History and the Written Word: Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins 9780812296761

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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.

H I S TORY and the W R I T T E N WOR D Documents, Literacy, and Language in the Age of the Angevins

Henry Bainton

Un iver sit y of Pen nsy lvan i a Press Phil adelphi a

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

vii

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Defining Documents

11

Chapter 2. Documentary Quotation

35

Chapter 3. Literate Sociability

56

Chapter 4. Literate Per­for­mances and Literate Government

74

Chapter 5. Literate Languages

91

Afterword 113 List of Abbreviations

119

Notes 121 Bibliography 175 Index 193 Acknowl­edgments

199

Note on Orthogr aphy a n d T r a n s l at i o n s

Orthogr aphy 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. Tr anslations 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 w ­ ill 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 in­ter­ est­ing 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 dur­ ing his day job as a clerk of the king. He transcribes its text at the end of his nar­ rative, 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 dull­ ness 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 w ­ ere actually ­doing—­historiographically, socially, culturally, and politically—­when they tran­ scribed 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 M ­ iddle Ages. I ask h ­ ere, 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 “documen­ tary 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

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place within the “mixed and heterogeneous textuality” that so characterizes history-­writing from this period,7 and I reconstruct their role as written monu­ ments within the strikingly dynamic memorial culture that characterizes the pe­ riod 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 fea­ ture 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 lit­ erary 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 M ­ iddle 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 appar­ ently 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 genera­ tions of modern scholars have attributed part of its luster to its historians’ use of

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documents. H ­ ere, a­ fter all, was a kind of history-­writing that fi­nally looked like something modern, even though it was written in the M ­ iddle 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 de­ ployed them to draw attention to their own “critical minds.”20 The central im­ portance 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 M ­ iddle 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 histo­ riographical one and sharply distinguishing between “rec­ords” and “narrative” as they did so.23 From a strictly diplomatic perspective, history-­writing that repro­ duced 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 ques­ tion 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

4 I n t rod u c t i on

context. The most impor­tant dimension of that context, I argue ­here, is the phe­ nomenon 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 Eu­ro­ pean society, starting from the top.26 This literate mentality was both a conse­ quence 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 “Lit­ erate modes” of thinking spread both territorially and socially. P ­ eople 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 teleologi­ cal) 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 back­ ground to this period’s history-­writing; it does not inform it in a vague or inde­ finable sense. Rather, ­those who wrote history in this period w ­ ere 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’ pro­ fessional 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 rec­ ords 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 Gill­ ingham 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 l­ ater 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 his­

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tories 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 enthu­ siasm” 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 w ­ ere presented.”34 Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, another of Becket’s biographers, described the pains­ taking 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 t­ hese, who all e­ ither lived or worked in the lands of the Angevin kings of E ­ ngland, 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 ­A fter all, historians throughout Latin Christendom quoted documents in their histo­ ries 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 w ­ ere writing for popes and when they w ­ ere writing about bishops.41 Likewise, I make no claim that the specific conjunction between documentary history-­writing and increasing literacy was a uniquely En­g lish 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 h ­ ere is more modest: it is to precisely locate a delimited corpus of texts within the social world of an identifi­ able group of administrators, whose professional lives revolved around using the written word. Although working this way loses the advantages offered by geo­ graph­i­cal breadth, it offers instead the advantages of analytical depth, and it al­ lows me to offer three new perspectives on this material that together cast new light on the social roles of documentary history-­writing.

6 I n t rod u c t i on

The first of t­ hose new perspectives concerns documentary history-­writing’s relationship with the formation of the bureaucratic state. While previous schol­ arship has stressed the connections between documentary history-­writing and En­glish literate government43—or even to the pro­cess once known as “the birth of the state”44—in this study I focus on the intersections between history-­writing and literate power more broadly conceived. I do not deny that cultures of gover­ nance became e­ ither more literate or more intensive in this period. But I do ar­ gue that using literate technologies (as Diceto and Howden undoubtedly did) and being interested in them (as they undoubtedly w ­ ere) did not necessarily im­ ply involvement with a bureaucratic state. B ­ ecause 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. B ­ ecause if the g­ rand narrative of the rise of the state, which is a venerable teleology, has obscured the nuances of history-­writers’ doc­ uments from one direction, another, more recent teleology has obscured them from another. That teleology, the progressive shift “from memory to written rec­ ord” is rehearsed in the title of Clanchy’s g­ reat 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 w ­ ere published, now invite us to work in the space that Clanchy’s title inadvertently closes down. Put briefly, cultural mem­ ory studies would insist that written rec­ords are neither an alternative to mem­ ory 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 forgot­ ten. 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 f­ uture generations to whom they be­ queathed 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

I n t rod u c t i on

7

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 doc­ uments) 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 changed”52—­only, in other words, by be­ ing 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 be­ tween history written in Latin (royal government’s language of rec­ord) and his­ tory 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 E ­ ngland.”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-­w riting 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

8 I n t rod u c t i on

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 w ­ ere 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 trans­ lated, versified, and rendered into an oralizing register if French history-­writing ­were to use them—­all t­ hings 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 h ­ ere that that it was nevertheless deeply in­ vested in the written word and e­ very bit as bound up with literate power as Latin history-­writing was. And although French and Latin history-­writing w ­ ere dif­fer­ent forms of memorial practices, they w ­ ere 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, t­ hose 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 differ­ ences between the memorial functions of Latin and French history-­writing can­ not 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 princi­ pal arguments is that documents cannot simply be material for historiographi­ cal 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 col­ lecting documents to writing books, historical practice is entirely relative to the structure of society.”56 To invoke the written word—to enact what Certeau

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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 t­ hing 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 t­ oday than what it meant in Ancient Greece or in nineteenth-­century France. Further­ more, 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 pro­ duces and surrounds it. History, as Paul Ricoeur memorably put it, “is writing from one end to the other”58: 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 tau­ tology,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) interchange­ ably 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 g­ oing to be deeply af­ fected 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 un­ derstood 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 or­ der to find it.1 For Michael Clanchy, this episode is striking primarily b­ ecause 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 it.2 Even a ­century ­after royal rec­ords had begun to be kept centrally, ­there was still no instinct actually to use t­ hose rec­ords, despite the controlled efficiency with which they ­were made.3 The episode demonstrates for Clanchy, furthermore, that ­those searching the rec­ords had no developed sense of textual criticism: their re­ sults ­were “scrappy and unsatisfactory,” and the Treaty of Falaise of 1174 that they recovered “was cited from a monastic chronicle, whereas more accurate tran­ scripts w ­ ere to be found both in the Red Book and the ­Little Black Book of the Exchequer.”4 Three complementary points can be made about this episode. First, the stor­ age media that Edward ordered to be searched are as remarkable as their wide dispersal. Edward’s edict mentions chronicles, registers, and secreta—­whatever exactly the latter may be—in the same breath and in that order. It is as if chron­ icles and archives ­were thought to belong to the same class of ­thing and that both ­were thought equally likely to preserve written rec­ords. Second, ­those searching the rec­ords worked ­under a very dif­f er­ent concept of textual authority to that of the modern diplomatist. For ­those searching the rec­ords, auctoritas did not re­ side in the best text—­the closest to originality or authenticity—­but rather in that which carried the greatest cultural weight;5 and in cultural terms, chronicles ­were weighty indeed, textual infidelities and all. The third point to be made about this episode, and perhaps the most striking ­thing about it, concerns what

12 c h a p t er   1

happened next. Once the search had turned up a copy of the Treaty of Falaise, which proved Edward’s rights in Scotland, Edward wrote to the dean and chap­ ter of St.  Paul’s ordering them to have this noted ( faciatis annotari) in their chronicles.6 The dean and chapter took Edward’s demand remarkably literally. They did not, as might be expected, note the fact of Edward’s triumph in the narrative of their chronicles; instead, they transcribed the letter announcing it onto a blank leaf of one of ­those chronicles’ codices.7 The codex was that con­ taining Ralph de Diceto’s Ymagines historiarum, which itself reproduced a copy of the same Treaty of Falaise u­ nder its annal for 1174.8 This episode lays bare, then, the complicated relationship between histori­ cal writing and the written word. It reveals a wonderfully circular and mutually reinforcing pro­cess whereby documentary proof of a historical right was found transcribed in one chronicle, the right established on the basis of that proof re­ framed and circulated via another form of document, before that second docu­ ment was transcribed into a further work of history (which itself already had a transcript of the original document embedded within its narrative). The aim of this chapter is to establish what exactly it was about historical narrative that made it work in such close association with documentary forms of discourse. Why did Ralph de Diceto and other chroniclers include the Treaty of Falaise in their chronicles in the first place? What could Diceto achieve by inserting a document such as that treaty that his own narrative alone could not? And how did the likes of Diceto understand the very notion of a “document” in the first place?

