History and the Written Word: Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins

By Henry Bainton

A thought-provoking look at the Angevin aristocracy's literary practices and historical record

Coming upon the text of a document such as a charter or a letter inserted into the fabric of a medieval chronicle and quoted in full or at length, modern readers might well assume that the chronicler is simply doing what good historians have always done—that is, citing his source as evidence. Such documentary insertions are not ubiquitous in medieval historiography, however, and are in fact particularly characteristic of the history-writing produced by the Angevins in England and Northern France in the later twelfth century.

In History and the Written Word, Henry Bainton puts these documentary gestures center stage in an attempt to understand what the chroniclers were doing historiographically, socially, and culturally when they transcribed a document into a work of history. Where earlier scholars who have looked at the phenomenon have explained this increased use of documents by considering the growing bureaucratic state and an increasing historiographical concern for documentary evidence, Bainton seeks to resituate these histories, together with their authors and users, within literate but sub-state networks of political power. Proposing a new category he designates "literate lordship" to describe the form of power with which documentary history-writing was especially concerned, he shows how important the vernacular was in recording the social lives of these literate lords and how they found it a particularly appropriate medium through which to record their roles in history.

Drawing on the perspectives of modern and medieval narratology, medieval multilingualism, and cultural memory, History and the Written Word argues that members of an administrative elite demonstrated their mastery of the rules of literate political behavior by producing and consuming history-writing and its documents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780812296761

Book preview

History and the Written Word

THE MIDDLE AGES SERIES

Ruth Mazo Karras, Series Editor

Edward Peters, Founding Editor

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

HISTORY

AND THE

WRITTEN WORD

Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins

Henry Bainton

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bainton, Henry, author.

Title: History and the written word: documents, literacy, and language in the Age of the Angevins / Henry Bainton.

Other titles: Middle Ages series.

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] | Series: The Middle Ages series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019030015 | ISBN 9780812251906 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Great Britain—History—Angevin period, 1154-1216—Historiography. | English literature—Middle English, 1100–1500—History and criticism. | Literacy—England—History. | Great Britain—History—Angevin period, 1154–1216—Sources.

Classification: LCC DA205.B35 2020 | DDC 942.03072—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019030015

CONTENTS

Note on Orthography and Translations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Defining Documents

Chapter 2. Documentary Quotation

Chapter 3. Literate Sociability

Chapter 4. Literate Performances and Literate Government

Chapter 5. Literate Languages

Afterword

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

NOTE ON ORTHOGRAPHY AND TRANSLATIONS

ORTHOGRAPHY

When I have quoted from scholarly editions, I have maintained their orthography (with the exception of æ, which one finds in the Rolls Series, which I have rendered ae). This means that the orthography of Latin quotations is not consistent throughout the study.

TRANSLATIONS

Where bibliographical details of a translation (or edition with translation) of a text are given, translations will be those of the editors. Otherwise, all translations will be mine, unless stated.

Introduction

A medieval chronicler is at work. Imagine that it is Roger of Howden—that dour Yorkshire parson,¹ administrator of the second class,² and least interesting chronicler of his generation³—whose chronicles underpin most modern narratives of English history in the late twelfth century. Howden (d. 1201/2) is busy working on an entry in his chronicle for the year 1174. He finishes writing up a short narrative about something that has happened, which he had perhaps earlier noted on a wax tablet.⁴ He reaches for his files and pulls out a copy of a charter he had got his hands on while completing some bureaucratic task during his day job as a clerk of the king. He transcribes its text at the end of his narrative, as if to attest to the truth of what he had written in his own words.

Nobody notices. Or, at least, not really: a historian nowadays might shake his or her head if the document is defective—if it is a forgery, for example, or if it was transcribed from a bad copy. A literary scholar might sigh at the dullness of it all before skipping on to find some narrative. Yet confronted with a document inserted into a chronicle such as Howden’s, most readers will simply register that Howden is doing what good historians have always done, giving it nothing more than a passing thought—if, that is, they think about it at all.

In this book I put Howden’s documentary gesture, which is one of the most basic of all historiographical gestures, center stage. I want to uncover what Howden and high-medieval history-writers like him were actually doing—historiographically, socially, culturally, and politically—when they transcribed a document into a work of history. This book, therefore, is about how and why history-writers used—that is, invoked, cited, rewrote, or even performed—documents in the High Middle Ages. I ask here, most basically, what those documents are. But I also ask what the documents mean and what they do. I seek to apprehend documents not just as precursors to the documentary evidence that is so fundamental to the modern discipline of history⁵ or as evidence for the reliability or otherwise of the historians who used them.⁶ Rather, by combining the disciplines of literary criticism and cultural history, I trace their place within the mixed and heterogeneous textuality that so characterizes history-writing from this period,⁷ and I reconstruct their role as written monuments within the strikingly dynamic memorial culture that characterizes the period more broadly.

