song of Lewes, ed. C. L. Kingsford, Oxford 1890, 85.

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St Thomas and his supposedly holy oil as agents of royal unction rather than as tools of political opposition.82 In the immediate term after 1170, Thomas’s murder had a vitally important part to play in shaping the Plantagenet historical record. It is surely no coincidence that the previously sycophantic Draco Normannicus should break off in 1169, at the precise point in which it forecast that Thomas, described by the Draco throughout as a simoniac traitor, had little to fear should he return to England.83 In the same way, it is surely more than coincidence that Roger of Howden should have chosen to begin the first recension of his chronicle with an account of the Christmas court of 1169, held a year before Henry’s outburst at the Christmas court of 1170, just over a year before Becket’s martyrdom and on the eve of Becket’s return from exile.84 Howden’s purpose – a purpose from which he was later deflected by events – was, I would suggest, to demonstrate that Henry II, although brought to the verge of disaster by the archbishop’s death, subsequently obtained both the saint’s and God’s forgiveness, returning to triumph after his penitential pilgrimage to Canterbury in 1174, and to victory in his wars against Scotland, Flanders and France. To this extent, Howden’s scheme of history closely resembles that of the earlier, and almost certainly by 1170 forgotten, Gesta Stephani, in which Stephen’s arrest of the bishops had been intended to mark a caesura, the king first declining from his godly ways, but then through suffering and repentance winning back his place in divine favour.85 That neither Howden nor the author of the Gesta Stephani judged correctly in predicting the course that history would follow should not blind us to the fact that their intention was essentially moralistic and eschatological. Their histories were written not so much as royal panegyric, let alone as personal travelogues, but as attempts to fit royal fortunes into some more overarching, cosmic pattern.86

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T. A. Sandquist, ‘The Holy Oil of St Thomas of Canterbury’, in Essays in Medieval History presented to Bertie Wilkinson, ed. T. A. Sandquist and M. R. Powicke, Toronto 1969, 330–44, and for further secondary literature, see the articles cited in A History of Canterbury Cathedral, ed. P. Collinson, N. Ramsay and M. Sparks, Oxford 1995, 142–3n, 498–9n. For the later use of the ‘anti-royal’ prophecies ascribed to Thomas, see P. B. Roberts, ‘Prophecy, Hagiography and St Thomas of Canterbury’, Medieval Futures, ed. J. A. Burrow and I. P. Wei, Woodbridge 2000, 67–80. Howlett, Chronicles, ii, 677 (comparing Becket to Simon Magus), 741 (once again accusing him of having bribed the Pope), 757 (breaking off as Becket ponders the risks of returning to England). As pointed out to me by Philippe Buc, there is an interesting comparison to be drawn here between the Draco and the false hopes of Arnulf of Milan, whose history of popes and emperors (‘Gesta archiepiscoporum Mediolanensium’, ed. L. C. Bethmann and W. Wattenbach, MGH SS viii, 1–31) breaks off in 1077 with the joyful return of Pope Gregory VII to Rome. Howden, Gesta Regis, i, 3ff, and the note that the very first documentary evidences cited in full by Howden (pp. 14–16) are the letters of Louis VII and Theobald of Blois to the pope, notifying him of the murder and clearly blaming the deed upon Henry. The theory advanced here is strengthened by the apparent likelihood that the Gesta were first drawn up in the mid 1170s, circulating in their earliest recension (as in the copy in BL MS Cotton Julius A xi) in a version that originally came to a close in 1177, as suggested by Corner, ‘The “Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi” ’, 133n.; Gillingham. ‘The Travels of Roger of Howden’, 70. The fact that the so-called ‘Barnwell annalist’ knew this version of the Gesta only to 1177 may well result from the fact that the annalist himself was working at Peterborough, home in the Middle Ages to the surviving MS Julius A xi. See here R. Kay, ‘Walter of Coventry and the Barnwell Chronicle’, Traditio 54, 1999, 141–67. See here R. H. C. Davis, ‘The Authorship of the “Gesta Stephani” ’, in Davis, From Alfred the Great to Stephen, 168.