Documentary Rhe­toric: Telling the Truth About the Past In order to answer ­these questions, I want to begin by thinking, in broadly liter­ ary terms, about what historical narrative is and how it uses documents to es­ tablish its identity as such. More particularly, I want to think about the way that documents help history-­writers negotiate a fundamental tension inherent in history-­writing as a genre. Western cultural convention dictates that history-­ writers compose true accounts about the past. Yet history-­writing uses the same narrative form that fiction also tends to use. As Hayden White argued, even though historians write about real events and novelists about ­imagined ones, “the forms of their respective discourses” are the same.9 However much narrative dis­ course might position itself within the domain of the real, t­ here is nothing in­ herently “true” or “false” about narrative itself, ­whether it is found in a history book or in an airport thriller. So when history-­writers offer their readers a nar­



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rative and claim that it is history rather than anything ­else, they have to signal to their readers—to persuade them—­that it is about true events rather than ones that they have made up. This was never truer than in the Age of the Angevins. Persuading audiences of the truth of history-­writing had become an urgent task in this period b­ ecause, if this was the age of documentary history, it was also the period in which literary fiction broke into the cultural mainstream.10 Given that high-­medieval history-­writing was “thoroughly dependent on the techniques of fiction to represent the real­ity of the past”11—­and given that t­ here was “nothing in . . . ​con­temporary thought to suggest that history required a new and special mode of discourse” in this period12—­high-­medieval history-­writers had to sig­ nal particularly clearly to their audiences that the “contract” they ­were establish­ ing with them was one of history rather than fiction.13 Along with devices such as the claim to have been an eyewitness to an event,14 documents are considered to have been the crucial devices with which history-­writers could claim that their narratives ­were true—­and authoritatively so.15 ­There are good theoretical reasons why this was the case (and indeed why it remains the case ­today). Whereas fic­ tional narratives need refer to nothing but themselves, invoking a document al­ lows a history-­writer to claim that her narrative has an external referent. As Paul Ricoeur has argued, the externality of documents is fundamental to how they work as truth-­claims. History, Ricoeur says, is “born” from a “taking of a distance which consists in the recourse to the exteriority of the archival trace.”16 History-­writers use documents, that is, b­ ecause they exist outside—­before and beyond—­the narrative that refers to them. Documents function as “testimonial shifters,” as Roland Barthes called them, which “[designate] any reference to the historian’s listening, collecting testimony from elsewhere and telling it in his own discourse.”17 History-­writers cannot deny that they constructed their narratives themselves. But by invoking a document they can speak through a voice that was ­there already. The events I am talking about r­ eally happened, the historian in­ sists. And if you do not believe what I say, see for yourself. Ask the documents. They are right ­here. Of course, high-­medieval history-­writers had not read much Barthes or Ricoeur. But most of them had read plenty of classical rhe­toric, whose intellec­ tual framework (and whose manuals) offered fundamental training for anyone learning to write Latin prose in this period. Classical rhe­toric had an incalcu­ lable impact on medieval history-­writing18—­and provided medieval writers of all sorts with a nuanced vocabulary with which to talk about narrative discourse and its relationship with the truth.19 Moreover, in its forensic (i.e., judicial or courtroom) mode, rhe­toric shared a fundamental concern with history-­writing.

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Both discourses aimed to make their respective discourses seem true (they both aimed to make their discourse veri similis, “like to the truth,” as the rhetoricians had it).20 Like prosecuting or defending advocates, history-­writers offered their audiences a narrative (a “narratio rei gestae,” or an account of ­things done) to per­ suade their audience that something had happened in the past and that it had happened in the way that they said it had. And like prosecuting or defending ad­ vocates, history-­writers could appeal to vari­ous kinds of “extrinsic testimony” to make their case more persuasive.21 As Matthew Kempshall explains, such tes­ timony “can be established by vari­ous means, but the basic distinction lies, ac­ cording to both Cicero and Quintilian, between ­human and documentary sources.”22 ­Because the rhetoricians felt that “­human witnesses are . . . ​a lways open to doubt”23—­they might have been lying, they might have been of dubi­ ous moral character, they might have just been plain wrong—­they suggested that presenting documents (or, as they called them, tabulae [tablets]) to an audience alongside a narrative was a particularly power­ful way of making that narrative feel more true. (“Antonius” illustrates this strategy in Cicero’s De oratore partic­ ularly clearly with the following example: “Hoc sequi necesse est, recito enim tabulas” [this must inevitably follow, for I am reading from the documents]).24 One of the many ­things that medieval history-­writers took away from the text­ books of classical rhe­toric, therefore, was the notion that documents, in their ex­ ternality, could work as truth-­claims. Paul the Deacon, writing his Historia romana in the late eighth c­ entury, was thus thoroughly conventional in claim­ ing that documentary evidence could work as “a guarantee against lying.”25 That view became a historiographical commonplace and remained so throughout the ­Middle Ages and beyond. Documents, therefore, authorize narrative and authenticate history. Clas­ sical rhetoricians said so, modern theorists say so, and medieval historians and scholars of medieval lit­er­a­ture agree with them. But this, I argue, is not all t­ here is to say about documents and the history-­writers who used them in the Age of the Angevins. So, at this point, I want to begin to broaden our sense of what doc­ uments actually w ­ ere and what they could do in high-­medieval history-­writing. I ­will do this, first of all, by thinking a ­little about the terminology that high-­ medieval history-­writers used when they referred to the t­ hings that I have been calling “documents.” I ­shall then consider the sorts of document that high-­ medieval history-­writers actually used. And I then ­shall explore how exactly history-­writers used them. Two arguments w ­ ill emerge from this analy­sis. The first is this: although we are used to carving up historical sources into “narratives” and “documents,” as if ­these ­were separate and easily identifiable categories, many



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of the documents that history-­writers used ­were already demonstrably narrative in their form. This means that they did not just serve the chronicler’s own narra­ tive: they ­were not simply evidential grist to their storytelling mill. I argue, rather, that documents ­were the narrative, or at least integral parts of it. My second ar­ gument concerns documents’ status as truth-­claims. Literary studies’ emphasis on documents’ role as truth-­claims, while justified, opposes the fictional to the documentary too starkly.26 Concentrating solely on documentary truth-­claims, that is, risks giving the impression that—­unlike historical narrative, whose com­ plicated entanglement with fictionality has long been understood—­documents themselves occupied a purely nonfictional space or at least provided a secure repre­sen­ta­tional link to one. It risks, in short, assuming that documents—­rather than nonfiction—­are somehow the opposite of fiction. The “documentary” was not a neat category of its own, at least not in the Age of the Angevins. It was not a bounded domain beyond and distinct from the historiographical, from which history-­writing could import evidence. Rather than providing a fail-­safe guar­ antee against fictionality, many of the documents that history-­writers quoted in this period have a relationship with fictionality that is at least as complicated as that of the narratives that used them.

