Beowulf and the intimidated critic

I confess it: I have been avoiding Beowulf.

Now, of course, as soon as I confessed this to myself, I had to jump in and volunteer to present in the first of two classes in which we will discuss Beowulf in our 'Mediaeval (As) Epic' class - ie, in two weeks, which makes me the first seminar presentation overall.  Despite my rational mind saying 'oh, you should probably go for one of the later Anglo-Norman epics, 12th or maybe 13th century, that way you can double up your theory with your thesis, which, may I remind you, you are writing this semester'.  Because Beowulf is the behemoth, the Hamlet-scale terror, at the mention of which everything in me retreats to huddle behind a defensive barrier of 'oh, I work in the late Middle Ages, no, I have no opinion on Beowulf, that would require reading reams and reams of lifetimes' works of scholarship, also I do not speak Old English, no, please, do not get me fascinated by Old English, I don't have time'.

So of course I have now put myself in the position where I have to have an opinion by next week.  Oh well.

The course is on the concept of epic, and we seem so far to be leaning towards discussion of the later appropriation of that concept, particularly for nationalistic purposes, which accords with the secondary reading for that week (largely nation and romanticism in the 19th and early 20th centuries).  And there I can double up on theory with my thesis, in terms of the opportunistic (re)construction of 'history'. I much suspect that my key terms will be not only 'nationalism' and 'alterity' but also 'borders' and 'fragmentation' - as that will be a topic of discussion later when we reach Raoul de Cambrai - and thus - Grendel!  March-reaver and literal object of fragmentation!

And this, of course, means that I have an excuse to read J. J. Cohen.  This is always a treat.

Modes of perception or stylistic conventions?

My supervisor recommended me last week a book that he finds has received less attention than it deserves, partly because it is awkwardly titled for its contents: William Brandt’s The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception (London: Yale UP, 1966). I have found myself alternately fascinated and frustrated by it.

Brandt argues that mediaeval clerical writers lacked any concept of causal correlation, that a basic characteristic of mediaeval modes of perception was that events or objects stood in isolation as entities in themselves. Consequently events, not processes, are the basic units of mediaeval history writing. Rather than a chronicles being true narratives, or even continua, they were ‘written as collections of incidents or events... the clerical chronicler simply did not see a basic continuity of action’ (85-6). In Brandt’s analysis, the events that form the basic units of the chronicle are included as if no context existed, unrelated either by the chronicler’s awareness of an underlying process or cause, or by any kind of ‘temporal dimensions’: each stands alone, ‘one particular instant in time’ (66).

Brandt’s ideas are fascinating and thought-provoking, and some of them I find very productive. In particular, given my area of study, I am happily toying with his conclusion that the world perceived by mediaeval clerical writers [Footnote: Or, as I prefer to restrict it, the world as it is organised in the chronicles of said writers.] was ‘non-temporal... Our modern feeling for time is a function of our feeling for process; time is the means of continual change. The discrete and self-contained character of action as perceived by the medieval clerk meant that the world could not be perceived as process’ (171). There are some productive ideas here. I do agree with him that the mediaeval concept of time does seem to involve a fundamental division into discrete units, although I’d add that all of these seem to bear the same relationship to each other, and can therefore function as proximate examples (for example, an incident from antiquity may be used as an example that reflects on an incident in 1274).

Where I quibble with Brandt is not over his analyses of mediaeval historical writing, but in his insistence that the results of his analysis reveal some basic mediaeval ‘mode of perception’. Brandt sets out to find some kind of mindset or perceptive frame that he might characterise as recognisably mediaeval, and he believes he finds it in certain structural characteristics of some of the most typical late-mediaeval chronicles. While the search itself may be a worthy one, it seems to have led him to exaggerate the significance of his findings. He applies the phrase ‘fundamentally antitemporal’ not to a particular style of writing, but to the mind that produces it (93).

Brandt attributes the wide variety of material and the resulting lack of narrative flow in universalising chronicles to this inability to perceive causal relationships between situations. While acknowledging that Matthew Paris seems to have been aware of the irrelevance (impertinentia) of certain of his material to what Brandt interprets as his main subject, Brandt denies that, for Matthew or his contemporaries, it could have been a major criterion in selecting that material:

When we say that something is relevant to something else, we ordinarily mean that there is a causal relationship between them. Lacking in great measure the perception of relationships, the medieval chronicler who took his work seriously, as Matthew certainly did, was hard put to know what was relevant and what was not. (47)

Although it may be a result of unfortunate phrasing, Brandt seems to imply that Matthew was conscious of a debilitating lack in his perceptual tool box which complicated his task. This seems unlikely, as a recognised intellectual lack is easily remedied. In any case, the supposition that the mediaeval mind was so hampered by its inability to recognise causal correlations as to be unable to distinguish between relevance and irrelevance is easily disproved: think genres as diverse as analyses of vices and virtues, legal treatises, mirrors for princes, and many chronicles whose scope is more specific than Matthew’s.

Brandt seems himself to be hampered by a particular mode of perception, at least as it relates to the purpose of historical writing. This is illustrated by the falsity of his supposition in comparing Matthew’s perception of relevance to the conceptual decisions that a modern historian might make in planning out a work. An historian nowadays has the luxury of selection: any material omitted may reasonably be expected to exist elsewhere in easily accessible form. We have the luxury of structuring our work around a process or an argument. We may choose a process, argue it and select the events to fit. Matthew Paris, however, is not telling a story or arguing a process, but recording events. From his point of view it is probably better that any particular event be given the benefit of the doubt in the question of inclusion – who knows whether it will be recorded elsewhere? And if it is, there is no guarantee that it will ever be available to any of his particular readers. Once such a wide variety of material is admitted, a chronological structure is likely to be more coherent than any attempt at narrative ordered by topic (as Brandt himself points out, 46). This does not mean that Matthew (or his contemporaries) was not capable of telling a story, shaping the narrative and the events to fit. The Fineshade chronicler, for example, does exactly that. [Footnote: Granted, the Fineshade chronicle is what Brandt would call an occasional chronicle, as opposed to the universalising chronicles of Matthew Paris; but if this ‘mode of perception’ were indeed as fundamental to the structure of mediaeval thinking and writing as Brandt claims, that would make no difference.]

Brandt seems throughout to view the work of the mediaeval historian through his ideas of what a modern one ought to write, which reveal themselves from time to time as condescension, fascination or mild frustration. For example, in discussing the aristocratic chronicle, he remarks as if wonderingly that ‘it aims to celebrate, not to explain, the actions with which it is concerned. An explanation that may occur along the way is never the point of the narrative’ (88). There is no reason, outside of Brandt’s expectations, why Matthew Paris, or Jean le Bel, or Sir Thomas Gray, should make explanation the ‘point’ of their writing. The mediaeval chronicle, after all, is descended from (and existed concurrently with) simple annalistic lists of events, with no commentary or expansion at all.

I would prefer to account for the lack of explanatory context in another way. Although I agree that mediaeval modes of perception doubtless differed widely from ours, in ways that still call for exploration, I would rather pin this particular difference not to authorial perception, but to modes of reading.

The mediaeval intellectual mind was well-accustomed to glossing, to extrapolating larger meaning from single points, to reading significance in juxtaposition or similarity. There is literal glossing, of course, in which the bare text of (say) a work of Augustine’s was expected to travel with one or more levels of interpretive gloss, which leant it several layers of (sometimes mutually contradictory) reading. The Bible was expected to be accompanied by the Glossa Ordinaria. Images, too, could provide a kind of gloss. An image on a page, though not directly illustrating the text, may on reflection emphasise or alter one’s reading of that same text. Texts were intended to be considered and re-considered, each page to be contemplated. A reader is, then, in the habit of taking on a certain burden of interpretation. The interpretation is naturally guided by the reader’s own cultural paraphernalia. If his (or occasionally her) copy of Mark’s Gospel lacked the Glossa, he would nevertheless have the intellectual apparatus to, say, produce a reasonable allegorical reading of a given passage, or read the appearance of a certain animal in terms of its usual symbolic significance.

In a similar fashion, in a chronicle – especially a local one – a list of events may perhaps be expected to function effectively as an aide-memoire. Exact sequences of events and dates may be forgotten, and so are recorded as the basic skeletal structure of memory. Memory’s flesh, however, the emotional weight and drama behind a certain event, or its significance to a given community – the shared cultural heart of it, in short – may be expected to come to mind far more easily, especially when prompted by the bone-like facts. Writing in Ramsey Abbey, where the death toll included the abbot, it may not be necessary to say more of 1349 than ‘hoc anno fuit magna pestilencia hominum’: anyone reading it knows what that means, fundamentally, in human terms. The year may slip one’s mind, but not its horror, whether one lived through it or not.

In this analogy, chronicle would function as text and internalised cultural memory as gloss.   The gloss is an important element in correctly reading the text, although it may be implicit rather than spelt out.  Brandt, I feel, goes too far in problematising the absence of an explicit authorial interpretative presence in the chronicles he examines.  He frets over the lack of a connecting narrative in Matthew’s account of the conflicts between Henry III and the church, finding that the chronicler sees ‘only a series of events… The things that make these struggles intelligible for a modern reader – the church–state controversy, for instance – were invisible to Matthew’ (76).

Can a man of Matthew’s sense and intellectual curiosity have been blind to the tension between church and state whose manifestations he so enthusiastically records? Perhaps instead we should say that they were not only visible, but so very obvious that he had no need to explain them. 