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A similar cosmology, once again employing Becket’s murder as the crucial turning point in royal fortunes, informs Gerald of Wales’ account of Henry II in the De Principis Instructione, save that here, of course, it is clear from the outset of Gerald’s entirely critical account that Henry’s repentance after 1174 will prove false, and that Henry, for his crimes against Thomas, will eventually suffer defeat and damnation.87 After the murder of Becket, it was impossible for any writer to pen a straightforwardly panegyric biography of Henry II. This in its turn may have led to a crucial breach in England with the tradition kept alive from William of Poitiers via William of Malmesbury to the Gesta Stephani, in which the deeds of successive Anglo-Norman kings had been commemorated in works specifically dedicated to kingly lives. Had Becket not died as he did, then it is possible that Howden’s scheme of history might have proved very different, so that it would be Henry II rather than Becket who was commemorated by a succession of contemporary biographers. Ironically, the only writer to compose an account of Henry II after 1170 cast remotely in the mould of Suetonius was the one writer, Gerald of Wales, most critical of Plantagenet rule. The second and third books of Gerald’s De Principis, coming after the self-consciously classicising account of kingship in the first, are arranged in chronological rather that Suetonian order, but nonetheless attempt to follow Suetonius in the delineation not only of events but of family descent, character, appearance, charitable foundations and testamentary bequests, in Gerald’s case, as in Einhard’s, leading to the recital in full of the late king’s will.88 However, whereas Einhard had transformed the Suetonian model to fit the needs of royal panegyric, Gerald’s account of Henry II’s sexual, familial and religious misdeeds is more truly in the tradition of Suetonius and his concern with sexual and other imperial misconduct.89 Becket’s murder may well explain the absence of a contemporary biography of Henry II, but it will not entirely explain the failure of any tradition of royal biography to reassert itself thereafter. Here, other factors must be taken into account. One must be the rivalries within the ruling family, and the lack of fraternal of 86

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To this extent I dissent strongly from the assumption made by Gillingham, ‘The Travels of Roger of Howden’, and Duncan, ‘Roger of Howden and Scotland’, that the quality of Howden’s information on any particular subject necessarily reflects his personal involvement in Plantagenet diplomatic initiatives. Remove the speculations of Duncan and Gillingham and all we know for certain of Howden’s contacts with the court is that he was briefly employed as a clerk to Henry II in the mid 1170s, as a forest justice in the late 1180s, and that he accompanied Richard’s army on crusade. For the rest virtually all of his information could have come to him in written or oral reports from others, without the need to place Howden himself at the centre of Henry II’s diplomacy. For an account of Gerald’s ‘plan’ here, see Bartlett, Gerald of Wales, 69–100, esp. 76–7. Bartlett suggests that it was Henry’s neglect of the Crusade, as much as the murder of Becket, that Gerald regarded as the crucial reason for Henry’s loss of divine support. The two themes, however, are interwoven in the ‘De Principis’. Descent, family and dominion: Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 153–50. Religious foundations, 170. Character and personal appearance, 213–15. Henry’s will, 191–3, with evidence of Gerald’s knowledge of Charlemagne’s will, perhaps from Einhard, at p. 100. It was surely in the same spirit of conscious imitation that Rigord recorded the political testament of Philip Augustus issued on the eve. of Philip’s sailing for crusade in 1190: Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. H. F. Delaborde, 2 vols., Paris 1882–5, i, 100–105. For examples of sexual misconduct in the ‘De Principis’, see for example Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 160, 165–6, 298–301.