Documentary Vocabulary So, what are documents, and what did they do, in the history-­writing of the Age of the Angevins? The first ­thing to consider is what history-­writers them­ selves called the texts that we call documents t­ oday. Roger of Howden’s docu­ mentary lexicon is particularly instructive in this re­spect. In the rubrics of his Chronica, Howden uses no fewer than twenty-­three dif­fer­ent terms to intro­ duce what scholarship would nowadays call documents. Howden refers to assisae, calumniae, capitula, cartae, concordiae, consuetudines, conventiones, decimae, decreta, epistolae, libera, leges, litterae, mandata, opiniones, pactae, paces, praecepta, placitae, rescripta, scripta, sententiae, and verba. Howden was not always consistent in his vocabulary, which suggests that he may not have had an absolutely fixed idea of what a “document” was. Sometimes he would call a document one ­thing in the rubric and then another when he refers to it in his own narrative (so he might call a document an epistola in a rubric but litterae in his own prose). He uses a smaller range of words when referring to documents in his prose than when he labels them in his rubrics. But even then he manages to use fourteen dif­fer­ent terms: assisa, carta, concordia, conventio,

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cyrographum, decreta, edictum, leges, litterae, mandatum, pax, praecepta, scriptum, and sententia. Two ­things ­really stand out from Howden’s documentary vocabulary. The first is that Howden is both very specific and very vague in his terminology. Words such as assisa, placita, and decima are highly technical, and Howden uses them precisely if rarely. But the terms he uses most frequently—­for example, litterae, for example—­seem at first sight to be imprecise, and apparently denote ­little more than a written text. As I argue shortly, however, the fact that How­ den usually calls what we call documents litterae was not b­ ecause he was lazy or ignorant.27 Rather, Howden often called documents litterae ­because letters in­ deed make up the vast majority of his documents. And this suggests that in or­ der to understand what t­ hese documents are, we need to understand the formal relationship between history-­writing and epistolography. But before attempting to untangle that relationship, I want to pause to consider the second—­perhaps more striking—­thing about Howden’s documentary vocabulary: Howden does not call a single one of his documents a documentum, the Latin substantive from which the modern En­glish word document derives. Howden, in fact, only ever calls one text a documentum, and that is not what anyone would call a document ­today. Howden’s documentum is a didactic maxim that he quotes from the work of the late-­antique poet Claudian: when Henry II and Louis VII (king of France, d. 1180) agreed to convert the Cathars back to orthodoxy by evangelizing them rather than fighting them, Howden says, the kings ­were “recalling the lesson (documentum) of the most eloquent man who said ‘the horror your name inspires achieves more than your sword.’ ”28 Modern readers of Howden’s documentum need to reach back to older uses of the En­glish word document to capture its di­ dacticism. The “helthsum document” of the preaching swallow in Robert Hen­ ryson’s Scots Aesop nicely captures it. So too do the “daily documents” in Isaac Jaggard’s En­glish translation of Boccaccio’s Decameron—­the saints’ lives that the el­derly Riccardo di Chinzica read to his bored young wife, keeping her away from the bedroom and oblivious to his impotence (but “wherewith, pour soule, she became so tired”).29 So Howden prob­ably considered the pithy maxims from po­ ets like Claudian and Ovid (and even Alan de Lille), which he scattered liber­ ally throughout his chronicles,30 to be its true documenta, not the letters and charters that he quotes in such abundance.31 Howden’s own documenta, in other words, are just the t­ hings anyone mining his chronicle t­ oday for “documentary evidence” is likely to ignore. If Roger of Howden only used the substantive documentum once, this does not mean that his use of the word is not still instructive. When Howden calls



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his quotation from Claudian a documentum, he underscores the potentially di­ dactic function of the intertexts that he invoked. The documentary lexicon of other history-­writers from this period ­really drives home the fact that a major function of history-­writing’s intertexts was to teach their audiences something (­whether or not we would call t­ hose intertexts documents t­ oday). The didactic valences of the documentary are especially evident in the verbs that history-­ writers used when they ­were introducing intertexts. Ralph de Diceto, for ex­ ample, makes no distinction between what he says he is ­doing when he inserts a vita of Saint Anselm of Canterbury into his chronicle and what he says is d­ oing when he inserts something we might call an “official document” t­ oday. The Life of Anselm, Diceto claims, w ­ ill teach (edocere) his readers about the saint’s life and his strug­gles with William Rufus and Henry I.32 Equally, Diceto says, a let­ ter from Henry II recording a conference between Philip Count of Flanders and Philip Augustus ­will instruct (docere) his readers about “what had happened ­there.”33 We would now prob­ably only think of the Life of Anselm as being prop­ erly didactic and only the letter as being properly documentary. Yet, as far as Diceto was concerned, both the vita and the royal letter belonged to the same category; they did the same t­ hing. Both showed his readers something, instructed them—­taught them.34 And, as he makes clear in his prologue, teaching his read­ ers is precisely what he set out to do in his history.35 Whereas ­today we might define a document on the basis that it is a specifi­ cally written text that follows specific formal rules, in the High ­Middle Ages, any text’s didactic function could potentially turn it into a documentum. That text did not even have to be a written one. Gervase of Canterbury, for example, neatly inverts modern expectations by saying that he wrote his Gesta regum partly on the basis of “virorum fidelium documenta”—­that is the ­things that reliable men had taught (or maybe just told) him—­and partly on the basis of “autentica scripta”—­that is, on what we might call original documents ­today (i.e., texts that belonged to a specifically written system of verifiable truthfulness).36 In the ter­ minology of high-­medieval history-­writers themselves, therefore, documenta ­were simply intertexts that they quoted for didactic purposes. ­There was nothing in­ herently historiographical about them; they did not offer unique “factual or ref­ erential propositions” like modern historical documents.37 And documenta did not amount to a generic category of written discourse of their own. They w ­ ere simply one didactic ele­ment of the mixed and heterogeneous textuality that so characterizes the history-­writing of this period. One solution to the mismatch between the modern meaning of document and the medieval meaning of documentum might be to abandon the word

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document altogether when describing the intertexts that history-­writers from this period invoke with such enthusiasm. The word scriptum, on the other hand, makes no reference to function, emphasizing instead the technology by which in­ formation is conveyed.38 It belongs to the administrative lexicon of the twelfth ­century,39 and Howden and Diceto sometimes use it themselves.40 The baldness of this term, though, might risk obscuring the way that “orality retains functions within a system of graphic repre­sen­ta­tion for language,”41 a crucial concern of Chapters 3 and 4 of this book. But the word scriptum has the advantage of drawing attention to the growing critical awareness of not just literacy and oral­ ity, vocality and aurality, but also of scripturalité, which encompasses the per­ formative aspects of the act of writing and situates it alongside other ritual and written practices and institutions of cultural memory.42 For the rest of this study, therefore, I ­will refer to history-­writing’s scripta when I refer to their documents, bearing in mind all the while their potentially didactic function.

Scripta and Letters If history-­writers from this period did not always use what t­ oday would be called “diplomatic vocabulary” precisely, that does not mean that the form of the scripta that they quote is not nevertheless significant. At this point, I want to return to my e­ arlier observation that chroniclers call the vast majority of the scripta that they reproduce “letters”—­that is, e­ ither litterae or epistolae. Chroniclers did not do this b­ ecause they did not know what they w ­ ere d­ oing. As T ­ able 1 shows, they called most of their scripta letters precisely ­because most of them did take the form of the letter—­here defined as written texts addressed from one named in­ dividual or group to another.43 Letters make up 59 ­percent of the scripta in How­ den’s Gesta, a figure that rises to 69  ­percent for his Chronica, 73  ­percent for Gervase’s Chronica, and 93 ­percent for Diceto’s Ymagines. (Charters and treaties, of course, are also forms of letter, although they are addressed to all ­those who might see or hear them now or in the ­future rather than to named individuals.) The t­ able shows that Howden, Diceto, and Gervase reproduced more letters than any other form of text in their chronicles. In some ways this is not surpris­ ing: as Frank Barlow once pointed out, “It is notoriously difficult to classify me­ dieval documents, b­ ecause almost all are cast into the form of the letter, and classes shade into one another.”44 From the point of view of standard accounts of ­these chronicles, however, the epistolarity of t­ hese scripta is very surprising. ­Because the chronicles have tended to be studied by ­those interested in admin­



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­Table 1. Scripta Classified by Type Howden, Gesta

Type Letters Charters and treaties Secular legislation (assizes e­ tc.) Ecclesiastical legislation ­Others Total

45 15 6 3 2 71

Howden, Chronica 117 24 10 6 7 164

Diceto, Ymagines 124 6 0 2 0 132

Gervase, Chronica 29 4 4 2 1 40

istrative and constitutional history, the texts that have attracted the most scholarly attention are the laws that they include.45 In terms of numbers if not constitutional significance, however, it is letters that r­eally dominate t­hese chronicles—­letters, on the ­whole, exchanged between churchmen about eccle­ siastical business.46 The (hitherto unremarked) preponderance of letters in t­ hese chronicles suggests that the epistolary form’s relationship to history-­writing cries out to be understood. And it is this relationship that I want to turn to now.