Annales Tres Seu Quattor Chronicarum: On MS BL Add. 54184.

Yesterday, after poring over it in the manuscripts room of the British Library, I gathered my courage and sent an email to their manuscripts department about MS Additional 54184, suggesting an amendment to its catalogue listing.

Add. 54184 is a manuscript of (mostly) the second quarter of the fourteenth century, from the great old monastery of Ramsey in Cambridgeshire. As it stands, it presents a history of England from her mythic origins to the (then) present day. Rather than composing their own, Ramsey used the Historia Anglorum of Henry of Huntingdon up to the death of King Stephen (1135, ff. 1-48v), the Annales Sex Regum of Nicholas Trevet up to the death of Edward I (1307, ff. 49r-130v) and – according to the British Library’s catalogue – Adam Murimuth’s Continuatio Chronicarum from the ascension of Edward II (1307) to the election of Pope Benedict XII in 1334 (131r-144r):

Murimuth's full Chronicle covers the period 1303-1347. The present text, headed 'Incipiunt Annales Regis Edwardi filii Regis Edwardi . . .', is very similar to that printed in E. Maunde Thompson, ed., Adam Murimuth Continuatio Chronicarum, Rolls Series (1889), pp. 3-219. Entries for 1307-1308 are different and much fuller in the present MS., which is not listed by Maunde Thompson, than in the Rolls Series version. A. Hall, who published the text under the title Adami Murimuthensis Chronicon (1721) was aware of the existence of the MS. in the posession [sic] of the Earl of Cardigan, but does not use the fuller 1307-1308 material in his version.

And there is a good reason that he didn’t (whether he knew it or not). The years 1307-1308 (ff. 131r-133r) are not Murimuth. Even if this were the only extant witness to them, that fact alone (in a chronicle so much copied ) would suggest that the author was a monk at Ramsey (or the author of Ramsey’s exemplar) rather than Murimuth. It would, in that case, be an interesting appendix to an edition of Murimuth – particularly as it is very full, very detailed, and very colourful in its language (in complete contrast to Murimuth’s usual style) – but one could hardly ascribe authorship to him.

But, in fact, this is not the only extant witness to this text. It’s actually the Annales Paulini for those years, the annals of St Paul’s in London, which Bishop Stubbs published as part of the Rolls Series in the 1880s. And that accounts for it being so well-informed about the London events – the coronation, in particular, is so detailed that I was seriously wondering (on my first quick read-through) if the Abbot had been a guest, and if so, how (given he died in 1314, if memory serves) he had managed to pass on such an anecdotal account to his monks that it was remembered in great detail in (at earliest) the mid- to late- 1330s. And even that wouldn’t account for the degree of geographic and locational specificity in the account, which sounds very much like a Londoner’s (as, of course, it is).

So I was reading it, becoming more and more incredulous about the idea of it being derived from Ramsey, and becoming increasingly sure that I’d read it before somewhere, when I came across the line “In omnem igitur terram exijt rumor iste / quod Rex plus amaret hominem magum malificum quam sponsam suam” (f. 132r ll. 21-22) - “And therefore across all the land arose this rumour, that the king loved an evil male sorcerer more than he did his wife”. And I said to myself, “Ah. THAT chronicle”.

So I checked it more thoroughly against Stubbs’ version, and found it is word-for-word the same, save for the opening sentence and some shuffling at the end of 1308, and the occasional scribal variants – preferring a few odd constructions of the perfect stem, and, entertainingly, amending Gaveston from being “poten[s]” (powerful) in the realm of England to “puten[s]” (stinking) in the realm of England. Which, I have to say, is entirely in character for language used by the chronicler elsewhere.

And so I daringly emailed the manuscripts department and suggested they mention the presence of a short extract from the Annales Paulini in the catalogue (mentioning the folio numbers and corresponding page numbers in Stubbs). We shall see what they think.

Slippery stories

Stories are supple things. They are far more (in many senses) than fact: they twist into myth and retrospect and drama and allegory as occasion demands. Sometimes they evolve by deliberate choices made by retellers, but mostly by shifts in emphasis, an embroidery here and there - or an error that just seems to fit.

I'm currently working on (among other things) a small, early 14C chronicle collection from the priory of Fineshade, which Cotton bound with a few other contemporary historical works to form Cotton Cleopatra D IX. The Fineshade manuscript contains transcripts of a few letters associated with Thomas of Lancaster's 1322 rebellion against Edward II, and a short chronicle of a few thousand words, written a year or two later (so before the deposition in 1327), narrating Edward II's reign in retrospect, as a story culminating in the events of 1322. The chronicler is not always correct in his facts, especially for the early years - he's far more accurate as he approaches the rebellion. However, where he errs, he errs in favour of improving the story.

For example, this author has the date of the Earl of Gloucester's death wrong. Gloucester died in 1295 (from memory), but here he dies after Edward II's accession, in the midst of the shower of ill-advised gifts that Edward is busy bestowing on Piers Gaveston, just so that Edward can also gift him Gloucester's daughter (Edward's niece) in marriage. This fits into the carefully structured 'gift crescendo' - royal money and treasure, then money and treasure extorted by taxes, then a wife of royal blood, then the earldom of Cornwall, all capped with a proverb about what sudden accession of power and riches does to a man's head. Gloucester’s death immediately preceding the betrothal, and perhaps acting as a catalyst for it, also fits with the theme of flouting the wishes of the dead patriarch.  Just as Edward seems destined to ‘throw away’ all that his father gained, no sooner is  Gloucester’s daughter Margaret left alone by the death of her father than the man who ought to have replaced him as her protector – her uncle the king - ‘wastes’ her on an upstart Gascon. There is probably also an implied parallel here between Margaret and the treasures “safely stowed [in the Tower] by his ancestors, so long ago that memory has faded”[1], which were also (according to this writer) given carelessly away to Gaveston.

The story, in this writer's hands, becomes a cohesive piece of literature in which the flaws that concern him most in Edward II's character are evident from his early years and provide the cause of all that comes after. They are even prophesied by Edward I before his death. The figures of Gaveston and Despenser stand less as players in their own right than as reflections (or strategic deflections?) of these crucial flaws in the king's character, embodying the financial mismanagement - first by inappropriate generosity and increasingly by violence - that in the view of this writer characterised Edward's reign.
There is also a more specific and interesting example of the evolution of a story in this manuscript which I think the writer did not intend. I should mention at this point that fragments of the collection, the chronicle among them, were published in the 1930s by George Haskins in Speculum and the EHR[2], but that, in examining the microfilm, I'm finding myself correcting Haskins far more often than I would have expected for a few pages of chronicle[3]. There are, of course, some matters of opinion - but one of them, I really wish he'd commented on. Here's an image:

Full sentence, with abbreviations expanded into italics: "Quod rex ut audiuit grauiter mouebatur in animo & peticionem imporor[sic]-/tunam ferens indignanter ips?m ad terram deiecit pedibus que conculcauit dicens / totam regionem anglicanam per ipsum fore amittendam" - "And hearing that, the king was greatly moved in his soul and, taking the importunate petition, flung ? indignantly to the earth and trampled it with his feet, saying that he [his son]  would give away the whole of the realm of England.

This is early in the story, and it is what looks like a popular (and probably oft-repeated) myth of Edward II's early years. A better-known version of it is in the continuation of Walter of Guisborough's chronicle. We know that Prince Edward went to his father and asked him to grant the county of Ponthieu to Piers[4], that Edward I was rather displeased and refused, and that very soon after this, probably as a result, Piers was banished from England. Of course, we don't know Edward I's actual reaction - Walter of Guisborough's chronicle gives an extravagant account of Edward I's violent fury - he calls his son "fili meretricis male generate" (base-born son of a whore) and tears out as much of his hair as he can manage before throwing him out (ed. Harry Rothwell, Camden Society 89, 1957, pp. 382-83)[5].

And here is another version of what seems to have been a popular story circulating[5]: this chronicler has Edward I "indignantly taking the importunate petition [the physical object, presumably]" and throwing... something to the ground and stamped on it. And what that something is - the petition, or his son - depends on how you expand ipm.

Haskins writes ipsum without comment - masculine, so Edward I is physically attacking his son, as in the Guisborough version. And yes, when reading a chronicle or a series of letters dealing with politics you become accustomed to expanding abbreviated ipm as masculine, because it usually refers to a person and almost all the actors in these events are male. But there's actually no reason it can't be feminine ipsam, so far as I can see – and thus refer to the petition.  The sentence would scan rather better syntactically, not to mention logically. Why take the chronicle just so that you can kick your own son? If the writer had wanted to avoid ambiguity he could have used a little 'a' above ipm (as below over abbreviated "tractati"), but this writer is not careful about ambiguities, and tends to go with muscle habit when it comes to abbreviations - see the quote above, where he absent-mindedly writes 'importunam' in full, but also adds a horizontal stroke to the stem of the p, which is the abbreviation for 'per' or 'por' (he does something similar a few page later, writing 'opprobrium' but adding a hook behind the first 'p' so that it technically reads 'oproprobrium'). And he is more accustomed to the single horizontal stroke about ipm - he's written it many times on the last few pages. To amend it, he'd have to stop and think about possible misinterpretations. Context is usually enough - but in this case, context fails him.