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filial affection between one king and another, few of whom had any cause to commission eulogies of their immediate predecessors. In particular, and given the role played by widowed queens in the commissioning of earlier royal biographies, it is hard to imagine Eleanor of Aquitaine, Berengaria of Navarre, or Isabella of Angoulême wasting time or money in the commemoration of Henry, Richard or John.90 Another explanation may be the lack of any settled capital for the early Plantagenet kings, and the absence of any relationship between Henry II, Richard or John and an English monastery equivalent to the relationship established by the 1140s between the Capetian kings and the monks of SaintDenis.91 It was from Saint-Denis that much of the panegyric tradition of French royal biography was to emerge, from Suger via Odo of Deuil to Rigord and Guillaume le Breton. The mention of tradition carries us on to one further point, which can all to easily be overlooked. As historians we are trained to search out the causes and consequences of things, and to distrust explanations that turn upon such inconsequential and indefinite concepts as taste or the zeitgeist. There are, however, certain areas in which differences between medieval kings or polities may have less to do with deliberate choice than with unconscious adherence to family or local tradition. Why, for example, did the kings of Spain and Scotland maintain coronation rituals so markedly at odds with those of France, England or the Empire?92 Why did Gothic architecture develop in such different ways in southern England and northern France, separated by only a few miles of sea?93 Why did the kings of England come to enrol many thousands of their outgoing letters and mandates when the kings of France adopted a far less comprehensive system of enrolment?94 Explanations for all of these phenomena can be advanced, with varying degrees of plausibility. In the end, however, it may well be that such explanations are merely academic exercises, vainly intended to explain the inexplicable. The writers of Capetian France maintained a tradition of biographical panegyric of their kings in unbroken succession from Louis VI to Louis IX, in part perhaps out of homage to the Suetonian style of Einhard’s Vita Karoli, in part because from Suger’s time onwards this was very much what was expected at Saint-Denis.95 In England, any such tradition was superseded, after 1154, by

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A point drawn to my attention by Julia Barrow. For Eleanor of Provence, widow of Henry III, who does appear to have supported the posthumous commemoration of her husband, even to the extent of crediting rumours that the late king had worked a miracle from beyond the grave, see William Rishanger, Chronica et annales, ed. H. T. Riley, RS, London 1865, 98. A suggestion made to me by James Bickford-Smith. A fact remarked on at least as early as the time of Gerald of Wales (‘De Principis Instructione’, I.20, in Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, viii, 138). See here the particularly interesting speculations of L. Grant, ‘Gothic Architecture in Southern England and the French Connection in the Early Thirteenth Century’, in Thirteenth Century England III, ed. P. R. Coss and S. D. Lloyd, Woodbridge 1991, 113–26; R. Plant, ‘English Romanesque and the Empire’, ANS 24, 2002, 177–202. See here the various less than satisfactory explanations proposed by N. Vincent, ‘Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries’, in English Government in the Thirteenth Century, ed. A. Jobson, Woodbridge 2004, 17–48. For the more significant of these early Capetian lives, see Suger, Vie de Louis le Gros, ed. H. Waquet, 2nd edn, Paris 1964; Œuvres de Rigord et de Guillaume le Breton, ed. Delaborde. For Suger’s life

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the writing of chronicles and more or less sycophantic histories, in which the deeds of the reigning king were not subjected to sustained biographical treatment. Rather than suggesting some profound difference between Plantagenet and Capetian kingship, this may reflect nothing more than the conservatism of the monks of Saint-Denis and the relative indifference of the Plantagenet kings to the insults and slurs cast at them by their detractors. Whereas from the time of Dudo through to the 1150s and the writings of Ailred and Osbert of Clare, the dukes of Normandy had need of historians to assert the legitimacy of their rule, after 1154 the needs for such legitimation declined as the duke-kings came to feel themselves secure in their ancestral inheritance. Only in hindsight, once the Capetian lives had been digested into Grandes chroniques, and once modern historians began to probe the differences between the supposedly sacral, mimetic style of Capetian kingship, set against the supposedly bureaucratic and secularised style of the Anglo-Norman and Plantagenet kings, only then did the absence of Plantangenet royal biographies and their relative abundance in France lead to and reinforce the very different ways that modern French and English historians chose to write about their kings, be it Le Goff’s Louis IX (a king virtually without a court) or Powicke’s Henry III (a court virtually without a king).96 Thus far I have used one of Frank Barlow’s chief subjects, Thomas Becket, to help to explain why Plantagenet and Capetian writing on kingship began to diverge after 1150. I would like to end by enlisting to the enquiry another of Barlow’s subjects, Edward the Confessor. One of the most startling differences between the Capetian and Plantagenet traditions of court history can be observed in the biographies produced in the late thirteenth century to commemorate Louis IX of France.97 Louis IX was almost the exact contemporary of one of the most pious kings of England, Henry III, and as I have argued elsewhere the similarities between Louis and Henry are extraordinarily close, in terms of their religious devotions, their artistic patronage and their personal morality.98 Louis, however,