This book focuses on the histories written in the second half of the twelfth century in the lands of the Angevin kings of England and the documents that those histories reproduce. I focus on this Age of the Angevins, as I call it, for two reasons.⁸ The first is simply quantitative: documents are such a marked feature of this era’s history-writing, in all its forms and in all its languages and in all its institutional contexts. Roger of Howden’s two chronicles, for example, the Gesta regis Henrici secundi and the Chronica,⁹ are so packed with documents that Antonia Gransden thought that the former read more like a register than a literary work.¹⁰ The two chronicles written by the churchman Ralph de Diceto, the Abbreviationes chronicorum and the Ymagines historiarum, are scarcely less documentary; they are so documentary, in fact, that the antiquarian John Bale mistook part of the Ymagines for a separate letter collection.¹¹ Documents are also present in fewer numbers in the historical works of the Benedictine monk Gervase of Canterbury (d. ca. 1210) and in the historiographical works of the sometime courtier and ecclesiastical administrator Gerald of Wales (d. 1220–23).¹² They can be found too in the history written by the Cistercian Ralph of Coggeshall (fl. 1207–26) and in the Historia rerum Anglicarum of the Augustinian canon William of Newburgh (d. ca. 1198).¹³ Documents, meanwhile, are a crucial feature of the history written in the wake of Thomas Becket’s murder, which was perhaps the defining historical moment of the age and simulated one of the most intense periods of historiographical activity of the entire Middle Ages. Most of Becket’s Lives quote the letters through which the conflict, at least in part, had played out.¹⁴ Finally, documents also can be found, translated into French and transposed into verse, in the period’s vernacular history-writing. Documents feature in the Estoire of the civil war between Henry II and his son, Henry the Young King (1173–74), written by the schoolman Jordan Fantosme (a text given the misleading title of Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle in its modern edition),¹⁵ and documents play a prominent role in the Vie de Saint Thomas written by Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence,¹⁶ a literate cleric who was apparently not attached to any single institution or patron.

If the first reason for focusing on the Age of the Angevins is quantitative, the second is qualitative. If this age was a golden age of historiography in England,¹⁷ to use Gransden’s often-quoted phrase,¹⁸ then successive generations of modern scholars have attributed part of its luster to its historians’ use of documents. Here, after all, was a kind of history-writing that finally looked like something modern, even though it was written in the Middle Ages. This sort of history was often written by administrators with a secular outlook, and it tended to focus on the state and its development.¹⁹ Most important, those who wrote it used official documents in the way that all good historians should: they used them as evidence to support the narratives that they themselves wrote and deployed them to draw attention to their own critical minds.²⁰ The central importance that modern scholars have attributed to history-writers’ documents in this period, therefore, suggests that those documents have the potential to tell us something about what history actually is as a practice and what it was in the High Middle Ages.

Yet, although documents feature in almost every modern account of the history-writing of the Age of the Angevins, Angevin historians’ use of documents has only ever been seriously studied from a diplomatic perspective.²¹ That is, today’s historians and diplomatists have tended to mine this period’s history-writing for its documents,²² carving out a purely documentary sphere from a historiographical one and sharply distinguishing between records and narrative as they did so.²³ From a strictly diplomatic perspective, history-writing that reproduced documents should be analyzed in order to determine how good or bad—how trustworthy or otherwise—the historians’ copies of the documents were.²⁴ But that is all: the question of how historiographical and documentary texts work together rhetorically in these histories is rarely posed, still less the question of what some documents’ combination with narrative tells us about what documents (and narratives) actually are. That is the task that I set myself in this book. Here I aim first of all to define medieval documents; I then go on to try to defamiliarize them. In the first two chapters I ask some very basic questions about documents. What are documents? What do they do for the texts that quoted them? And what did those texts do for the documents in return? The answers to these questions partly lie in quantitative work (what sorts of texts did history-writers actually use in this period, and how many of each sort did they use?). But qualitative work is just as revealing. So in what follows I use formal and literary analysis to think about how documents work as rhetoric, how they work as texts, and how they work as language. I investigate how documents interact with the texts of the histories that frame them. And I situate documents within a typology of literary forms. Perhaps unusually, that typology includes fiction, even though fiction is usually thought to be as far away from the documentary as one can get.