And that makes it interesting. Because a story with violence displaced onto a non-human object suddenly has the potential to have the violence directed to its cause, which rather disrupts the author's otherwise stable themes of proper and proportion use of power. Because any reader who loves drama who comes to read this manuscript later, without the author around to correct them, will be more likely to read ipsum than ipsam, because it's more usual. And - well, it makes a far more interesting and dramatic story, doesn't it? Particularly if they've also read the Guisborough version, and thus have the suggestion of violence in their mind. Fling the paper, or beat the son? Experience tells us which is likely to have the greater staying power.

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[1] All quotes in this post are from  f. 87r of the manuscript.  I’ll post the text of the whole – and eventually a translation – when it’s tidied up.


[2] “A Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II”, Speculum (1939): 73-81; “The Doncaster Petition, 1321”, English Historical Review 53 (1938): 478-485; “Judicial Proceedings against a Traitor after Boroughbridge, 1322”, Speculum 4 (1937): 509-511; for the latter see also George Sayle's correction of Haskins' error in “The Formal Judgement on the Traitors of 1322,” Speculum (1941): 57-63.


[3] He frequently leaves out or inserts 'et', or (in the Anglo-Norman documents) one or the other of commonly paired words like 'lige' and 'seygnur' in 'notre seygnur lige le roy'. Twice he skips an entire line, and several times he mis-expands an abbreviation. I think he must have had little time with the ms and been mostly working from his own notes in preparing the edition, because some of the errors just look like haste. Will post more about this at some point.


[4] This chronicler actually says Cornwall, rather than Ponthieu, which is the earldom Edward II gave Piers when he became king himself "iuxta sui desiderium prius conceptum & ordinatum" ("as he had already desired and fixed upon") - another example of retrospective narration, in which the story becomes smoother and more coherent.


[5] Given Walter of Guisborough seems to have died c. 1304, and this was supposed to have taken place in early 1307, this particular story can't have been narrated by him, but his successor seems to have inherited his flare for dramatic exaggeration and putting speeches into the mouths of his characters.

Piers Gaveston's cups and Edward II's incontinence

So, yesterday I was browsing through the indices to various issues of the journal Northamptonshire, Past and Present to see if Fineshade Priory (or, failing that, Castle Hymel or John Engayne) got even a passing mention anywhere (they didn't), and I found something completely different, and rather entertaining.  The index to the 2008 issue pointed to one reference, on page 20, to a certain Piers Gaveston.  Naturally I went to investigate, and then almost embarrassed myself with laughing too loudly in the stacks.

The article was a guide to the various chronicles known as belonging to, written by, edited by, derived from or possibly misattributed to Peterborough (Nicholas Karn and Edmund King (and what a perfect name), "The Peterborough Chronicles", pp. 17-29).  And Walter of Whittlesey, writing early in the fourteenth story, includes what Karn and King call "the abbey's 'Piers Gaveston story'" (20).  Translation is mine, because I am picky:

And in the thirty-fourth year of the reign of that King Edward [I, so c. 1306]... the abbot Godfrey also received at the Borough lord Edward, son of that king, and lord Piers Gaveston, and to these he sent gifts as is here narrated: When the abbot's messenger reached lord Edward with a certain cup to the value of 50 pounds[1], he asked intemperately ('petiit idem Eduuardus incontinenti') if a gift had also been sent to lord Piers. When the messenger replied that he had not, he disdained the cup and would not receive it: the messenger then seeking out the lord Piers upon the abbot's command bearing a cup valued at 40 pounds, he was granted admission and the abbot's gift was joyfully received with thanks ('gratanter donum abbatis recepit, gratias agens quam facere'). The messenger was also sent on the abbot's behalf as if to beg the advice of lord Piers on the question of whether the other cup would now prove pleasing to the lord Edward, and he replied that it would; the messenger then revealed that he had not wished to receive it, and the lord Piers summoned his chamberlain to say to him, 'Go to the lord Edward and tell him that I would like him to receive the abbot's gift'.   Upon their returning to the said lord Edward with the said cup as directed, he received them gladly, bestowing thanks on the abbot ('gratias conferens abbati') for his gifts.  [2]

But the thing is, this isn't a Piers Gaveston story - it's an Edward story. It isn't Gaveston's behaviour that's the problem here, but that of the future king.  Not only does he insist on putting Gaveston on a similar status to himself, as a guest in his own right rather than part of the future king's train, but he sends the Abbot - the Abbot of Peterborough, no less - supplicating to an untitled knight for the favour of the prince.  The prince who is his guest.  Gaveston's reception of his gift actually shows Edward up - he 'gives thanks' to the abbot (using 'agere', which is to the best of my knowledge the usual verb coupled with 'gratias'[3]), and even has an adverb to emphasise his gratitude, while Edward, when he gets around to deigning to accept the gift, seems to give his thanks as a favour ('conferre'). The difference in Walter's word choice there could be due to the difference in their rank, but given the exasperation (and, I think, glee) of the narration, I suspect he's playing the two scenes up in deliberate contrast.

Of course, I understand what Karn and King mean when they call this "Peterborough's  'Piers Gaveston' story" - everyone had one, I'm sure, just as many later had a 'Hugh Despenser' story. He lent himself to flamboyant stories, and Edward certainly wasn't one for being diplomatic about it (although, honestly, Edward, Abbot of Peterborough + host). But Piers Gaveston is never just Piers Gaveston.  He's a metaphor for what Edward does wrong - just as the whole sodomy thing in contemporary accounts is never about sodomy, but about the imbalance of power that was perceived to be threatening the entire structure of the state[4]. The abbot is denied access to the prince who is his guest, in stark contrast to the civil visits and interactions with his father narrated immediately before this tale. The abbot is forced to almost double the value of the polite gift-giving he expected on the occasion of a royal visit.  The abbot is humiliated, via the messenger, and not only the messenger but the whole monastery are clearly destined to know about it, and probably recount it in gleeful detail.  The vividly imagined little scenes, even the snippet of direct speech from Gaveston, savour to me of repeated retellings and scandalised delight.

I'm assuming, on those grounds, that the story is at least a little exaggerated, possibly embellished with details from other similar 'Piers Gaveston stories'.  But even in its bare bones, it's interesting, firstly (and most reliably) as witness to the types of stories people were telling and relishing at this point, but also for the hazy glimpse it affords us of the actors within it.  Even if only a little of the story is true, Edward is becoming increasingly defensive about people's reactions to Gaveston at this point, and making it worse with his own behaviour.  I'd say he's 'acting out' in a teenage way by taking advantage of those times when he's away from his father to enforce his opinion of the proper order of things - and it is completely characteristic of him at this period, to be recognising only in his father any kind of restraint, or constraint, to the extent that he does not feel the need to be bound by usual codes of polite social interaction.

Well, why should he.  He's the prince.  And people just keep slighting his Piers.  They deserve a little tetchiness.


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[1] Karn and King say 100, but Sparke's Latin clearly reads L, not C.  They may have silently corrected this in consultation with manuscript sources; but I am translating Sparke's edition.  In light of the value of Gaveston's cup, it's not an insignificant question - is the knight worth 4/5 or 2/5 of the prince?
[2] Walter of Whittlesey's continuation of the Peterborough Chronicle; ed. Joseph Sparke, Historiae Coenobii Burgensis Scriptores Varii, London 1723, 171-72.
[3] Cf the Latin of the Gloria in the mass - 'Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam propter magnam gloriam tuam'.

Notes on the concept of history in Henry of Huntingdon's Prologue

In around 1130 Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, was commissioned by his boss Bishop Alexander of Lincoln to write a history of the English people. The result was the Historia Anglorum, nominally completed in 1135, but which he continued to revise and extend until his death, some 40-odd years later.

The prologue was written in 1135, addressed to Bishop Alexander, and contains some interesting statements about Henry's ideas of historical writing, and about the structure of history itself.

Henry appears to have three central ideas about history: that the study of it is worthy and improving, that it is structured in a comprehensible way by a divine hand, and that its shape demonstrates the ultimate failure and decline of all worldly things.

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1. History as genre.

Nothing is more excellent in this life than to investigate and become familiar with the course of worldly events. Where does the grandeur of valiant men shine more brightly, or the wisdom of the prudent, or the discretion of the righteous, or the moderation of the temperate, than in the context of history? (3)

Cynicism would immediately suggest that, if you're turning to history to find brighter examples of "the grandeur of valiant men" than you can observe in the world around you, the history you're reading probably isn't very historical.  However, this not only imposes modern genre divisions on the twelfth century, but misses Henry's point. 'History' could include, eg, Homer, as Henry proves in the very next sentence.  A catalogue of the Ramsey Abbey library in the mid fourteenth century includes, under the heading 'Books of History', a volume of the Acts of the Apostles - despite having plenty of copies of the Bible and New Testament under other headings [2]. In Henry's view, the purpose of history is (broadly speaking) to teach, and he finds it a more effective tool for doing so than philosophy. 

"Narrative" might, in some ways, be a better term, perhaps with “historical” as a clarifying adjective when necessary. Henry’s estimation of its pedagogical value seems centred on the fact that it tells a story, rather than preaching abstractly.  As Jesus taught effectively by parables, Homer's stories and the examples of men's actions shown within them teach more effectively than the "many volumes of moral philosophy" that Chrysippus and Crantor "sweated to produce".  Narrative demonstrates proper and imitable moral codes "more clearly and agreeably than the philosophers" (3). 

The question of factual accuracy seems not expected to arise. Perhaps, as the events of history are shaped according to divine plan, a written history may be assumed to be true to that plan if it improves the reader.  And truth must surely be ranked above mere accuracy.