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of Louis VII, edited by A. Molinier, Vie de Louis VI le Gros par Suger suivie de l’histoire du roi Louis VII, Paris 1887, and for a significant commentary on Suger’s life of Louis VI, noting the dissimilarity with Einhard and the extraordinary emphasis upon military campaigns listed chronologically, see L. Grant, Abbot Suger of St-Denis: Church and State in Early Twelfth-Century France, London 1998, 36–42, including the suggestion that Suger himself was influenced by earlier Anglo-Norman writing, particularly by accounts of the reign of William I. For the verse panegyric of Louis VIII, printed in RHF, xvii, 312–45, see most recently T. Gartner, ‘Das “Carmen de gestis Ludovici VIII” des Nicholaus von Braia. Untersuchungen zu den literarischen Quellen und zur Textkritik’, Studi Medievali, 3rd ser. 43 fasc. 1, 2002, 349–432. For a recent attempt to downgrade Rigord, the biographer of Philip Augustus, from the status of royal physician and familiar to that of mere anthologist working at St-Denis in deliberate imitation of Suger, see F.-O. Touati, ‘Faut-il en rire? Le médecin Rigord, historien de Philippe Auguste’, Revue Historique 309, 2003, 243–65, although more plausibly see J. W. Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus, Berkeley 1986, 396–7. For the Grandes chroniques, see G. M. Spiegel, The Chronicle Tradition of Saint-Denis: A Survey, Berkeley 1978, and the essays by P. Bourgain and Spiegel in Saint-Denis et la royauté. Etudes offertes à Bernard Guenée, ed. F. Autrand et al., Paris 1999, 375–404. See here the list of texts and editions in J. Le Goff, Saint Louis, Paris 1996, 910. N. Vincent, ‘Heinrich III. (1216–1272)’, Die englischen Könige im Mittelalter von Wilhelm dem Eroberer bis Richard III., ed. H. Vollrath and N. Fryde, Munich 2004, 120–1; N. Vincent, ‘Problems in the Writing of Anglo-French Kingship’, Les Idées: traversent-ils la Manche?, ed. J.-P. Genet, Paris forthcoming.

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was commemorated by at least four contemporary biographers, whereas Henry inspired no biography at all.99 Why was this so, and what have been the consequences? Here, beyond any question of the personal success or failure of Louis or Henry as kings, beyond their respective dealings with baronial rebellion, or their capacities as crusaders, one rather obvious consideration shines out. France in 1270 could lay claim to no royal saint since Carolingian times, and certainly no saint sprung from the ruling Capetian dynasty. Hence the eagerness of those at the court of Louis’ immediate successors to seek the canonisation, and hence to commission the writing of biographies, of the late king.100 In England, after 1270, there was less need to seek the canonisation of Henry III, and hence less need to commission any biography of him, not only because there was little by way of a tradition of writing royal biography at the Plantagenet court, but because England already possessed a perfectly respectable royal saint, Edward the Confessor, canonised in the 1160s at the prompting of King Henry II, and thereafter, with his shrine at Westminster, the object of devotions from the royal family, most notably from the obsessively devoted King Henry III. As a result, whereas Louis IX has gone down in history as a saint in his own right, Henry III is remembered, if at all, as a mere devotee of the cult of St Edward. Were it not for the contemporary biographies of Louis IX, modern writing on Capetian kingship might be very different. Like the earlier lives of Louis VI and VII, Philip Augustus or Louis VIII, and like much of the so-called ‘court literature’ of the Plantagenets, the lives of St Louis circulated in only limited numbers and only rarely beyond the immediate circle of the court.101 Just as the canonisation of Edward the Confessor in the 1160s marked the high-water mark in Plantagenet dealings with the Church, so the canonisation of Louis was followed swiftly by one of the more serious breaches between Capetian church and state. Nonetheless, to modern historians, very much the slaves of their sources, the fact that, when compared to Plantagenet England, Capetian France could boast such a rich tradition of royal biography, has been taken at far more than face value – as the outcome not merely of taste, or of Capetian necessity, but of a profound dissimilarity between Capetian and Plantagenet approaches to the holy. That there was in reality no such profound divergence, and that historians have been led astray more by differences between their source materials than by true differences in kingship, is an argument that I have attempted to develop here, and that at the very least, I would suggest, merits further debate.