Letters, Narrative, and History-­Writing Letters, charters, and history-­writing from this period sometimes resembled each other so closely that it is hard to tell them apart.47 One only has to read Abelard’s Historia calamitatum or John of Salisbury’s Historia pontificalis—­one is a letter written as if it ­were a history and the other is a history written as if it w ­ ere a letter—to see how seamlessly letters and history converged.48 At the root of this convergence lay a shared entanglement with narrative. History is a narrative genre by definition—or, at least, “by definition, [it] cannot exist without narrativity.”49 And narrative was hard-­wired into letter-­writing as a discipline. When twelfth-­ century students learned the art of composing letters (the ars dictaminis), they learned that one of the principal parts of the letter was the narratio, where the sender told his or her recipient what had happened to prompt the letter’s writ­ ing.50 If narrative had always been impor­tant to letters in theory, by Howden’s and Diceto’s day its centrality came to the fore in practice. It was in precisely this period that a form of epistolary narrative—­the newsletter—­emerged, which would become fundamental to public, literate, and po­liti­cal life in the ­later ­Middle Ages and into modernity.51 Newsletters crisscrossed Eu­rope in huge num­ bers in the Age of the Angevins. They announced victories on battlefields, and

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they chronicled defeats, both at home and in the Holy Land. Th ­ ese newsletters ­were demonstrably epistolary: a named individual would address another and convey information to them in written form. Yet the a­ ctual contents of t­ hese let­ ters ­were almost indistinguishable from historiography, and especially from the distinctive “fast historiography,” as Lars Boje Mortensen has called it, that emerged during the Crusades.52 Chroniclers such as Howden copied newsletters into the working texts of their histories almost as soon as they received them, often simply absorbing their narratives into their own by removing the letters’ addresses, greetings, and farewells.53 I want to pause at this point to offer a close reading of one of t­ hese newslet­ ters, which Roger of Howden reproduced in his chronicles and which shows par­ ticularly clearly how the narrativity of letters made them so compatible with history-­writing. Hugh de Nonant (bishop of Coventry and veteran po­liti­cal schemer, d. 1198) wrote this letter in 1191, addressing it to all and sundry to tell them the news of the spectacular downfall of his hated e­ nemy William de Long­ champ (papal legate, royal chancellor, and bishop of Ely, d. 1197). Nonant had written the letter, he said, ­because “the ­things that are noted down through the marks of letters are without doubt consigned to posterity.”54 Through the writ­ ten word, Nonant suggests, the pre­sent could address the ­f uture and teach it about the past. “By t­ hese very letters,”55 he continues, “I want to bequeath to pos­ terity the [tale of the] downfall of the bishop of Ely, so that in this example hu­ mility might ever-­a fter discover what succeeds, and pride discover what is fearsome.”56 Nonant then provides a long narrative recounting Longchamp’s vices, including his stubborn Frenchness, and his humiliating flight from his trial in Canterbury. Longchamp had run away from his trial disguised as a w ­ oman and had tried to swim to France. But he was washed up half-­naked on Dover beach, Nonant salaciously related, before a fisherman blew his cover, having put his hands up his skirt “thinking [he] was a prostitute.” The fisherman quickly realized his m ­ istake.57 Nonant’s letter was a very public way of gloating at the misfortunes of a po­liti­cal ­enemy. But he set the letter up as a written exemplum, whose narrative about Longchamp would move its readers to embrace humility. It was a didactic documentum, in other words: it was intended to teach (docere) posterity, long before Howden used it as a “historical document” to do the same. (And as Roy K. Gibson and A. D. Morrison argued, premodern letters have a “natu­ral inclination ­towards the delivery of instructions, [which,] combined with the relative simplicity of communication style, gives the letter form an astonish­ ing didactic utility and range of application . . . ​in pursuing a didactic agenda, the letter genre becomes remarkably elastic.”)58 In their didacticism, therefore, let­



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ters such as Nonant’s w ­ ere already closely allied with history-­writing written in a demonstrative mode—­that is, with much of the history written in the High ­Middle Ages.59 In the letter’s extended account of Longchamp’s ­career and downfall, meanwhile, Nonant’s letter also marks out its debts to the sort of rhe­ torical narrative on which historiography also depended. (In this case, it resem­ bles nothing so much as a forensic narratio, which used evidence of a defendant’s bad living to persuade a jury that they had done bad deeds.)60 Fi­nally, as a self-­ consciously written artifact—­addressed to posterity and designed to func­ tion even though its author was absent61—it was already inscribed before Howden transcribed it into his chronicle. It was already history-­writing before Howden wrote it into his history. Howden and Diceto largely concerned themselves with scripta such as this, whose form and rhe­toric signaled that they w ­ ere addressed to a teachable pos­ terity and that their authors intended that they should be preserved. Like Nonant’s letter, ­these scripta ­were autonomous units of historical narrative, which used writing to address their storied testimony to distant, f­ uture readers. Their writtenness combined with their narrativity to give them a self-­sufficiency that meant they could wield a didactic or po­liti­cal force long a­ fter they had left the hands of their authors. The epistolarity of the scripta that history-­writers used—­and their epistolary narrativity—­affected the way that history-­writers used them. Most impor­tant, their self-­sufficiency meant that history-­writers hardly needed to do anything to letters if they wanted to reuse their narratives as ele­ ments in their own stories. They could lay them down like narrative building blocks and combine them with narratives they had composed themselves. As a consequence, chroniclers could—­and did—­deploy epistolary scripta and narra­ tive in all sorts of dif­f er­ent ways in their chronicles. When Diceto deploys a scriptum, for example, he generally makes no comment about it himself. Of the 220 scripta that he includes in his two chronicles, he introduces only 15, using a min­ imalistic formula, such as “Alexandro papae scriptum est in haec verba” (it was written to Pope Alexander in ­these words).62 The remaining 205 scripta he sim­ ply inserts without comment, muting his own voice and minimizing any impres­ sion he might give that he, as an author, might have intervened in his text by inserting scripta within it. The scripta seem just to be ­there, of their own accord, neutrally transcribed as if by nature. Diceto pre­sents ­those silently transcribed scripta in many dif­fer­ent ways. Sometimes he relates them to the narrative entries that precede and follow them, using parataxis to connect narrative to scriptum. (That is, he does not explic­itly say how the narrative and the scriptum are related, but he arranges them in a way