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2. History as pattern. According to Henry, Homer's characters embody various vices and virtues. Ulysses is prudence, Agamemnon fortitude, Nestor temperance, and Menelaus justice; while Ajax represents imprudence, Priam feebleness, Achilles intemperateness and Paris injustice. 

So far so good – unless you’ve actually read the Iliad.  My predominant impression of Menelaus is not of his sense of justice; I’m sure Priam has some qualities as a ruler besides being old and a little infirm; I’d call Agamemnon irascible before I’d call him strong.

But the list couples them into opposing pairs: Ulysses/Ajax, Agamemnon/Priam, Nestor/Achilles, Menelaus/Paris.  And those pairs are supported and encouraged by the narrative – Homer sets them against each other, with the possible exception of Nestor/Achilles (though one might easily make the case for it, particularly once Agamemnon and Ulysses are already spoken for).  And the most obvious contrast between Agamemnon and Priam could very well be strength and weakness, and Nestor and Achilles certainly contrast in the extent of their emotional self-indulgence.  The competition between Ulysses and Ajax undeniably pivots on some intellectual quality, which one might choose to label prudence.  And Menelaus - justice? Well, if you want an opponent to Paris, and the injustice of Paris’ most infamous action, who else would it be but the husband whose property he stole?

It takes some jiggling and squinting, but the pattern is visible, once you impose it. Henry goes on to do the same for characters in the Old Testament.  Yet this is not literary analysis, but an observation of patterns in history. Man did not put them there, although he may have, through ‘true’ writing, made them clearer.  These events, and the patterns within them, were shaped by God,  creator both of the the participants in history and the medium through which it moves, time. And, of course, of the historian. This is how history is shaped. 

Perhaps this justifies the departure from authority that Henry allows himself in the structure of his Historia.  Bede is his primary source, naturally, but Bede does not anticipate the shape Henry gives to British history.  It is dominated by five invasions, called plagues, visited on Britain by “divine vengeance” whenever her people become too sinful or arrogant (15). The invasions by the Romans, Picts and Scots, English, Danes, and finally Normans thus provide for Henry a structure around which he can shape the events that precede and follow them, repeatedly building up a litany of sin and pride which leads to devastation and pain.  The most recent iteration is, of course, still being feelingly lived in Henry’s lifetime.

For Henry, history is the story of God "raising up and putting down peoples and kingdoms by Thy judgement, that operates sometimes secretly and sometimes openly" (17). History repeats, because the same hand is at work throughout – and that hand seems to deliberately create comprehensible patterns for the moral edification of mankind.

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3. O Fortuna, velut luna semper crescis aut decrescis… 

There may be an implicit comfort in the idea of God sitting back and shaping history, but the rise-and-crash pattern isn’t a very comfortable one for those who live through it.  Henry’s view of history is essentially pessimistic, founded on mutability and divine punishment.  What was is lost; what is wil be lost. 

Early in the first book, Henry describes the geography of Britain, both as it is and as it once was.  He gives the names of "twenty-eight very noble cities" for which the island was famous once, many of which have changed or been forgotten, or belong to cities that no longer exist (13).  Then, on describing the division of the island into shires, he decides it necessary to include a list of their names.  For, he says,

with the passage of time it may perhaps come about, in the same way that the names of the cities just mentioned - which were once well loved and highly regarded - are now considered barbarous and ridiculous, that the names of the shires, which are now very well known, may become either unrecognizable or unbelievable.  From this it is clear how pitiably and uselessly we who live in the shires strive to make our own names famous, when even the names of cities and countries cannot survive. (17)

Not only their names will be loss, but their honour.  As the English are now shamefully subject to the Normans, so have their place names suffered a corresponding loss in status: they are now ridiculous. And from the vainglory of a people, to that of a shire, to that of the individual, Henry turns to point his favourite moral.

But notice what remains constant in this tale of ruin.  It is his own individual striving, his own achievement – or at least, that of the men among whom he now numbers himself.  At this future point he envisions, when provinces have shifted and been renamed, when human memory fails, he clearly still expects his history to be present and read to speak the names of the lost shires.  It is history writing which provides the link between past, present and future. Henry knows the names of the old cities because of the books he has consulted in old libraries, and we know them because we have read them in his work.  The people in his future will know the names of the shires for the same reason – and they will also know those of the old cities.  Henry’s work stretches from past to future, linking through the present, sitting in that privileged position that allows him to survey, however mistily, the whole of creation.  He becomes ever so slightly atemporal – and as such, he even rebukes his temporal patron:

And we pray you, Bishop Alexander, father of the fatherland, prince second to the king, that anything we have written well may be brightened by your praise... Here you see kings and peoples whom the lottery of fate has raised up and put down, but judge[3] the future by them.  See, great father, what has become of the powerful: see how the honour, the lustre, the glory of the world come to nothing. (7-9)

Is Alexander, prince second to the king, to be numbered among the glorious powerful, invited to see his own downfall in the pattern of Henry’s history? Well, technically he’s a member of the secular clergy – he is subject to the movements of the saeculi.

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4. And one other thing:

History ... brings the past into view as though it were present, and allows judgement of the future by representing the past. (5)

This sounds familiar, but not in application to humans.  According to Augustinian (and Boethian) adaptations of Aristotelian/Platonic philosophy, all created beings exist in time and are subject to it, unable to grasp the past or know the future, existing only in a perpetually fleeting present.  God, by contrast, is not subject to time: it is an aspect of his creation, and he lives in an eternal now which includes all of time and creation. Every moment is equally present to him. 

The conflation of past, present and future suggested by Henry here thus does more than broaden the mind or provide the reader with knowledge.  It places him[4] halfway outside of time, less subject than previously to its constraints, able to grasp a little more of the course and pattern of events and guess at their meaning.  Implicitly, it also enables him to observe enough of time to at least guess at the ideal eternity on which it is modelled, and so glimpse a little of the nature of he who made it.  In short, he rises further above the beast and closer to the divine. 

It is perfectly logical, therefore, for Henry to continue:

The knowledge of past events has further virtues, especially in that it distinguishes rational creatures from brutes, for brutes, whether man or beast, do not know - nor, indeed, do they wish to know - about their origins, their race and the events and happenings in their native land. Of the two, I consider those brutish men to be the more wretched, because what is natural to beasts comes to brutish men from their own mindlessness, and what beasts would not be capable of, even if they wished to be, such men, even if capable, do not desire. (5)

The lives and deaths of these men, he says, are condemned to "perpetual silence" - they do not speak, or they are not spoken of. History does not include them.

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[1] All quotations are from Diana Greenway's 1995 edition and translation of the Historia Anglorum (Oxford: Clarendon).

[2] Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis. Ed. W. Dunn Macray. London: Longman and Co., 1886. Rolls Series 83.359.
[3] According to the Latin, this is the imperative, not an indicative sharing its subject with the previous clause.
[4] You know the good thing about studying the Middle Ages? Frequently, you can get away with just using the masculine pronoun, rather than saying "they" (informal), "one" (limited and stuffy), or that ugly "he or she". Given the overwhelming majority of Henry's intended audience would have been male, I think I can legitimately avoid the charge of slighting my own gender.

Hugh Despenser: a finger in every pie...

... and lo, the pie was then abruptly smashed and everyone did make a grab for the finger. And they clamoured over the rings thereupon.

Cotton Vesp. A xviii[1] contains a cartulary of Ramsey Abbey of the mid-1300s. On f. 113v there’s a list of the abbots from its founding (though incomplete) with a sentence or less about each. Except for Simon of Eye, abbot from 1316-1342. In place of his entry, we have a long and detailed obituary, amounting to a short biography or chronicle (pp. 349-353 in Macray’s edition). It is headed “De obitu Simonis Eye quondam Abbatis, et de diversis notabilibus per ipsum factis in vita sua” (Of the death of Simon of Eye sometime Abbot and of the diverse deeds of note performed by him in his lifetime); but the “notabiles” that the composer saw fit to record are obsessively, almost exclusively, concerned with money.

The first page and a half in Macray’s edition, after a brief introduction (in which we are informed that he spent lavishly on strengthening the church against “persecutiones” and “insultus”), are almost entirely a list of “Item adquisivit” and “Item emit” (also he acquired, also he bought).

The second section of the obituary is a more expansive narrative of his abbacy, but it is also heavily structured by the movement of money. The title seems to suggest a story marked by the conventions of martyrdom – ‘Placita et adversitates quae sustinuit pro ecclesia sua’ – but if so, Simon’s trials and sufferings are only financial. Even the grand narrative of national affairs is phrased in these terms. For 1326, the year in which Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer invaded England, deposed Edward II and set his son on the throne in his place, this author reports that the abbot “sustinuit magnum certamen et laborem cum illis de Ramesey [the village] propter mutationem saeculi quia dominus Rex cum matre sua applicuit in Angliam” (351). The dramatic deposition and incarceration of a crowned king appears only as it causes trouble to Simon de Eye and arguments with the villagers.

But this next section in particular entertains me.  The monk writing is terribly indignant over what happened the following year, when Isabella, Mortimer and Edward III stopped by to visit.  The villagers got uppity again, and the men and women of Ramsey, because of “malam voluntatem versus dictum abbatem” (ill will towards that abbot), accused him of treachery before the king.  The charge was “ipsum habere magnam partem thesauri Hugonis le Despenser nuper suspensi” – that he had taken to himself a large part of the wealth of Hugh Despenser, then lately hanged.