99

For recent attempts to compare the piety of Louis IX and Henry III, see N. Vincent, The Holy Blood: King Henry III and the Westminster Blood Relic, Cambridge 2001, 188–96; idem, ‘Pilgrimages of the Angevin Kings’, and idem, ‘King Henry III and the Blessed Virgin Mary’, in The Church and Mary, ed. R. N. Swanson, Studies in Church History 39, Oxford 2004, 126–46. For the later medieval manipulation of the image of Louis IX, see especially C. Beaune, The Birth of an Ideology: Myths and Symbols of Nation in Late-Medieval France, trans. S. R. Huston, Berkeley 1991, 90–125. 100 Fundamental here is L. Carolus-Barré, Le Procès de canonisation de Saint Louis (1272–1297). Essai de reconstitution, Nogent-le-Rotrou, Rome 1994. 101 There is, for example, no surviving manuscript of the verse panegyric of Louis VIII, and only a handful of manuscripts even for the lives of Louis VI and Philip Augustus, as noted in the editions listed above.

INDEX Medieval persons are listed by first name; anonymous texts are indexed by title. The index is largely confined to those pre-modern figures, places, and texts which recur in the volume or which are deemed particularly germane to its theme. Names of modern scholars are generally not indexed and neither are fleeting or incidental mentions of indexed terms.

Abelard, Peter 100–1, 154, 173–4, 177 Abingdon 73, 86, 90–3 See also Wulfgar Adela, countess of Flanders 112, 126 Ælfgifu, queen 59 Ælfric of Cerne and Eynsham 2–3, 78, 87, 94–6, 111 Ælfthryth, queen 59, 87, 89 Æthelmær, ealdorman 87, 96 Æthelred the Unready 55, 77–97, 101–3, 126 Æthelthryth, queen 50, 52, 60 Æthelweard, ealdorman 84, 86–7, 148 Æthelwold, bishop 89, 91–2 See also Wulfstan of Winchester Ailred of Rievaulx 241, 243, 256 See also Walter Daniel Alexander III, pope 214–5 Alfred, king of Wessex 61–75, 238 See also Asser Alcuin 22–4 Epistolae 28 See also Vita Alcuini Anacletus, antipope 179 Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 65–66, 69, 79–80, 83, 94, 97, 101, 118, 130–2, 135–41, 201 See also Æthelweard, ealdorman Angers 122, 152, 175 Anna Comnena, Alexiad 148 Arnulf, bishop of Lisieux 173–4, 177–81, 183–4 Arthur, King 238 Asser, Vita Ælfredi 4, 7, 62–66, 248 The Astronomer, Vita Hludovici 22 Augustine, bishop of Hippo 22, 134 Autobiography 154, 250 See also Guibert of Nogent Avranches 175, 181, 214 Baldwin V, count of Flanders 112, 114, 126 Barking Abbey 50–2, 58, 97 Barrington, Cambs. 29–31, 35–8, 46 Baudri of Bourgeuil 177