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that implies that they are, leaving his reader to make the connection between them.) During his account of the year 1188, for example, Diceto notes, in narra­ tive form, that the Christian army had surrendered Jerusalem to Saladin in ex­ change for the captured Guy de Lusignan and that Count Bohemond of Tripoli had died in captivity. He then inserts a vituperative letter that Frederick Bar­ barossa had sent to Saladin, upbraiding him for profaning the Holy Land.63 Al­ though Diceto does not say as much, Frederick’s letter was a direct consequence of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem,64 an event that stimulated all sorts of polemi­ cal writing.65 Diceto’s con­temporary readers doubtless made the connection be­ tween the two ­things and understood Frederick’s letter in the context of the surrender of Jerusalem. In other places, though, Diceto’s scripta and their neigh­ boring narrative entries have ­little to do with one another. And sometimes they have nothing in common at all: in his account of the year 1187, for example, Di­ ceto rec­ords the birth of Count Arthur of Brittany, before inserting a letter from Urban III directing Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury to stop building his new collegiate church at Hackington.66 ­Here the scriptum and the narrative are not thematically connected, and neither is related to Diceto’s subsequent en­ try, which rec­ords how Henry II and Philip Augustus made peace near Châ­ teauroux in the same year.67 Aside from their shared interest in the shifting power relations of the Angevin espace, t­ hese three entries have nothing in common. They deal with dif­fer­ent actors ­doing dif­fer­ent t­ hings in dif­fer­ent places. Fi­nally, Diceto sometimes transcribes a bald series of scripta, his own narrative fading away entirely. In some places ­these scripta are closely connected with one another—­ the series of letters about the Norman lands of Diceto’s friend Walter de Cou­ tances, archbishop of Rouen and former justiciar of E ­ ngland, is a good example.68 But in other places nothing at all connects the scripta that Diceto inserts: a let­ ter relating how the Assassins murdered Count Conrad of Montferrat follows a letter from Pope Celestine III to the province of York announcing Archbishop Hubert Walter’s legation, and it precedes a letter that Richard I had sent to the bishop of London complaining that the monks of Durham had secretly elected a new bishop.69 Diceto, therefore, used t­ hese scripta as self-­sufficient units of his­ torical narrative. Sometimes he used them alongside his own narrative; some­ times he used them to illustrate his own narrative, but often he did not. The letters already told stories, and he simply incorporated them into his codex. In history-­ writing such as this, therefore, scripta had no priority over narrative, and narra­ tive had no priority over scripta; neither did the other’s bidding. Scripta told their own stories, which history-­writers redeployed within plot arcs of their own devising.



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Diceto’s summary of the chapters of his Ymagines historiarum illustrates what this equivalence between narrative and scripta looks like on the page. In Diceto’s summary, letters, the dispatch of letters, and his own narrative entries share equal historiographical weight. Within the space of ten capitula, Diceto summarizes one straightforwardly narrative entry (“Hubert, archbishop of Can­ terbury, was made legate”),70 one entry saying only that a king dispatched some letters (“Philip, king of the French, wrote three letters to the archbishop of Rouen”),71 and one entry summarizing the text of a letter—­which is presented as if it ­were a narrative entry like the other two (“Richard King of ­England, to the bishop of Evreux: ‘We inform you’ ”).72 In Diceto’s world, therefore, the dis­ patch of letters—­and letters themselves—­were as much historical events as they ­were evidence for them. They belonged to the same order of significance as the narrative entries that he had written himself. The externality of letters, mean­ while, appears not to have played a particularly significant rhetorical role: no­ where does Diceto claim that his chronicle is more trustworthy or veri similis on the basis of the letters he included, even if that is what modern historians think about it.

Collecting Letters and Writing History Letters could tell their own stories, then, which history-­writers could retell in their turn by reproducing them in their chronicles. If this suggests that history-­ writing and letter-­writing ­were closely related narrative discourses in this period, then con­temporary practices of letter-­collecting drive home the closeness of that relationship. I want to think a ­little about the connections between history-­ writing and letter-­collecting in this period ­because it is no coincidence that the age of Howden and Diceto—­that “golden age of history-­writing”—­was also a golden age for letter-­collecting. As Howden and Diceto began writing their chronicles, Gilbert Foliot, Arnulf of Lisieux, and Peter of Blois, three of the pe­ riod’s g­ reat controversialists, w ­ ere assembling their letters in order to publish them. (Diceto knew all ­these men, and Howden prob­ably did too.)73 More sig­ nificantly perhaps, a new form of epistolary collection also became widespread in this period, which combined letters with narrative and resembled the cartulary-­ chronicles that had emerged e­ arlier in the M ­ iddle Ages but which had their En­glish heyday in this period. Th ­ ose cartulary-­chronicles, and indeed cartula­ ries more generally, ­were e­ ither overtly or implicitly historiographical: Monika Otter has shown that “many monastic chronicles are r­ eally cartularies, collections

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of local documents combined with portions of narrative history”;74 Leah Shop­ kow, meanwhile, has argued that ­there is no rhetorical “dividing line between cartularies and serial biographies” such as the Liber pontificalis.75 And Karine Ugé argues that “the bound­aries between dif­fer­ent narrative genres [such as cartulary and chronicle] interpenetrate one another. . . . ​The historical, commem­ orative and liturgical nature of charters, cartularies and gesta have long been recognized . . . ​[and] ­because of the elasticity of dif­f er­ent genres, almost any kind of text could fulfil almost any need.”76 Of course, letters had been compiled long before cartulary-­chronicles emerged as a textual phenomenon, and they did not always function as historiography. Letter collections presented “a controlled and selective image of the author”—­they celebrated their authors’ personality and their prose style77—­but they did not necessarily tell a story about them; they ­were not always conceived of “an archival witness to the events of the author’s life,” as Julian Haseldine puts it.78 In their use of chronological narrative, however, the new model of narrative letter collections ­were more overtly historiographical than the letter collections of stylists like Peter of Blois. Alan of Tewkesbury had made plain what a power­ful combination letters and historical narrative could be when he redacted Becket’s letters and bound them up with John of Salisbury’s Life and Passion of St. Thomas. (Alan makes a nice distinction between the letters, which enabled readers to trace the “iter martyris” [martyr’s path,] and John of Salisbury’s narrative Life, which “cleared that path” for the letter’s readers.)79 Gilbert of Sem­ pringham’s followers certainly took Alan’s lead and wrote a narrative vita of their patron and circulated it alongside his collected letters in order to argue for his canonization.80 The compiler of Gilbert’s letters claimed that, taken together, the letters and narrative proved Gilbert’s sanctity and the magnificence of his works. Gerald of Wales, meanwhile, did not—­quite—­claim that he was a saint, but he too demonstrated the polemical potential of the technique of weaving to­ gether letters and narrative when he recounted his disputed election to St. David’s in his Invectiones.81 Despite the fact that the bulk of ­these texts w ­ ere made up of letters rather than passages of narrative, many of their compilers nevertheless claimed that they ­were engaged in a historiographical task when they ­were gathering the letters to­ gether. They did this by foregrounding the distinctive combination of written­ ness and narrativity that letters and history-­writing shared (a combination that Hugh of Nonant exploited so cannily). On the one hand, the collectors stressed that they had arranged the letters chronologically. This was partly a rhetorical move, designed to underscore the authority and truthfulness of their collections. As the compiler(s) of the so-­called Book of St. Gilbert put it, “We have collected



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together into one sequence copies of letters . . . ​by which the sanctity of blessed Gilbert, and the greatness of his works, are rightfully commended and proved.”82 The singularity and seriality of the collection adds to the authority of the letters themselves. ­A fter all, as high-­medieval rhetoricians had insisted, ordering t­ hings accurately was one of the ways one could be sure one was writing history rather than writing fiction,83 telling the truth rather than telling lies.84 The compilers may also have been inspired to stress the chronological order of their collections and to stress the role of historical narrative in holding them together by the work of Eusebius, whose Ecclesiastical History was one of the canonical works of Christian history-­writing in this period. As Rufinus puts it in his Latin transla­ tion of the History, Eusebius had “historica narratione in unum corpus redi­ gere” (united into one body through historical narrative) what his pre­de­ces­sors had written in dispersed places.85 The monk who compiled the Epistolae Cantuarienses (a collection of letters relating to Christ Church Cathedral Priory, Can­ terbury, compiled 1201–5) uses Eusebius’s words to state that he too had arranged the letters “in ordinem et unum corpus” (into order, and into one body).86 The compiler of the Book of St. Gilbert likewise emphasizes that he had carefully ar­ ranged Gilbert’s letters into a single chronological sequence (series).87 Becket’s biographer Herbert of Bosham, meanwhile, praised Alan of Tewkesbury’s “diligence” in arranging Becket’s letters “secundum ordinem historiae” (accord­ ing to the order of history).88 ­Whether they ­were following the rhetorical textbooks that stressed the (his­ toriographical and truthful) ordo naturalis or simply following the example of Eusebius, when letter collectors in this period emphasized the chronological or­ dering of their collections, they emphasized the close relationship between their collections and history-­writing. Furthermore, by transcribing a series of lettered stories, by uniting them “into one body through historical narrative,” letter-­ collectors addressed themselves to posterity and struck a didactic pose, just like the history-­writers who used letters as documenta. For example, the compiler of the Epistolae Cantuarienses opens his collection by praising the prudence of ­those who had committed the “rerum gestarum notitia” to writing.89 That was a distinctly historiographical turn of phrase, and the compiler aligns himself with ­those prudent writers of history (or recorders of the “notitia rerum gestarum”) by using it. When he goes on to suggest that he too was bequeathing “ea quae gesta sunt” (­those t­ hings that have been done) to posterity, he underscores the close­ ness of that alignment.90 Meanwhile, when Gerald of Wales argued that the “­things by which he won praise at the curia” should be recorded because “­things said or done [dicta vel acta] by the efforts of the ancients are accustomed