Poor Hugh. To the best of my knowledge he hadn’t any property in the area (though, let’s face it, he had some just about everywhere by that stage), but his thesauri seems to have reached legendary status, especially in a country still suffering through the effects of the Great Famine (technically ended 1322, but all those abandoned villages and unsown crops and reduced labour forces take their toll).  Accusations and acquisitions naturally attend the downfall.  Even if Eye had not grabbed some (and the author doesn’t comment on that, because he’s too busy being indignant), it was obviously credible enough or easily enough imagined that the villagers thought it was a good accusation to effectively get the king on their side in their ongoing struggles with the abbey.

The most entertaining thing, I find, is that the author isn’t really concerned with telling the story of the accusation and its outcome, but rather the story of how outrageous and ungrateful those sorry little plebeians were, and how poor long-suffering Simon was such a martyr for putting up with them.  His last word on the subject is that “[p]ropter quae idem abbas pacifice sustinuit magnam tribulationem, ac diffusas fecit expensas pro dicto falso clamore sedando” – on account of these accusations that abbot pacifically suffered great trials, and it cost him many expenses to subdue that false clamour.

And note the terms in which his martyrdom is expressed? Good old money.

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The relevant passage:

… dominus Rex cum matre sua Regina et aliis filiis et cum Rogero de Mortuo Mari, instinctu dicti Johannis de Hothom tunc cancellarii Regis, venerunt apud Rameseiam cum tota familia eorum, ubi plures de Rameseia tam viri quam mulieres, attendentes malam voluntatem versus dictum abbatem, in adventu ipsorum Regis et Reginae dictum abbatem false et malitiose accusabant et traditorem regni vocabant, asserentes ipsum habere magnam partem thesauri Hugonis le Despenser nuper suspensi. Vendicabant etiam mercatum de Rameseia, communiam in diversis locis, et alias libertates eis injuste ablatas et subtractas. Propter quae idem abbas pacifice sustinuit magnam tribulationem, ac diffusas fecit expensas pro dicto falso clamore sedando.

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[1] Published in the appendices of the Chronicon Abbatiae Rameseiensis, which should be called the Liber Benefactorum Rameseiensis, as the main manuscript calls itself. Ed. W. Dunn Macray. London: Longman and Co., 1886. Rolls Series 83. 351.

Ramblings on Christina of Markyate’s mouth

So I accidentally bought a book the other day (the bookshop was just there, flashing its volumes enticingly at me): The Life of Christina of Markyate, A Twelfth-Century Recluse. It’s published in 2005 by Toronto U. P., but is actually a re-issue of a 1959 edition+translation by C. H. Talbot, who managed with great effort to transcribe those parts of the single manuscript that were not destroyed or obscured by the Cotton fire of 1731 (honestly, why would you move a collection of priceless manuscripts to a place called Ashburnham House for temporary storage? Someone was just asking for trouble).  My excuse for the flagrant self-indulgence (it cost all of $9!) is that it is tangentially related to my thesis, as it’s a product of St Albans, and I’ll be using existing studies on the historical-writing culture of St Albans as a touchstone for more original work that I intend to do on other places.  And, although she lived during the first half of the 12th century, and the vita seems to have been writing during her vita, the surviving manuscript was written (apparently with some intentional alteration from the lost original) in the mid 14th, so it’s within my time period too[1].

I’ve only just started reading it, but I was immediately struck by the style of narration, in which speech is very prominent.  It frequently uses direct speech, marked by the use of the first person (note the punctuation of the transcription):

Dixitque. Dimitte me. ut eam hostium obserare. Quia licet minime Deum metuimus. saltem homines opere tali ne superveniant vereri debemus.
And she said to him: ‘Allow me to bolt the door: for even if we have no fear of God, at least we should take precautions that no man should catch us in this act.’ (42-43) 

Direct speech is both frequent and usually marks the emotional and moral crux of each scene. Not only that, but it emphasises speech and its style and effect to such a degree that it would not be an exaggeration to call the whole vita (well, so far as I’ve read) a narrative of speech events.

• Almost every scene centres around a particular potent occasion of speech. 
• Christina’s devotion to Christ is learned and expressed through speech, as is the battle for her mind and chastity. 
• The proof of her holiness is in her speech: eg, when young she speaks aloud to Christ in her room at night, in a loud clear voice, believing that no mortal could hear her while she was addressing God.
• Her spiritual education by Sueno is told in terms of his speech and the “colloquium” he had with her. And the elided “cum” in “cum”+“loquor” is appropriate: we are told that he is learning from her speech as much as the other way around.
• Similarly, when trying to force her into marriage, her parents’ primary method of coercion is to keep all religious, god-fearing men from having “colloquium” with her, as if blocking access to the words can keep God away. Instead, she is surrounded examples of bad speech, by “people given to jesting, boasting, worldly amusement, and those whose evil communications [mala colloquia] corrupt good manners [mores bonos]” (47).
• In addition, they set one of her best friends on her, who uses flattery and persuasion and sheer persistence for a whole year to try to persuade her to consent – to that one verbal act that constitutes a contract of betrothal or marriage (depending on verb tense).
• Vows, prayers and moments of verbal consent are the turning points that provide the dramatic structure of the narrative.
• In trying to seduce her, the evil bishop Ralph of Durham uses not force, or even simply words, but explicitly “that mouth which he used to consecrate the sacred species”, neatly demonstrating the moral difference between his speech and hers.

In the example I quoted above, the use of direct speech provides the dramatic and moral crux of the scene. Ralph is  trying to seduce/rape the young Christina in his bedroom, and she is employing a ruse to allow her nearer the door so that she can escape, while pretending to acquiesce. The direct speech thus dramatises the ploy, heightening its effect, and doubles it by having her feign what we as readers know is a completely insincere disregard for God and God’s omnipresence. At the same time, that jarring note serves as a harsh reminder of exactly what the bishop’s priorities should be, highlighting his hypocrisy and thus suggesting that Christina’s apparent dishonesty is excusable, in the service of a higher truth.

The bishop demands her oath that she would not ‘fail’ but that she indeed lock the door; she swears to it, darts out of the room and locks him in. These happen in reported speech, rather than direct, playing out the suggestions inherent in the direct speech.

Incidentally, the word I’ve rendered above as ‘fail’ is my own translation of ‘falleret’.  Talbot, who prefers throughout to read this text as a literal account of her life[2], misses the double meaning here and translates it as ‘deceive him’ – certainly the primary meaning in context, and the only meaning Ralph intends, but I would have preferred to have the ominous hint preserved.  To fall truly in this instance, to fail in her vows of virginity, would be to stay in the room with him.

This emphasises the difference maintained throughout the scene between her reading of words (which is largely allegorical) and his (determinedly centred on the physically present).  She observes that the door is closed but not bolted (“clausum… sed non obseratum”). Similarly, her chastity is so far defended, but not inviolable.  Bolting the door erects a physical barrier between her and her would-be violator, just as there is already a spiritual barrier between them.  She has kept her promise she made to him: she has locked the door both physically and spiritually, in a manner far more significant than he intended. She is not forsworn: she adheres to a truth he cannot comprehend.


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[1] Copying a text, especially with substantial editing, definitely counts as historical writing for my purposes.  Oddly, Talbot seems to make little distinction between the original author and the amending copyist – so far as I can tell, as he uses the word ‘biographer’ for both, he seems to assume they’re both from St Albans on the grounds of the same textual evidence (use of “nostrum” etc when referring to the saint or monastery).


[2] He emphasises the biographer’s close relationship to her and the fact that it was written in her lifetime, as well as the paucity of fantastical tales that mark most hagiography of the period, to conclude that it was a genuine attempt at a “history” of the real woman rather than a collection of “stock elements”.  I… disagree, mostly with that distinction.