Bede 2, 50 Historia Ecclesiastica 50, 52, 60, 66, 117–8, 245–7 Benoît of Saint-Maure 238, 240 Berinsfield, Oxon. 37–8 Bernard of Clairvaux 161–72, 179 De consideratione 170–1 Vita S. Malachiae 164–6 See also Ernaud of Bonneval, Geoffrey of Auxerre, William of Saint-Thierry Bernard of Tiron, see Geoffrey Grossus Biography, Collective 2, 5–7 Documentary sources for 112, 226–9, 244 Oral sources for 50–2, 153–4, 229–34 Patronage of 58, 114–17, 124–6, 235, 254–5 Vernacular 2–3, 143–59, 221–35 Vernacular sources for 51–2, 122 Boethius, De Consolatione Philosophiae 61 Bologna 178–80 Boniface, bishop 53–6, 58 Burton 86 See also Geoffrey, abbot of Burton Byrhtferth of Ramsey 70, 78, 87 Canterbury 86, 116, 119, 239, 249 See also Christ Church, Eadmer Carmen de Hastingae Proelio, see Guy of Amiens Castledyke South, Barton-upon-Humber, N. Lincs. 36–7, 46 Charlemagne 15–28, 238, 249 See also Einhard, Notker Chartres 175–6, 178, 181–3 See also Geoffrey of Lèves Chepstow 225–6, 228–9 Chrétien de Troyes 221 Christ Church, Canterbury 86 Cicero, Ad Herennium 1, 3 Circumlationes 113–4, 119

260

INDEX

Cnut, king of England 81, 101, 103–4, 107–8, 124, 131

Fulda, see Rudolf of Fulda Fulk le Réchin 145–59

David, Old Testament king 64–5, 73, 238, 246 David I, king of Scots 187, 204 Dhuoda, Frankish noblewoman 23 Draco Normannicus, see Stephen of Rouen 251 Drogo of Saint-Winnocksbergen 112–4, 116–7, 119–21, 123–4 Vita S. Godelieve 114, 120, 124 Durham 216–7

Gent 112–3 Geoffrey, abbot of Burton, Vita S. Modwenne 49 Geoffrey of Anjou, father of Henry II 189–90, 198, 240 Gesta of 240–1 Geoffrey of Auxerre, monk of Clairvaux 162, 167, 170–2 Geoffrey of Lèves, bishop of Chartres 162, 167, 173–84 Geoffrey of Monmouth 196, 247–8, 251 Geoffrey of Vendôme 177 Geoffrey de Vigeois, Chronicle of 251 Geoffrey le Barbu, count of Anjou 150, 155 Geoffrey Grossus, Vita S. Bernardi 174–5, 177–9 Geoffrey `Martel’, count of Anjou 145, 149–53, 155 Gerald of Wales (de Barri) 208–9, 219, 228, 237–8, 241–2, 244, 246, 249–51, 254 Gerard, bishop of Angoulême 174, 178–9, 183 Gervase, archbishop of Reims 112, 114, 126 Gesta Stephani 186–7, 253–4 Gloucester 225, 228–9 Godelieve 123–4 Goscelin, monk of Saint-Bertin 3, 112, 115, 117, 120–6 Liber confortatorius 124 Vita S. Edithe 50–3, 55–9, 117, 120 Vita S. Mildrithe 50–1, 54, 117 Vita S. Wulfhilde 50, 54 Vita S. Wulfthrythe 50 Great Chesterford, Essex 37, 39, 46 Gregory the Great, pope 1, 64–5 Guibert of Nogent 154 Guy of Amiens, Carmen de Hastingae Proelio 125, 131 Guy of Étampes 175