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to be noted down and perpetuated in writing,”91 he was using a phrase that al­ most any high-­medieval history-­writer with a modicum of rhetorical education could have written. In their self-­conscious and didactic writtenness, therefore, and in their nar­ rativity, some letter collections in the Age of the Angevins strongly resembled the period’s documentary history-­writing. In fact, it is pos­si­ble that t­ hose who made chronological collections of letters in this period saw themselves as history-­ writers before they saw themselves as anything ­else. And it is pos­si­ble that they did this b­ ecause chronicles such as t­hose written by Howden and Diceto and Gervase of Canterbury, which wove together narrative and letters, showed them how combining letters and narrative could work together to tell stories about the past.

Epistolarity and Emplotment To recapitulate a l­ ittle, at the beginning of this chapter, I posed two questions: what are “documents,” and what did they do in the history-­writing of the Age of the Angevins? The short answer to the first question is that most of the docu­ ments that history-­writers reproduced in their histories ­were letters of some sort. The answer to the second question is more complicated and has to be more pro­ visional at the moment. But this much is clear: ­because letters often offered nar­ ratives, they could function in history-­writing as ready-­made narrative building blocks, which w ­ ere often nearly identical in form to the narratives that history-­ writers composed themselves. Letters told stories, in other words, and history-­ writers used letters to tell stories. In ­doing so, history-­writers resembled the period’s letter-­collectors, who also combined narratives and epistolary documents in their accounts of individuals’ (and institutions’) lives. And ­those collectors claimed, for their part, that they ­were somehow writing history. If history-­writers and letter-­collectors used letters to tell stories—if they told letters as stories—­then this impinges on one of the central questions that schol­ ars have asked about documentary history-­writing and its scripta. Namely, did history-­writers’ epistolary storytelling enable them to distinguish their narratives from fiction (the other major narrative form in this period) and falsehood? Or did it in fact rely on the fictive and artificial constructs on which narrative dis­ course depends? For all that high-­medieval letter-­collectors stressed the histo­ ricity of their accounts, modern narratological theory would surely point t­ oward the fictiveness with which they ­shaped their collections. Using Hayden White’s



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terminology, one could argue that the letter-­collectors “emplotted” the letters that they collected. The compilers, that is, selected and arranged the letters in such a way to tell a story whose plot they had already “prefigured.” (White espe­ cially emphasizes the importance of emplotment in retrospective accounts of in­ dividuals’ lives—­accounts, that is, such as the epistolary accounts of the lives of Becket and Gilbert of Sempringham.)92 Even if Hayden White’s perspectives are not universally accepted by medi­ evalists (or indeed historians more generally), many would agree that letter-­ collectors actively intervened to shape the documentary rec­ord when they offered “a controlled and selective image” of their subjects.93 Yet if we accept that the letters in letter collections ­were heavi­ly emplotted by their compilers as they of­ fered that image, this raises the question of ­whether the same ­thing can be said of the letters that history-­writers like Howden and Diceto reproduced in their histories. At first glance, the answer to this question seems to be no. ­Because, de­ spite the similarities of their narrative forms—­and despite their common claim to represent the past—­there is a crucial difference between historiographical let­ ter collections and documentary history-­writing. While letter-­collectors might well have emplotted letters to tell the story of a life now lived (or, in Gerald’s case, a ­career now over), chronicles did not tend to narrate such discrete and bounded stories.94 Howden’s and Diceto’s chronicles had no ending u­ nder whose sign their epistolary contents could be or­ga­nized: the chronicles simply stop, presumably when their authors died or became too frail to continue writing. Indeed, viewed from Hayden White’s perspective, Howden and Diceto ­were not strictly speak­ ing writing histories at all. Although they might have arranged “ele­ments in the historical field” into the “temporal order of their occurrence,” they did not always then or­ga­nize that “chronicle” into a “story” “by the further arrangement of the events into the . . . ​pro­cess of happening, which is thought to possess a dis­ cernible beginning, ­middle, and end.”95 In truly historical accounts of the past, White argues, “events must be not only registered within the chronological framework of their original occurrence, but narrated as well, that is to say, re­ vealed as possessing a structure, an order of meaning, that they do not possess as mere sequence.”96 On White’s reading, chroniclers simply recorded events and documents in the order in which they originally occurred “­under the assump­ tion that the ordering of the events in their temporal sequence itself provided a kind of explanation of why they occurred when and where they did.”97 Does this mean, therefore, that the letters that chroniclers reproduced ­were in fact insulated from the sort of fictive framework that a letter-­collector might have imposed on them? It may well be that it insulated them from the specific

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kind of “fictionality” that White had in mind (which is that of the four master plots that he had borrowed from the work of Northrop Frye.)98 But this does not therefore mean that incorporating self-­standing epistolary narratives into a broader chronological and historiographical arrangement was an entirely artless business. As White concedes elsewhere in his work, t­ here is “nothing natu­ral about chronologically ordered registrations of events.”99 Nor is ­there anything natu­ral about chronologically ordered “registrations” of letters. For one ­thing, the very fact that correct chronology—­the rhetoricians’ ordo naturalis—­was taken in the High ­Middle Ages to be a marker of truthfulness means that a chronicle’s chronology was itself a scale charged with epistemological value.100 (Gervase of Canterbury equated incorrect chronology with mendacity: histori­ ans who got their chronology wrong introduced “a ­great confusion of lies into the Church of God,” he said.)101 Moreover, even White accepts that so-­called na­ ïve chroniclers or­ga­nized events and letters into something like a story, albeit one lacking “the characteristics that we normally attribute to a story: no central subject, no well-­marked beginning, ­middle, and end.”102 As White himself ar­ gues in his power­ful reading of the Annals of St. Gall, which is a paradigmatic example of annalistic history-­writing that rec­ords very l­ ittle except the passing of the years, “­there must be a story [­here], since t­ here is surely a plot—if by plot we mean a structure of relationships by which the events contained in the account are endowed with a meaning by being identified as parts of an integrated ­whole.”103 The explicit chronological ordering of the Annals, manifested in “the list of dates of the years, . . . ​confers coherence and fullness on the events. . . . ​The list of dates can be seen as the signified of which the events given in the right-­ hand column are the signifiers. The meaning of the events is their registration in this kind of list.”104 The possibility that even chronicles had plots is a particularly impor­tant con­ cession when it comes to understanding the relationship between letters and narratives in the chronicles of the Age of the Angevins. B ­ ecause if White is right that “the meaning of the events is their registration”—­and that the fact of regis­ tration “confers coherence and fullness” on events—­then this is surely as true for the letters that chroniclers reproduced as it was of the narrative entries that they had composed themselves. To misuse White’s formulation (and mindful of the roots of the word registration in the word res gestae), the meaning of letters is their registration in “this kind of list.” As we have already seen in practice, the chron­ ological registration of letters in chronicles conferred on them a status coequal to that of historical events—it made them historical events by elevating them into the order of historiography and by indexing them against the same set of chron­