Temporal identity

So I’m returning to this idea again, which I first floated back in September over here, of temporal identity. I’ve still not really seen it explored anywhere, but I do think it’s potentially a valuable methodological approach. 
The idea is to interrogate texts for a sense of identity defined with significant attention to one’s place in time.  This identity may be personal, or attached to membership of a small group (family, parish, social stratum), or on a larger scale approaching national or universal.  It may also involve the deliberate exclusion of other groups (we are more advanced / more traditional than they are), or an attempt to forge a more inclusive future.  It may be unconscious, assumed, or defensive of something that ought to be generally assumed; or it may be deliberately constructive of a particular historical moment.
For example, we know that (broadly speaking) some Renaissance texts could be found to define themselves deliberately against an immediate mediaeval past, particularly certain aspects of it that they found repellent or obstructive, and simultaneously assume to themselves similarities with a more distant classical past, in an attempt to construct (in collaboration with other people now) a more idealised future. 
Millenarians (which I know nothing about) could also be an interesting case in point, as investing (or professing to invest) an exceptional degree of identity in one clearly defined future point, beyond which there would be no future (or would there? how does divine/infernal eternity relate to this?).  But to what extent do they (individually - I doubt they were ever really a body as such) acknowledge a debt to the Biblical and classical traditions on which they were drawing, or relate the coming final moment to the sinful actions of the distant past, immediate past or present?  How did they understand the effects of one moment in time, or one age, on another, on themselves, on the world around them, on the moments to come?
Other potentially interesting fields of investigation:
- On a smaller scale, and prompted just now by thoughts of millenarians’ focus on a specific immediate future point: what about individual testimony within individual lives? such as a pregnant woman awaiting childbirth, if such a testimony exists? Could we extend this sort of investigation to such an intimate, complicated test subject?
- Genealogy. In every age that I’ve investigated there is a degree of interest in one’s ancestry to be traced, especially amongst the nobility for whom it can prove land claims and precedents.  We could therefore perhaps study it across several centuries to ask what it can reveal about changing temporal identities.  For example, who was interested in it at any given time? 1066 and the next generation or two doubtless provided a crisis in England for both the locals and the invaders in terms of tracing one’s bloodline and preserving a connection with the past – are there similar moments later on? What effect did it have? Was it exclusively or primarily a noble (or gentle) pastime until the late mediaeval/early modern times? and is pastime the correct word? How and when did it spread, and to whom? What was it used for? proof? of what? to what ends? And what could prove it? The Earl of Warren’s sword with which his great-grandfather helped William invade England? A diagram on paper shaped like a tree whose roots are literally in the bowels of William the Conqueror?
- What about ‘progress’? Whose idea is that? And I mean that in a continuous way – not ‘where did it originate’, which is not a helpful question, but ‘in any given generation, was the idea of progress present, and was it positive or negative according to any given member or group in a given population’.  Of what did it consist, where were the emphases laid, and did it give any sense of a continuum in which the past, via the present, informed the future? or was the past being discarded?
- Is there any particular polemic associated, at any given point, with temporal identity? Is it continuous enough to trace any sort of history of it? To what extent do people use temporal concepts as insults (and do they in that context have an implicit identity-forming function by contrast)? I imagine, for example, this might come up a lot in theological/academic argument – accusing someone of being outmoded, or of abandoning auctoritas, places a value judgement on intellectual temporalities (or rather, lends them a temporal angle).  Or to look at it another way, the age of an individual – Chaucer’s Januarie/May repeats a well-established pattern of despising the body of the aged in comparison with the fresh body of youth, but of course there is more to the discourse of age than that, and the compliment might often be reversed (wisdom of age vs folly of youth, etc).  And how does this alter when someone has died, is past?
- And of course, most interesting from my point of view – how does a person’s perception of their individual relation to history, of their age’s place within a broader (divine?) scheme, of their duty to a future time (and/or present patron) affect their perception of their immediate task when they sit down to write a chronicle, write history? And what else gets in the way?

Lego librum – who is the reader?

John of Salisbury was on the brink of distinguishing three meanings for the verb legere, but then leaves it at two.  He says that the word ‘to read’ is equivocal, indicating either the activity of a teacher reading out and a listening learner (‘docentis et discentis’) or that of studying what is written for oneself (‘per se scrutantis scripturam’). John therefore refers to three different persons (teacher, learner, individual reader), but lumps the first two together by seeing them under prelectio, the communication between teacher and pupil, as distinct from lectio, individual reading. By thus squeezing out the learner-listener (discens) from the usage of legere, John has confined himself to a double function of this verb.  He therefore remains content with the suggested distinction between prelegere (to read aloud to others) and legere (to read for oneself).[1]

 

That distinction that John of Salibury doesn't quite commit to is actually quite an interesting one if it's fully articulated. And if it isn't, that is in itself interesting. When we analyse mediaeval reading patterns, do we consider locutor and audens to be one single unit, the lector? When we read a mediaeval reference to a specific act of reading, does the author of the reference consider them as a single unit, and if not, where is his/her focus? To whom is the verb legere given - where does the credit lie?

If we consider (or our hypothetical author considers) the speaker to be the reader, we foreground the skill of reading - in other words, we buy into (or examine) the cultural stratification around that ability that was for so long the closely guarded property and defining characteristic of clerics. If we consider the hearer to be the reader[2], we foreground instead the act of comprehension - involvement in a specific moment rather than intellectual accomplishment, internal analytical processes rather than external processing - and open possibilities for the meaning of 'legere' approaching, for example, spiritual contemplation.  This might also tie in, depending on period and author, with the opposition of mouth and ear, and the concerns over positive and negative functions of speech.

I don't suggest that either is more correct - I simply think it's a distinction that is valuable to bear in mind when reading mediaeval accounts of such moments, to see which figure/idea is foregrounded by the author, or to reserve our own ability to analyse the scene from both angles.

 

 

[1] D. H. Green, Women Readers in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, 5-6.  Internal quotes are John of Salisbury, Metalogicon I 24 (qtd in Green, Medieval listening and reading: The primary reception of German literature 800-1300, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994, 337 n. 155).

[2] The speaker may also be a hearer, and thus a reader under this definition, but not invariably.

A study of Cleopatra D IX: MSS III, IIIa, ff. 84-88, 89. Fineshade collection.

A collection of letters and a chronicle relating to the civil wars of 1321-22, from the priory of Fineshade, with a related proclamation from 1325 attached.

Description.

III: Parchment, 5 ff. Single column of 40 lines. Two letters and a petition transcribed, followed by a short chronicle and some notes. In two hands, one predominant, with occasional corrections suggestive of composition rather than copying in the chronicle and no similar errors in the previous documents. A, the primary scribe, uses a rounded and rather irregular Anglicana, with heavy downstrokes that can tend toward the blotchy, irregular minims, and a rather awkward serpentine ‘s’ whose lower bowl sits noticeably below the line. B, who writes less than half a page on 87v before A resumes on 88r, uses a contemporary Anglicana that is smaller and more regular, with consistently angled curves and controlled decorative flourishes on his maiuscules. Miniscule ‘a’ is typical of the differences between the two hands: A’s lower bowl varies in size relative to the x-height, to the extent that the eye is sometimes broad and sometimes almost non-existent, while the upper bowl is left open as the pen-stroke trails off. B’s ‘a’ has a lower bowl that is usually consistent with the x-height, while the upper bowl is firmly closed with a broad stroke. Some pages also have contemporary marginal notes, in a hand that appears to belong to A, though smaller and in a lighter ink.

IIIa: An official proclamation of the judgement against the traitors at Boroughbridge, issued 1322 or 1325, on a smaller sheet of vellum, approx. 250x150 mm (Haskins, “Proceedings” 511). Added later, according to Sayles, which accords with Ker’s assessment that only ff. 84-88 originate from Fineshade (Ker, Libraries 87). The text of the judgement is written lengthwise on the page, in a clear, contemporary hand. Two titles have been added at a later date, one “at least as late as the middle of the fourteenth century”, the second modern (Haskins, “Proceedings” 510-11). The first is partly obscured by a torn corner of the parchment (the bottom right?), and reads “COMENT LE CUNTE DE LANCASTRE FU ACOUPE DEVANT …[?la bataille de Pount de Burgh et jugee a] LA MOR[?t...]”. The second is smaller, inserted between the first and the text, and reads (more accurately) “Judicium in Barones captos apud Burgh Bridge” (qtd. in Haskins, “Proceedings” 511).

 

Contents.

- 84v: A copy of the king's letters of prohibition issued to Engayne and others forbidding attendance at a meeting at Doncaster, November 1321. Chronologically, follows the previous entry. Latin, ½ p.

- 84v-85r: A letter of summons from Lancaster to John Engayne, urging him to attend a meeting at Doncaster on 29 November, 1321. Anglo-Norman, 1 p. Incipit:

A honurable homme et nostre trescher amy, Monsure Johan Dengayne, Thomas, / Counte de Lancastre et de Leycestre [etc], saluz / e cheres amitez. Sire, pur les granz periles et oppressions et grantz maux, qe nous / sentoms et entendoms... (qtd. in Haskins, “Petition” 483; in all quotes from Haskin’s editions, it must be assumed that he has regularised punctuation and spelling.)

- 85r-86r: A petition drawn up by Lancaster’s adherents for the forbidden meeting at Doncaster. It may have been composed at the meeting or in preparation for it, as there is no evidence that it ever took place (Haskins, “Petition” 479). Anglo-Norman, 1 p. Incipit:

A touz honours e reuerences, &c. Sire, pleysea a vostre seynurie sauer come plusurs e de-/-uerse greuaunces qui sont monstrez a nous e a nos autres bon piers de la tere... (qtd. in Haskins, “Petition” 483).

- 86r-88r: A short chronicle of the civil wars of Edward II, focussed primarily on the battles in Yorkshire in 1321-22. The final eight lines on 87v and all of 88r comprise a roll of the dead, executed, imprisoned and exiled after Lancaster’s final defeat at Boroughbridge. Haskins notes that this list apparently has a common source with a similar roll in MS Egerton 2850: each omits some names contained in the other, and the ordering of the names suggests that the original was in two columns, which one copyist read from left to right while the other read down (Haskins, “Chronicle” 74). Latin, 3 ff. Incipit:

Anno dominice incarnacionis .M°.CC°. octogesimo quintodecimo et regni regis Edwardi / .xx°ij°. et etate Edwardi filii predicti regis Edwardi quartodecimo. Cum idem rex transfre- / -tasset in Flandriam causa pacis inter regem Francie et comitem Flandrie, vt dice- / -batur, reformande... (qtd. in Haskins, “Chronicle” 75).

- 88v: A list of other historical notes which Haskins labels “various entries of no interest” Haskins, “Chronicle” 73). Presumably they were of some interest to the chronicler, but we are left to speculate as to their content. Latin, 1 p.

- 89: An official issue of the judgement against the rebels of Boroughbridge. Names Lancaster and Hereford personally, leaving the remainder general. Anglo-Norman, 1 f. Incipit:

Pur ceo que vous .j. home lige nostre seignur le Roi, contre vostre foi, homage, e ligeaunce, fausement e treiturousement / pristes sa ville e son chastel de Gloucestre... (qtd. in Haskins, “Proceedings” 483).