If the first part of this book addresses itself to the texts of histories and their documents, the second situates those texts within their social and linguistic context. The most important dimension of that context, I argue here, is the phenomenon of the increasing diffusion of literacy that took place throughout society in the Age of the Angevins. If documentary history-writing flourished in this period as never before, that flourishing coincided very closely with one of the pivotal moments in the cultural history of this part of Europe: the Age of the Angevins was a formative stage in the history of literacy, which, as Michael Clanchy has argued, was as culturally significant as the advent of printing, and it had cultural consequences that reached as far.²⁵ As Clanchy has masterfully shown, the half-century before the turn of the thirteenth was precisely the point where a newly literate mentality began to spread through every level of European society, starting from the top.²⁶ This literate mentality was both a consequence of, and a stimulant for, the new uses and forms of writing that appeared as people made and retained written records on an unprecedented scale.²⁷ Literate modes of thinking spread both territorially and socially. People wrote more, and more people wrote. And all of this added up to a deep cultural shift from memory to written record, as Clanchy’s (slightly uncomfortably teleological) title, From Memory to Written Record, has it. The distinctively documentary textuality for which the Angevin historians became best known, therefore, became a feature of history-writing at a crucial juncture in the history of literacy in the West. The question that interests me above all is how this juncture and that textuality are connected.

The shift from memory to written record, however, is not merely the background to this period’s history-writing; it does not inform it in a vague or indefinable sense. Rather, those who wrote history in this period were at the very fulcrum of the institutional and social changes that increasing literacy helped to bring about. The written word, that is, was as central to history-writers’ professional lives as it was to the histories that they wrote. Roger of Howden, for example, describes himself in his chronicles as a clericus regis,²⁸ and there are records of his serving as a justice of the forest three times in the 1180s (where he would have been responsible for judging infringements against forest laws that had been handed down through written capitula; David Corner and John Gillingham have reconstructed Howden’s role in royal business on numerous other occasions in the later twelfth century,²⁹ partly on the basis of the documents that he would have used in the course of that business and which he later reproduced in his chronicles).³⁰ Ralph de Diceto, meanwhile, was a consummately literate ecclesiastical administrator. He was archdeacon of Middlesex from 1152 and dean of St. Paul’s beginning in 1180, and he brought to bear his innovative thinking about the written word on his administrative work. As well as writing two histories that deployed a novel visual indexing system (a sure sign that he wanted his histories to be not just read but actually used),³¹ he also made an innovative survey of his chapter’s property and codified the cathedral’s charters.³² He was an occasional papal judge-delegate, and he was one of those English canonists who collected and circulated decretal letters with an almost incredible enthusiasm in this period.³³ If Howden’s and Diceto’s literate expertise is implicit in their work, other historians who wrote in this period burnished their credentials by emphasizing their own mastery of written technology more explicitly. William FitzStephen (d. ca. 1191), author of a Vita of Becket, trumpeted his closeness to Becket (and with it the authority of his Vita) by telling his readers that "‘I was [Becket’s] dictator in his chancery … [and] when he was sitting judging cases, I was the reader of the letters and documents that were presented.³⁴ Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, another of Becket’s biographers, described the painstaking textual work that he had to endure" (ensuffrir) in order to produce an accurate historiographical text. He had to cut his text down, he said; he had to add to it and revise it; he had inserted text, deleted text, and improved his text.³⁵ He was a skillful navigator, in other words, of the world of written texts.

In directing my focus at writers such as these, who all either lived or worked in the lands of the Angevin kings of England, I am not claiming some sort of exceptionalism for English material, even if English history-writing has a long history of using documentary material stretching back to Bede via Eadmer and William of Malmesbury and onward to Matthew Paris and his successors.³⁶ After all, historians throughout Latin Christendom quoted documents in their histories in this period. Historians writing in France and in the Empire did so;³⁷ they did so in the Holy Land,³⁸ in the Italian communes,³⁹ in monasteries;⁴⁰ they did so when they were writing for popes and when they were writing about bishops.⁴¹ Likewise, I make no claim that the specific conjunction between documentary history-writing and increasing literacy was a uniquely English phenomenon: other areas of Europe underwent their own literate revolutions in this period.⁴² Fully understanding documentary history-writing in the Age of the Angevins would demand a comparative and comprehensively pan-European approach. That is not the approach I adopt in this book. My aim here is more modest: it is to precisely locate a delimited corpus of texts within the social world of an identifiable group of administrators, whose professional lives revolved around using the written word. Although working this way loses the advantages offered by geographical breadth, it offers instead the advantages of analytical depth, and it allows me to offer three new perspectives on this material that together cast new light on the social roles of documentary history-writing.