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ological diacritics that gave historical events their meaning. When chroniclers incorporated letters into their chronological accounts of the past, therefore, they or­ga­nized ­those letters into some kind of meaningful plot, even if they did not necessarily marshal them into the heavi­ly emplotted narrative forms that epis­ tolary compilers used when they fashioned the lives of o­ thers out of letters. Howden and Diceto would prob­ably have recoiled at the idea that they ­were using fictive structures when they arranged—or emplotted—­scripta in chronological order. For them, ordering ­things chronologically was a mani­ festly historiographical gesture. Indeed, the word that they and other history-­ writers used to describe what they w ­ ere d­ oing when they copied documents reveals that they may have conceived of that task as much in graphical as in his­ toriographical terms. When history-­writers describe what they ­were d­ oing with documents in this period, they generally used the verb inserere (to insert). (Gervase of Canterbury offers a good example when he appeals for his readers’ patience: “Nec te moveat, lector bone . . . ​quod tot epistolas inserui” [Do not let it disturb you, good reader . . . ​that I have inserted so many letters]).105 The word inserere had distinctly bureaucratic overtones in this period: it was a scribal term, designating “la mise par écrit” of (for example) judicial acts, em­ phasizing “l’application de lettres” onto parchment.106 The fact that Diceto uses the verb inserere as much about recording deeds as he does about scripta fur­ ther illustrates the proximity between the business of recording deeds and re­ cording documents. History books are full of examples of rebellious royal sons coming to sticky ends if you look for them, Diceto says. “If you carefully survey the vari­ous crises of kingdoms . . . ​and unlawful rebellions of insurgent sons against their f­athers inscribed (insertas) in the annals . . . ​you ­w ill soon find [­those] sons ­dying before their ­fathers.”107 Similarly—­and in a neat reworking of the Franks’ worry in the Chanson de Roland that p­ eople would sing bad songs about them—­Diceto writes that the French abandoned Verneuil to Richard I at Pentecost in 1194 ­because they ­were worried that Richard’s vic­ tory over them on such a sacred day would be remembered by posterity through being “inserted into their annals (annalibus inserendam).”108 The scribal rhe­toric of “insertion,” however, makes history-­writers’ use of scripta sound more innocent and more selfless than it was in practice. By story­ ing scripta in their chronicles and by giving them what Paul Ricoeur calls archi­ ­ ere putting them into the play val “aid and assistance,”109 Diceto and Howden w of con­temporary politics, irrespective of ­whether or not they ­were “making fic­ tion” as they did so. A ­ fter all, Diceto and Howden w ­ ere personally connected to high-­ranking and highly literate churchmen, who pursued their po­liti­cal

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ambitions through a mixture of the written word and brute force. ­These church­ men (or “literate lords,” as I call them when I discuss them in more detail in Chapter 4) circulated letters among their literate friends and adversaries for po­ lemical purposes (Hugh de Nonant’s hatchet job on William de Longchamp is a perfect example). And they did so with the express desire that they should have as wide a circulation and as enduring a life span as pos­si­ble (hence, presum­ ably, Nonant’s overdetermined emphasis on the endurance of writing). Literate lords such as Nonant would assem­ble dossiers of scripta, almost as libelli de lite,110 around individual ­causes or controversies, and ­these dossiers provided Howden and Diceto with some of their documentary material. The letters about the Becket conflict is a good if special example of such collections,111 but similar collections might also have provided them with the letters documenting Wil­ liam de Longchamp’s contentious chancellorship.112 Diceto also includes a number of letters documenting the dispute between Walter de Coutances and Richard I over Coutances’s manor of Les Andelys.113 Howden, meanwhile, gives considerable documentary attention to the ­career and controversies of Geoffrey Plantagenet, archbishop of York,114 as he does to the drawn-­out controversy revolving around the disputed election to the see of St. Andrews in 1180.115

St. Andrews: Storying the Documentary Rec­ord Howden’s St. Andrews material can serve as an excellent case study of the par­ tiality with which chroniclers gave carefully selected scripta “aid and assistance” by reproducing them in their chronicles. They gave them aid and assistance, that is, while they emplotted and fashioned what we now think of as the “documentary rec­ord.” The dispute at St. Andrews began in 1180, when William the Lion (king of Scotland, d. 1214) tried to appoint his chaplain, Hugh, as bishop. The cathe­ dral chapter had other ideas: they had elected their own candidate, John “the Scot,” to the episcopal seat. John appealed to the pope to have Hugh deposed and excommunicated (he was), and Hugh, in turn, appealed against his sentence. The dispute lasted ­until 1188, when Hugh died making his case in Rome. How­ den’s account of the dispute is particularly in­ter­est­ing from a historiographical point of view b­ ecause he wrote about the dispute twice—­first in his Gesta and then in his ­later Chronica—­and ­because he deployed scripta differently each time. Howden wrote his Gesta broadly contemporaneously with the events it nar­ rated.116 He began writing his Chronica ­after 1192, a full four years ­after the St. Andrews dispute had blown over.117 As one might expect of an account pro­



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duced contemporaneously with the events it describes, Howden’s version of the dispute in his Gesta is disjointed and paratactic. B ­ ecause Howden did not know the outcome of the dispute as it unfolded—he may not even have understood what its early skirmishes signified—he rarely subordinates one event to another. (As Ricoeur says, “The ­whole truth concerning [a historical] event cannot be known ­until a­ fter the fact and long a­ fter it has taken place. This is just the sort of story only a historian can tell.”)118 Howden’s entries about St. Andrews reflect the order in which he received news about it, and jostle for space in the Gesta with vari­ous other ­things that ­were happening at the same time. The same goes for the scripta that Howden includes. ­These give the impression that Howden transcribed scripta about St.  Andrews into his Gesta as and when he came by them.119 By contrast, when Howden revisited the dispute retrospectively in his Chronica, he writes in continuous prose complete with causal subordination. Entries about St. Andrews gravitate around one another rather than being widely dis­ persed. And by contrast with his practice in the Gesta, in the Chronica, How­ den “arrang[ed] selected events of the chronicle into a story,” to use Hayden White’s terminology; he “arranged the events . . . ​into a hierarchy of significance by assigning events dif­fer­ent functions as story ele­ments in such a way as to dis­ close the coherence of a ­whole set of events considered as a comprehensible pro­ cess with a beginning, ­middle and end.”120 Crucially, Howden rearranged the letters as part of that pro­cess. He also storied them, meaning that they too be­ came ele­ments in the coherent “set of events” that he identified as having taken place at St. Andrews. I want to think a ­little more now about the implications of Howden’s con­ trasting use of letters across his two accounts of the St. Andrews dispute. How­ den had apparently sought out or come across more scripta about the dispute in the period in between writing his two accounts of it. Howden includes four let­ ters in his Chronica—­two from 1182 and two from 1186—­which he does not include in the Gesta. The obvious inference is that in his Chronica, Howden was trying to give a fuller account of the dispute now that he could see the ­whole pic­ ture and that he included the extra letters in order to do so. Yet Howden had, in fact, seen at least one of the additional letters (“Cum litteras”) when he was writ­ ing the Gesta but de­cided to leave it out—­de­cided to not give it any of Ricoeur’s “aid” or “assistance” at all. We know this ­because Howden’s own narrative in the Gesta depends on that letter’s text.121 Why did Howden use the letter Cum litteras as the basis of his narrative in his Gesta but quote it in direct discourse in his Chronica? It is impossible to say