Although Planta’s catalogue, still the official catalogue of used by the British for the Cotton collection, describes this manuscript as a whole simply as “Fragments relating to the civil wars”, even this brief summary of the contents reveals a greater cohesion of purpose than the term “fragments” implies. Gathered as they are, this manuscript – and here I include the additional leaf – tells a story, and rather a personal one. The first three documents seem to be copies of those possessed by John Engayne with relation to a single fraught political event of late 1321, and the chronicle, while it begins with the generalised lurid speculation and frequent inaccuracies that characterise rumour-informed accounts of Edward II’s earlier reign, becomes both more accurate and more emotionally invested as it approaches the final battles of 1321-22, with its sympathies firmly in the baronial camp. The addition of the judgement adds a literal closing page to a grim chapter of recent history, recalling the epitaphical list of the victims of Boroughbridge incorporated by the chronicler into his final pages.

Date.

Hardy dates the chronicle at 1327 (395), though the narration ends in 1322. It shows no awareness of the invasion and overthrow to come in 1326-27, unless this is noted among the entries on 88v. The judgement was issued in the aftermath of Boroughbridge in 1322, but Sayles demonstrates that this manuscript is among those re-issued as a general warning in 1325 (61), at which time sufficient copies were made and distributed that “the chronicler would have had little difficulty in securing one for his own use” (57).

Origin and authorship.

An unknown canon from the Augustinian priory of Fineshade in Northamptonshire (Ker, Libraries 87). The letters and petition have been transcribed from another source, by the same hand (A) that appears to have composed the chronicle. Several errors, corrected by the same hand interlinearly or midway through the line, are suggestive of composition rather than copying: for example, on several occasions on ff. 87r and 87v the scribe simply changes his mind on word order. The relation of A to B is unknown, though they seem to be working in close collaboration, but A appears to be the dominant force in writing the chronicle and collecting the supporting documents.

Given the location of Fineshade, therefore, it is curious that the letters and petition focus on events in the north, and the chronicle in addition shows a first-hand knowledge of events in the north beyond what can be accounted for by those documents. Haskins conjectures that the author is a northerner, “probably from somewhere in the county of York, for his account becomes at once more accurate and detailed as the scene shifts, in the spring of 1322, to the region of Boroughbridge and Pontefract” (“Chronicle” 74). Although this precedes Ker’s establishment of its origin, the point remains valid. We must suppose either that the chronicler was a northerner who moved south to Fineshade sometime between 1322 and 1325, or that he had access to the personal memories of someone heavily involved in the final stages of the baronial rebellion.

Both may be true: while the style of the chronicle seems to show a level of personal investment that may be indicative of a local’s attachment, a canon writing at Fineshade had a possible witness in the person of John Engayne, the local baron and a follower of Thomas of Lancaster. Richard Engayne had founded Fineshade in the 1208 (Knowles & Hadcock 137), and the pope’s confirmation in 1223 gave the establishment the right to elect their own prior without consent of the Engaynes (Serjeantson & Adkins 135). Nevertheless, they seem to have retained a close enough relationship with their erstwhile patrons that the priory (or the canon personally) could borrow and transcribe the letters and petition that were presumably among John Engayne’s personal papers.

This being so, there is a possibility that the memory and personal involvement reflected in the chronicle belong to John Engayne, shared in conversations with the canon who was writing what amounts to a history of Engayne’s experiences. Engayne died in 1323 or early 1324 (Dugdale 466), so perhaps it is not too great a leap to speculate that the chronicle may be partly coloured and motivated by reverence for his memory.

If, on the other hand, we hypothesise a smaller role for Engayne, limited to the loan of his papers (possibly by his estate after his death), we return to the supposition that the chronicler himself was a Yorkshireman, who moved to Fineshade after the disturbances of the civil wars. In this scenario, it may have been the move itself – from a place shaken by events that were justifiably felt to be of national importance, to a place less impressed by or less knowledgeable about those events – that prompted the impulse to record, to draw a comfortingly cohesive history from the catastrophe.

Later provenance and position in codex.

There is no evidence of the movements of the manuscript after its composition, and no later additions save the mid-fourteenth-century title on the final leaf. Fineshade was dissolved in 1536 (Knowles & Hadcock 137), and the manuscript may be presumed to have fallen into private hands at this date, if not before. The date and source of Cotton’s acquisition are not known, but it seems to appear on none of his loan lists, so was probably not among his most popular possessions with his fellow antiquarians.

Lacunae and potential.

- Perhaps the most frustrating lacuna is one that could easily be solved by examining the manuscript: the contents of those “various entries of no interest”, which have the potential to add tantalising clues (though possibly no answers) to the question of the date, circumstances and motivation of authorship.

- The field of candidates for authorship is pleasingly narrow, given the probable size of Fineshade at this period. However, without details of the names and biographies of all the canons resident in the 1320s, there is little evidence to pursue beyond that point.

- The exact relationship between Engayne and the chronicler is probably not discoverable. It may be possible, however, to find out a little more about the final two years of Engayne’s life, and whether his experiences in the war hastened his demise a year later.

 

Cited.

Dugdale, Sir William. The Baronage of England. London, 1675.

Haskins, G. L. “Chronicle of the Civil Wars of Edward II.” Speculum 14 (1939): 73-81.

----- “Judicial proceedings against a traitor after Boroughbridge, 1322.” Speculum 12 (1937): 509-511.

----- "The Doncaster Petition, 1321." English Historical Review 53 (1938): 478-485.

Ker, Neil R. Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books. London: Royal Historical Society, 1964.

Knowles, David & R. Neville Hadcock. Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1953.

Planta, Joseph. Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Cottonian Library deposited in the British Museum. The British Museum: Department of Manuscripts. London: Hansard, 1802.

Sayles, George. "The Formal Judgments on the Traitors of 1322." Speculum 16 (1941): 57-63.

Serjeantson, R. M. & W. R. D. Adkins (eds). “Houses of Austin canons: The Priory of Fineshade or Castle Hymel”. A History of the County of Northampton v. 2. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1906. 135-36.

A study of Cleopatra D IX: MS II, ff. 80-83. Breve chronicon.

A brief chronicle arranged by year from 1066 to 1304, extended to 1314 in another hand, with a later addition in a third.

Description.

Vellum, quarto (Hardy 352), 4 ff. Brereton mistakenly includes this manuscript and the following to f. 88 in her foliation of the Liber Alani de Ashbourne (see previous post), suggesting that it resembles those manuscripts at least superficially in layout, script and quality of parchment.

Contents.

A brief chronicle with three different periods of authorship. Incipit “Anno ab Incarnatione millesimo sexagesimo sexto”; explicit “In die nativitatis ejusdem Johannis” Baptistae (qtd. in Hardy 352).

Date.

According to Hardy, it imitates the Chronicle of Wigmore to 1279 (though scantily), then continues independently to 1304, where the first hand ends. The second hand continues through to 1314, while a single entry in a third hand notes the truce between France and England in 1341 (352).

 

Origin, authorship, later provenance.

The nature of the chronicle and the multiple authorship suggest a religious house. Hardy notes that local references would suggest Gloucester or nearby Wales, with influence from Wigmore, Herefordshire (Hardy 352). As Sir John Prise was very active in the dissolution of the religious houses in Gloucestershire, and had a penchant for collecting chronicles (Ker, Sir John Prise 5), it is possible it passed directly into his hands in 1535 or 1539, and thence to Cotton by a similar path to the South English Legendary fragment.

 

Lacunae and potential.

The brevity and imitative quality of this chronicle leave few clues as to its history, and have drawn it little attention from those scholars who have studied the manuscript. It sits, quiet and unassuming, in approximately the middle of the codex, least remarked of all. However, it is perhaps this very unremarkable nature that makes it valuable. A comparison with the Lichfield and Fineshade chronicles, together with some of the many other small-scale monastic chronicles by religious houses around this period, has the potential to establish a valuable pattern against which to judge impulses of conformity and diversity, inspiration and influence, in historical writing of the day.

Cited.

Brereton, Georgine E. (ed). Des grantz geanz: An Anglo-Norman poem. Oxford: Medium Ævum 1937.

Hardy, T. Duffus. Descriptive catalogue of materials relating to the history of Great Britain and Ireland v. 3. London: Rolls Series 1871.

Ker, Neil R. “Sir John Prise”, Library, fifth series, 10 (1955): 1-24.

A study of Cleopatra D IX: MS I, ff. 5-79. ‘Liber Alani de Ashbourne’.

A book of historical lists, annals and stories from Lichfield Cathedral’s library, written or commenced by Alan of Ashbourne, vicar of Lichfield.

Description.

Vellum, small folio (Ward 198), 75 ff. Written on the recto of the first folio is “Liber Alani de Asshhburne Vicarii Lichf”. According to Brereton’s description of one item in it, that section at least has three columns with 50 lines (with an initial in red). Brereton describes the whole as being “in the same hand throughout, except for a few later additions on columns and pages left blank for the purpose” (vi). The accuracy of this assessment is questionable, as her examination of the remainder of the manuscript is cursory, to the extent that she includes the next two manuscripts in the number of folios she allots to this [*]. However, the error suggests that the hand, and perhaps the layout, of the manuscript are at least superficially uniform throughout.

Contents..

Historical lists and annals, local and universal, all in Latin save one Anglo-Norman romance. Although Des Grantz Geanz, a foundation poem recounting the mythic pre-history of Britain, survives in several manuscripts, this is the only witness to the longer redaction. It has been published by Brereton in a facing-page edition with the shorter redaction. There has been no edition of the remainder of the manuscript.