The first of those new perspectives concerns documentary history-writing’s relationship with the formation of the bureaucratic state. While previous scholarship has stressed the connections between documentary history-writing and English literate government⁴³—or even to the process once known as the birth of the state⁴⁴—in this study I focus on the intersections between history-writing and literate power more broadly conceived. I do not deny that cultures of governance became either more literate or more intensive in this period. But I do argue that using literate technologies (as Diceto and Howden undoubtedly did) and being interested in them (as they undoubtedly were) did not necessarily imply involvement with a bureaucratic state. Because lordship—government’s less rational antagonist, which snapped at its heels throughout this period—was just as interested as government in harnessing the power of the written word. By looking closely at who exactly wrote history for whom in this period, I argue that it was literate lords rather than the central government whose interests administrator-historians and their history-writing tended to serve.

The second new perspective I offer is informed by the relatively new field of cultural memory studies. Because if the grand narrative of the rise of the state, which is a venerable teleology, has obscured the nuances of history-writers’ documents from one direction, another, more recent teleology has obscured them from another. That teleology, the progressive shift from memory to written record is rehearsed in the title of Clanchy’s great work.⁴⁵ Clanchy assiduously avoids being prejudiced in favor of literacy.⁴⁶ But the paradigms of cultural memory studies, which is a relatively new field that did not exist when the first and second editions of that book were published, now invite us to work in the space that Clanchy’s title inadvertently closes down. Put briefly, cultural memory studies would insist that written records are neither an alternative to memory nor a late-coming substitute. Rather, written record is itself a form of memory, and written records depend on memory, without which they risk being forgotten. As Aleida Assmann puts it, writing—which she calls that ‘antidote ’gainst death and all oblivious enmity’—is incomplete without ‘the living record of your memory.’⁴⁷ Only in alliance with memory can writing stand against ruin and death, Assmann continues; Writing prolongs life and ensures remembrance only if planted in the memories of future generations.⁴⁸ So when history-writers used documents in their histories, I argue that they were attempting to plant those documents in the memory of the future generations to whom they bequeathed their written monuments. By transferring documents—which are what cultural memory studies would call memory-matter—from storage memory to active memory, or from cultural latency to presence,⁴⁹ history-writers were engaged in a process that reused and re-presented documents in order to ensure they did not vanish on the highway to total oblivion, to use Aleida Assmann’s formulation.⁵⁰

The first advantage of thinking about history-writers’ documents in terms of memory as well as in terms of written record (I begin to do this in Chapter 2) is that doing so shifts the focus away from the processes of making records to the cultural dynamics of reusing them. It throws into relief, in other words, the interplay between what Jeffrey K. Olick calls mnemonic products (such as documents) and mnemonic practices (such as the history-writing that reproduces them).⁵¹ Mnemonic products can only do their memorial work, Olick argues, by being used, interpreted, reproduced or changed⁵²—only, in other words, by being used in mnemonic practice. The second advantage of thinking in terms of cultural memory is that it complicates the relationship between history-writers’ documents on the one hand and the state on the other (the state, that is, for whose birth they are so often taken as evidence). By thinking of documents in terms of mnemonic products rather than written records, one can focus more sharply on the substate political actors who used them and how they did so. That is to say, one can approach this material using a level of magnification other than that of the incipient nation-state, which Timothy Reuter memorably accused (English) medievalists of being unwilling to use.⁵³

The third new perspective I offer on documentary history-writing concerns language. One of the implications of thinking in terms of literate power rather than bureaucratic government, and of thinking in terms of cultural memory while also thinking in terms of written records, is that it opens up a dialogue between history written in Latin (royal government’s language of record) and history written in French, which was the spoken sociolect of the Angevin ruling elite. French has typically been excluded from thinking about documents and their power in this period. The number of French documents to survive from this period is, after all, vanishingly small, at least compared to surviving documents in Latin. Those few French documents that do survive, as Clanchy argued, are exceptions proving the rule that French was not yet a language of record for royal government in England.⁵⁴ One implication of this is that, almost by definition, French history-writing could not function as a form of record itself, or at least it could not do so in the same way that Latin history-writing could. For formal and linguistic reasons, documents found a comfortable home in Latin history-writing: there is little to distinguish the language and the prose form of Latin chronicles from the discourse of documents themselves, at least formally speaking. French history-writing, by contrast, was a more difficult environment for documents in which to thrive in their original form. For one thing, the history was not written in the same language as those documents. For another, French history was largely written in verse, unlike the documents, which were drawn up in prose. And French history-writers tended to position their texts as if they were oral discourses that called out to a listening audience; writers of French history tended to position their audience, meanwhile, as if they were experiencing a commemoration of the past rather than witnessing a written monument to it. Latin documents, therefore, would have to be translated, versified, and rendered into an oralizing register if French history-writing were to use them—all things that risked distorting them somehow, imperiling their authenticity and undermining their status as records.