Eadmer of Canterbury 78, 137 Letter to the monks of Glastonbury 117 Vita Anselmi 139, 163–4, 171–2 Eadric Streona 81, 87 Ealdred, bishop of Worcester, archbishop of York 115, 130–2, 141 Edgar, king of England 55, 77, 83, 85, 90 Edith, queen 58, 99–107, 115, 122–3, 125–6, 185 Edith of Wilton 55 See also Goscelin Edith-Matilda, daughter of Malcolm Canmore 58, 126, 185 Edward the Confessor, king of England 77–8, 101, 108, 238, 256–7 See also Folcard, Vita Ædwardi Edward the Martyr, king of England 55, 81 Edward I, king of England 189 Einhard, Vita Karoli 3–4, 18–23, 63–4, 248–9, 254–5 Eleanor of Aquitaine 185, 241, 255 Ely 86 See also Æthelthryth Emma, queen 80, 87, 94, 99–108, 115, 122–3, 125, 185 Encomium Emmae 108, 111, 115, 121–2 Erchinoald, mayor of the palace 57–8 Ernaud, abbot of Bonneval 162–3, 167–9, 174 Eve of Wilton 122–4 Exeter 79, 99, 205 Eynsham 86, 96 Faremoûtiers-en-Brie 52, 57–8 Folcard, monk of Saint-Bertin 112, 115–6, 121–2, 125, 131 (attrib.) Vita Ædwardi 4, 116, 120–2, 129, 131 Vita S. Johannis episcopi Eboracensis 115, 117, 120 Frederick Barbarossa 238, 241, 247, 249 See also Otto of Freising

Hadrian I, pope 17, 21 Helgaud, monk of Fleury, Vita regis Roberti Pii 148–9 Henry I, king of England 180, 189–90, 196–7, 213, 239 Henry II, king of England 85, 188, 194, 199, 202, 207–15, 227, 230, 233, 235, 238–45, 250, 252–4, 257 Henry II, emperor 84 Henry III, king of England 7, 224, 250, 252, 256–7 Henry of Avranches 251

INDEX

Henry of Blois, bishop of Winchester 192, 194, 199, 201–2 Herman, bishop of Ramsbury 115–6 Hildebert of Lavardin 175, 177–8 Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal, see John Honorius II, pope 178–81 Innocent II, pope 178, 192, 204 Ivo, bishop of Chartres 173, 177–80 Joachim of Fiore 239 John, Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal 221–35, 250 John, bishop of Sées 180 John, king of England 212, 217–8, 239–40, 246, 250, 252 John of Earley 222–3, 233–4 John of Salisbury 246, 250–1 Historia pontificalis 165 Policraticus 251 John of Worcester 138, 201, 205, 228 Jonas, Vita S. Columbani 4 n. 19, 52 Jordan Fantosme 209–10, 241, 251 Landulf, Historia Mediolanensis 168 Le Mans 150, 175, 222, 241 Leoba 50, 53–5, 58 See also Rudolf of Fulda Life, see Biography, Vita and under names of individual authors Lincoln, Battle of 193, 195, 197–8, 232 Lisieux 183, 186 See also Arnulf London 74, 79–80, 86, 88, 193, 205–6 See also St Brice’s Day, massacre of Louis the Pious 23 See also The Astronomer Louis VII, king of France 174, 210 See also Suger Maldon, Battle of 80, 87 Manuscripts Avranches, Bibliothèque municipale, 159 242 Boulogne, Bibliothèque municipale, 103 118 Dublin, Trinity College, 503 228 Laon manuscript of Gesta Stephani (lost) 196–8 London, BL Arundel 69 207 London, BL Cotton Julius A.xi 243 London, Inner Temple Library, 551.2 207 Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, 792 196–8 Vatican, Biblioteca apostolica Vaticana, Reg. lat. 173 145

261

Margaret, queen of Scotland 126, 130 See also Turgot Matilda, abbess of Essen 84, 148 Matilda, empress 59, 185–94, 199–200, 203–6, 241, 243 Matilda, queen of William I 125–6, 185 Matthew Paris 224, 239, 244 Mildrith 51 See also Goscelin Miles of Gloucester 202, 204–5 Mill Hill, Kent 35, 37–9 Minster-in-Thanet, see Mildrith Miracles and miracula 49, 52, 57, 113–4, 139, 161–72 Morigny, Chronicle of 173–4, 178 Norton, N. Yorks. 35–7, 46 Norwich, see St John Timberhill Notker, Gesta Karoli 20, 26 Oakington, Cambs. 35 Orderic Vitalis 130, 135–40, 190, 195 Ordulf 87, 95–6 Osbert of Clare 241, 256 Vita S. Eadburgae 52 Otto I, emperor 83 Otto II, emperor 83 Otto III, emperor 84 Otto of Freising 244, 247 Paris 162, 175, 177–8, 181–3 See also Saint-Denis Peter of Blois 246, 250 Philip II Augustus, king of France 210, 219, 224, 227, 235 Plummer, Charles 66–9, 71 Plutarch 249 Polybius 187 Ralph of Diceto (Diss) 178, 241–5 Raunds Furnells, Northants. 36–42, 46 Richard, king of England 209, 212, 217–20, 239–41, Richard fitz Nigel, Tricolumnis 250 Robert, earl of Gloucester 189–91, 197, 199, 201, 204–5 Robert of Lewes, bishop of Bath 199–201 Robert of Torigny 190, 193, 242–4 Roger of Howden 207–220, 239, 241–5, 250, 253 Roger of Pont l’ Évêque, archbishop of York 208, 214–5 Roger of Wendover 66, 244 Rome 20, 175, 178, 186, 244 Rudolf of Fulda, Vita Leobae 50, 53, 55–8