- 5v-24v: Annals from the beginning of the world to 1291 (or possibly 1292). Latin, 20 ff..

- 25r-37v: A list of the popes from St Peter to John XXII (Jacques Duèze, papacy 1316-1334), until 1317 according to Planta’s catalogue. Presumably this is an a quo date calculated on the ascension date of the last pontiff listed. Latin, 13 ff.

- 38r-69r: Annals of the deeds of the English, from the death of Hengist to 1377. In at least two different hands. Neither Ward nor Brereton mentions at which year the hands change, or how much space the first leaves for subsequent additions. Latin, 32 ff.

- 70r-71r: Des Grantz Geanz, long redaction (281 octosyllabic couplets). Anglo-Norman, 2 ff. At the foot of the first page is a jotting, presumably intended for a decorative header to the poem:.

Incipit tractatus de terra Anglie a quibus inhabitabatur in principio ante aduentum bruti . que terra primo vocabatur Albion . et postea a bruto britannia. Deinde Anglia nuncupata est. (qtd. in Ward 198).

The first four lines are:.

Ci put hom saver comen.

et quant et de quele gen.

Les grants geans primes vindren.

et Engleterre primes tindrent.

(ibid)

- 72r-74r: A list of the Archbishops of Canterbury, from Augustine to the investiture of John of Stratford (1333). Latin, 3 ff.

- 74r-79: A history of the bishopric of Coventry and Lichfield to 1347, with additions in a later hand to 1388. Latin, 5ff.

The selection and arrangement of the contents suggests a careful overall design. There is a balance between dry lists and narrative chronicles, and the field of vision narrows steadily from the universal to the national to the local. Given this level of organisational integrity, the apparently incongruous presence of an Anglo-Norman mythic romance in the midst of Latin prose histories provides a picturesque example of the flexibility of mediaeval understandings of genre..

Date, Origin and Authorship.

The library of Lichfield Cathedral (Ker, Medieval Libraries 115), c. 1323-1334 with later additions, Alan of Ashbourne and others..

Brereton dates the manuscript “with certainty” (vi) between the deaths of Simon of Mepham (1333) and Alan of Ashbourne (1334), on the grounds that the book records the death of one and is written by the other. This precision, however, rests on the assumptions that the book was written (or compiled) within the space of one year, and that it is primarily or exclusively the work of Alan of Ashbourne’s own hand. The first assumption is undermined by the book’s length, as well as Brereton’s own observation that the manuscript “consists of historical miscellanea and is written in the same hand throughout, except for a few later additions on columns and pages left blank for the purpose” (vi). This suggests that it was intended to function as a continuing record. If so, the vicar could have initiated it as a project any number of years before, rather than writing cover to cover within the space of a year. Greenslade asserts, based on internal evidence, that he began it in 1323, the year after his appointment at Lichfield (8).

The communal function implied by the long-term nature of the layout also complicates Brereton’s second assumption: although the majority of the work of compilation does seem to fall before his death, the book may have been initiated or directed by the vicar, without being written by his hand..

The addition of later entries up to 1388 and the inclusion (in transcription) of at least two works composed earlier (Des Grantz Geanz and the annals of the world) further complicate notions of any hypothetical authorship or definite date of composition. In particular, it is suggestive that the early annals end in the year 1291 or 1292. In 1291, a fire broke out in the Lichfield complex severe enough to burn at least the monastery to the ground (Knowles & Hadcock 192). Might the author have died in this fire, or stopped writing in the upheaval of rebuilding and recovery? The coincidence of dates suggests that while Alan of Ashbourne was compiling his own history of the bishopric, he collected or directed the collection of several other historical documents already belonging to Lichfield Cathedral – possibly including a (fire-damaged?) manuscript of a short chronicle written within fading living memory. The unfinished incipit the first page of Des Grantz Geanz strengthens the impression of a haphazard work in a constant state of composition, never polished and final.

His work appears to have been adopted on his death by his immediate community, enough to be referred to and intermittently updated for the next half century. By 1390, the manuscript seems to have fallen out of use as a record, superseded, forgotten or simply filled, and updates ceased..

The manuscript as a whole, with a history more accessible than most small-scale monastic chronicles can boast, provides valuable glimpses of possible motivations behind such an undertaking. Local and personal motivations sit side-by-side with a broader sense of national purpose. For example, if the first item (annals of the world) was written locally, as seems reasonable, a factor in the vicar’s decision to include it could well have been neighbourly reverence for the memory of its author and his not inconsiderable undertaking, from a man engaged in one no less ambitious. On the other hand, its contents demonstrate an anxiety to set local concerns, to which the majority of his efforts will be dedicated, in a universal context. Similarly, his local history and history of England suggests that he was among the many across England who felt prompted by the civil and natural disturbances of the 1320s to impose some order on events and dignify them with the name of history.

Later provenance and position within codex.

The picture is complicated around 1450 by Thomas Chesterfield, prebendary of Tervin in Lichfield Cathedral, who made a copy of Alan of Ashbourne’s chronicle and donated it to Lichfield Cathedral. It survives as MS Bodleian 956 pp. 113-229, and the inscription of the donor’s name on this copy led to the attribution of the authorship of both manuscripts to him in subsequent centuries (Greenslade 8-9 & notes; cf. Planta). The presence of two copies of the collection at Lichfield complicates their subsequent history.

The Franciscan house at Lichfield was dissolved in 1538, though other parts of the Lichfield establishment remained, including the cathedral, which is still in use today (Knowles & Hadcock 192). One of the two manuscripts, however, seems to have remained in the library of Lichfield Cathedral, as it was consulted there by William Whitelocke in the composition of his own history of Lichfield Cathedral in the late 1560s (Kettle, “Whitelocke”). This was probably the Chesterfield manuscript, as Whitelocke attributes the chronicle to him. The absence of both from the catalogue compiled by Patrick Young c. 1622 (Ker, “Young’s catalogue” 152 &c) suggests that both passed into the hands of a private collector at some time after 1670. Perhaps Whitelocke, “[o]ne of the few clergymen of the period to make a significant contribution to antiquarian studies” (Kettle, “Whitelocke”), felt it would be no disloyalty to his cathedral to allow such a manuscript to pass into the burgeoning library of some fellow antiquarian; or possibly the private circulation of his histories piqued someone’s interest in his source. The original Liber may also have been retired from the cathedral library prior to the dissolution, and fallen into private hands then.

Whether directly or through several intervening libraries, it was in Cotton’s hands by 1608, when he loaned it to Archbishop Bancroft (Tite 44-45). The loan entry reads only “Lichfield chronicle”, suggesting that at this time the manuscript was still circulating independently.

As for Chesterfield’s manuscript, this may be the one referred to in a note written c. 1617 in Bodleian Twyne 22 as the property of Thomas Allen (Tite 215). As Cotton indisputably possessed the original manuscript by that date, and had probably already bound it into the existing codex, Allen’s may very well have been the fifteenth-century copy – although it is also possible that he owned one of the manuscripts of Whitelocke’s adaptation.

Lacunae and potential.

- Basic codicological details and paleographical details are lacking, together with information about the contents of each section.

- As noticed above, this manuscript contains the sole surviving witness to the long redaction of Des Grantz Geanz. The second redaction, more than a hundred lines shorter, first appears in 1333, leading Brereton to suggest that this manuscript may be the source from which the second was abridged (vi). The lack of evidence regarding the origin of those manuscripts makes speculation somewhat futile, although it seems safe to say that both are evidence of an increased interest in this poem from the late 1320s onwards. If this is the case, judging only by the surviving manuscripts (which may not be representative), Lichfield Cathedral seems to have been a little ahead of the literary fashion.

- Many of the suggestions made above rest on the history of Lichfield from 1290 until Alan of Ashbourne’s death, particularly the local writing culture and the effects of the fire. For these, the chronicle itself may well be the best source we have, if it were available..

- The irregular number of folios – 75 does not divide easily into any set of regular quires – may suggest the addition or removal of folios or leaves after the primary stage of assembly. An examination of the manuscript could potentially confirm or deny this, as well as giving some indication of where changes may have taken place, potentially informing our understanding of how the vicars of Lichfield understood and interacted with their book as a historical document.

Cited.

Brereton, Georgine E. (ed). Des grantz geanz: An Anglo-Norman poem. Oxford: Medium Ævum 1937.

Greenslade, M. W. The Staffordshire Historians. Staffordshire Record Society, fourth series, 11 (1982).

Kettle, Ann J. “Whitelocke, William (c. 1520-1584).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford UP, 2004. [http://www.oxforddnb.com.proxy.bib.uottawa.ca/view/article/29318, accessed 03 Dec 2009].

Ker, Neil R. Medieval Libraries of Great Britain: A List of Surviving Books. London: Royal Historical Society, 1964.

--- (ed). “Patrick Young’s catalogue of the manuscripts of Lichfield Cathedral”, Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (1950): 151-168.

Knowles, David & R. Neville Hadcock. Medieval Religious Houses: England and Wales. London: Longmans, Green & Co, 1953.

Planta, Joseph. Catalogue of the manuscripts in the Cottonian Library deposited in the British Museum. The British Museum: Department of Manuscripts. London: Hansard, 1802.

Tite, Colin. The Early Records of Sir Robert Cotton’s Library: Formation, Cataloguing, Use. The British Library. Bury St Edmund’s: St Edmundsbury Press, 2003.

Ward, H. L. D. Catalogue of Romances in the Department of Manuscripts in the British Museum. London: British Museum, 1962.