But while it is clearly true that French history-writing did not reproduce royal records in this period, I argue here that that it was nevertheless deeply invested in the written word and every bit as bound up with literate power as Latin history-writing was. And although French and Latin history-writing were different forms of memorial practices, they were nevertheless both forms of written memory. Even if we accept that Latin history-writing was used to monumentalize texts more than French was, and that French history-writing tended to be used more in the context of commemoration than Latin history-writing was, those memorial practices are not in opposition to one another, and they do not evolve in a progressive sequence. In this book I insist that Latin could be performed and that French had a life in writing; I insist, equally, that differences between the memorial functions of Latin and French history-writing cannot be down to a narrow alignment of Latin with writing and French with speech and performance.

* * *

By focusing on historiographical documents in this book, I focus on one of the most fundamental features of historiographical discourse. Yet one of my principal arguments is that documents cannot simply be material for historiographical or diplomatic study. So, if I cast one eye on history-writing itself, I cast the other on the graphic culture, as Armando Petrucci called it, of the Age of the Angevins more broadly,⁵⁵ which means that this study is as much about the role of writing in Angevin society as it is about the history-writing that that society produced. And this is necessarily so: as Michel de Certeau suggested, from collecting documents to writing books, historical practice is entirely relative to the structure of society.⁵⁶ To invoke the written word—to enact what Certeau calls a new cultural distribution upon it by transforming it into a document⁵⁷—means different things in different cultures, because in each of those cultures the written word itself carries different social and cultural valences. Even if it looks like more or less the same thing to us, a historical document was not necessarily the same thing for Roger of Howden as it was for Thucydides or Jules Michelet because using the written word means something very different today than what it meant in Ancient Greece or in nineteenth-century France. Furthermore, as the most self-consciously written of all cultural forms, history-writing is particularly sensitive to changes in the role of writing in the society that produces and surrounds it. History, as Paul Ricoeur memorably put it, is writing from one end to the other⁵⁸: historiography depends on writing both for its medium of expression and for many of its sources, and it has never been able to free itself from its own distinctively graphical suffix. History-writing is a tautology,⁵⁹ and this was never more true than in the High Middle Ages, where history was thought to belong absolutely to the realm of the written: Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies, the period’s basic and canonical school-text, classified historia as part of the discipline grammar,⁶⁰ which itself, he said, took its name from the Greek word for letters, grammata.⁶¹ High-medieval biblical exegetes, meanwhile, used the terms letter (littera) and history (historia) interchangeably to describe the fundamentum of biblical narrative—to describe the way historical fact and literal truth converged in the Word incarnate.⁶² Hugh of St. Victor, who once taught Ralph de Diceto, famously compared the exegete’s grounding in history to the grammarian’s knowledge of the alphabet.⁶³

The written word was fundamental to history’s identity as such in the Age of the Angevins. So, as a genre, history-writing was always going to be deeply affected by any change in what the written word meant to those who used it. Conversely, it was also always likely to play a prominent role in bringing that change about. Understanding how high-medieval history-writers themselves understood documents, therefore, demands that we locate them precisely within the spectrum of high-medieval written culture and that we understand history-writing’s relationship to it. The challenge that this book takes up is to understand what writing meant to those who used it in the cross-Channel lands of the Angevin kings of England in the second half of the twelfth century and how these particular valences affected history-writing in its turn.

CHAPTER 1

Defining Documents

Seeking evidence to prove his historical right to rule Scotland, in 1291, Edward I demanded that English monasteries should search their "chronicles, registers and every other secreta, both ancient and current, of whatever shape or date" in order to find it.¹ For Michael Clanchy, this episode is striking primarily because it shows not only that the evidence Edward sought was of the written variety, but because Edward had made no attempt at first to search the royal records to find