262

INDEX

Saint-Bertin 112, 115–6, 118, 122 See also Folcard, Goscelin Saint-Denis 24, 183, 255–6 See also Suger St Albans 86 St Andrew, Fishergate, York 40, 47 St Brice’s Day, massacre of 81, 94 St David’s, Dyfed 62–3 St Helen-on-the-Walls, York 37, 40, 42–3 St John Timberhill, Norwich 43 Sallust 3 Samson Mauvoisin, archbishop of Reims 177, 181, 183 Sées 175, 178, 180–1, 214 Sigebert of Gembloux 2, 245 Stephen, king of England 185, 188, 190–4, 195–205, 230 See also Gesta Stephani Stephen of Rouen, Draco Normannicus 241, 247–8, 251, 253 Stephen Harding 179 Stubbs, Bishop William 6, 68, 207–8 Suetonius 3, 18–19, 21, 64, 137, 228, 248–9, 254 Suger, 173–4, 177, 183, 255 Vita Ludovici 4, 149, 224 Swein Forkbeard 81, 97 Tavistock 95 Theobald I, count of Blois 151 Theobald II, count of Blois 162, 179, 190–1, 198 Thietmar of Merseburg, Chronicon 84 Thomas Becket 208, 210, 214, 249–50, 252–6 Letters of 245 Tours 150, 152, 175 Turgot, Vita S. Margaretae Scotorum reginae 126 Urban II, pope 152 Urraca, queen of León-Castilla 185 Virgil, Virgilian influence 135 Visio Wettini 21, 27

Vita Ædwardi, see Folcard Vita Alcuini 64 Vita S. Neoti 68, 118, 121 Vita S. Norberti 165, 168–9 Wace 238, 240–1 Walter Daniel, Vita Aelredi 7, 164 Walter Map 213, 251 Wetti of Reichenau, see Visio Wettini Wharram Percy 39–41, 43, 46 William I, duke of Normandy, king of England 126, 129–41, 249 William IV, king of Scotland 209, 215, 218, 242 William, count of Poitou 143–59 William of Malmesbury 8, 59, 78, 89, 119–120, 126–7, 131, 135–7, 195–6, 198, 201, 203, 205, 220, 228, 248–9 William of Jumièges, Gesta Normannorum ducum 132–4, 244, 249 William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi 129–37, 140, 151 William of Saint-Thierry 162–4, 166, 172 William Marshal, earl of Pembroke, see John, Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal William Marshal, second earl of Pembroke 223–5, 233–4 Wilton 53, 58–9, 126 See also Edith, Edith-Matilda, Eve Wimborne 50, 54 Winchester 104, 111, 119, 206, 228 Old and New Minsters 71, 79, 86 See also Æthelwold, Henry of Blois Wulfgar, abbot of Abingdon 90–3 Wulfsige 63 Wulfstan of Winchester 78, 87 Vita Æthelwoldi 95 Wulfstan, archbishop of York 78, 85, 87, 111, 130–1 York, 44–5, 86, 208, 211, 216–8, 220 See also Ealdred, Roger of Pont l’Évêque, St Andrew, St Helen-on-theWalls, Wulfstan