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for sure. But like so many conflicts between power­ful and literate ­people in this period, the dispute at St. Andrews revolved around the existence or other­wise of specific and power­ful scripta. Cum litteras alludes to just such scripta. Cum litteras was a report that Roland, bishop-­elect of Dol and papal judge delegate, had sent to Pope Lucius III about his attempts to resolve the dispute. In that re­ port, Roland reveals how hard William and Hugh had tried to have all the pa­ pal mandates about the dispute destroyed (or, to be precise, incinerated). While he was negotiating with King William, Roland relates, William offered to make John his chancellor, to give him a pension, and to appoint him bishop of Dun­ keld as a consolation. Th ­ ere ­were only two conditions. First, John should renounce his claim to St. Andrews. Second, John should surrender all the papal letters (instrumenta) that he had about it. John agreed to the chancellorship and the pen­ sion, but (Roland relates) he said he would never let Hugh remain in possession of St. Andrews. And rather than burn (comburere) the instrumenta as William had suggested, “he wished that t­ hese instrumenta be put away in some place so that he could never have them used in opposition to the royal w ­ ill.”122 It is clear from Roland’s report that the very existence of the papal letters about St. Andrews was materially damaging to Hugh and to his patron, King William. According to Roland, Hugh and William claimed first that ­those instrumenta ­were forgeries, before raising the stakes and demanding that they be destroyed altogether. Hugh died before the conflict was resolved, and it is un­ clear what became of John’s instrumenta. But if they w ­ ere destroyed, as Hugh and William had wanted them to be, it was ­after Howden had seen and copied them.123 So Howden, in reproducing ­those scripta as part of his Chronica’s story about St. Andrews, was ­doing precisely what King William and Bishop Hugh had sought to make impossible. Howden ensured, that is, that even if the origi­ nal instrumenta ­were destroyed along with the sentences and censures they con­ tained, ­those instrumenta would have an afterlife as stories. Or rather, they would have an afterlife as narrative documenta, exemplary ele­ments in a story. Hugh and William had both been absolved, so they did not need to fear the judgments that the instrumenta had handed down. But they surely did fear their historiograph­ ical potential: Hugh and William did not want to feature in written examples that might teach posterity what not to do in the ­future. And they did not want the instrumenta that sealed their fate to be fashioned into parts of “a compre­ hensible pro­cess with a beginning, ­middle, and end.” Once they had become parts of a pro­cess that had been brought to something like a conclusion—an ending that history would rec­ord as a defeat for Hugh—­then the game r­ eally was over.



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Howden made the St. Andrews instrumenta fulfill their storytelling poten­ tial by giving them archival “aid and assistance.” John’s crafty suggestion to put them out of reach for a while rather than burning them always kept this possi­ bility open. So much, then, for Howden’s famous impartiality, which is often mentioned in the same breath as his inclusion of scripta.124 By including Cum litteras, Howden was taking sides with John, which is something he might not have been comfortable ­doing before the dispute was resolved and before it was clear who would end up on the winning side.125 Exactly what was at stake in Howden’s reproduction (or suppression) of t­ hese scripta remains obscure.126 But what­ever the precise politics of Howden’s reporting, this much is clear: he turned scripta to a historiographical purpose by storying them and rescued them from oblivion and the explicit threat of destruction by ­doing so. Giving the St. An­ drews scripta archival “aid and assistance,” as Howden did, involved integrating ­those scripta into a new epistemological framework. It involved selecting them and fashioning them as parts of a new w ­ hole, and it thus transformed them from isolated utterances into ele­ments of a series that conferred on them their mean­ ing. And while the St. Andrews dispute is a clear case of “fierce bull-­headed am­ bitions over nothing much shaping the historical rec­ord,”127 the pro­cesses at work in Howden’s shaping of the rec­ord can be found in many similar texts from this period. The impact of some of t­ hose has been incalculable. Anne Duggan, for example, has shown how Gerald of Wales’s adulteration (if not forgery) of Pope Adrian IV’s bull Laudabiliter (which allegedly conferred the lordship of Ireland on Henry II)—­and his subsequent “storying” of it in his narratives about the conquest of Ireland128—­“permanently reshaped the story, the memory, the his­ tory of the Anglo-­Norman-­Angevin acquisition of the dominion of Ireland, and [Gerald] did it so successfully that all sides in the subsequent centuries looked to Adrian IV’s Laudabiliter as the effective authorization for the establishment of Anglo-­Norman rule in the island.”129 Indeed, according to Duggan, “It is unlikely that any more would have been heard of this piece of documentary ephemera, had [Gerald] not refashioned it to become the centerpiece of his Vaticinalis Historia. . . . ​I nserted into no fewer than three of his works, . . . ​ Gerald’s version of Laudabiliter was seen and read (and copied and quoted) by numerous generations of the po­liti­cally active on both sides of the Irish Sea, while the ­actual documents which had confirmed King Henry’s dominion lan­ guished in the relative oblivion of the Exchequer’s Black Book.”130 In highlighting the importance of narrative in the shaping of the historical rec­ord, Duggan’s penetrating analy­sis of Gerald’s use of Laudabiliter encourages us to think beyond the question of w ­ hether or not using scripta made narratives

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more “true.” Yes, t­ hose scripta could work as truth-­claims (Howden’s narrative about St. Andrews, for example, could easily be read as an exercise in forensic rhe­toric that made a case for John the Scot, whose narratio was made probabilis by its use of documentary testimonium and by its use of correct chronological order). And yes, sometimes ­those truth-­claims ­were spurious (the ­Battle Abbey Chronicle’s forgery of its foundation charter is prob­ably the most famous histo­ riographical forgery from the Age of the Angevins).131 But ­these ­were not just rhetorical gestures. By quoting scripta—by offering them “aid and assistance”—­ history-­writers kept them in circulation; they kept circulating them. And if Roger of Howden quoted the letter Cum litteras deliberately in order that it not be for­ gotten, and Gerald of Wales quoted Laudabiliter to make sure that it was re­ membered in a very par­tic­u ­lar way, this suggests that documentary quotation played a broad cultural role as well as offering specific rhetorical effects. As Jef­ frey K. Olick has argued, “mnemonic products” such as scripta only ever “gain their real­ity . . . ​by being used, interpreted, reproduced or changed.”132 The ques­ tion this book needs to take up now, therefore, is how we should characterize the re-­use of documents in history-­writing—­and what the cultural implications of that reuse ­were.

chapter 2

Documentary Quotation

The Age of the Angevins was a compilatory age, and its history-­writers belonged to a compilatory culture. As Neil Hathaway argued some time ago, “Compilations may not have been the sole activity of intellectuals in the [High] ­Middle Ages but they w ­ ere the foundation and heart of the rest of university education and professional, administrative pursuits.”1 The rhetorical princi­ples of imitatio and aemulatio w ­ ere fundamental to how high-­medieval writers composed all sorts of texts, “literary” and “pragmatic” alike.2 Scholastic commentators established their auctoritas on the basis of their skillful compilation, and subsequent rewriting, of other texts.3 High-­medieval authors quoted patristic and classical texts to add rhe­ torical color to their sentences.4 Charter scribes, chancery clerks, and letter-­writers lifted formulas from formularies and letter collections. Rewriting what someone had already read, excerpted, or collected was one of the defining characteristics—if not the defining characteristic—of high-­medieval textual culture. Given that so many Angevin history-­writers ­were highly educated admin­ istrators, it is hardly surprising that compilation was the “foundation and heart” of history-­writing too. As Marek Thue Kretschmer has explained, “Medieval his­ toriography largely consisted in combining (compiling) and changing (adapt­ ing, rewriting, abbreviating, paraphrasing, epitomizing ­etc.) already existing sources.”5 This is especially true of historiography written in l­ ater twelfth-­century ­England. As well as compiling and emplotting scripta in the ways I explored in Chapter 1, all of the Latinate history-­writers who feature in this book w ­ ere com­ pilers in a broader sense. Ralph de Diceto prefaced the chronicle of his own times with a “summary (abbreviatio) of chronicles, carefully excerpted (excerpta) from dif­fer­ent codices,”6 which was almost as long as the chronicle Diceto had composed himself. As well as writing a Chronica (which begins with the acces­ sion of Henry I and focuses mainly on the history of Christ Church Cathedral

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Priory), Gervase of Canterbury also produced a compilation of the deeds of the kings of Britain,7 which he called Exceptiones brevissimae de numero et gestis regum Britanniae (Very Brief Excerpts about the Number and Deeds of the Kings of Britain).8 Similarly, Roger of Howden began his Chronica by compiling ma­ terial that he had “extracted” (edita) from the Historia post Bedam, a text that someone e­ lse, in turn, had compiled from Simeon of Durham’s and Henry of Huntingdon’s histories.9 And even the parts of the Chronica that Howden wrote himself w ­ ere based on his ­earlier Gesta, which, as his material about St. Andrews so clearly shows,10 he had augmented, reordered, and synthesized as he rewrote ­ iddle Ages, Angevin history-­writers it.11 Like so many other writers in the High M ­were fully engaged in what Bernard Cerquiligni called “la réécriture incessante à laquelle est soumise la textualité médiévale,”12 both when they ­were rewriting histories and when they w ­ ere recompiling scripta. In the Age of the Angevins, therefore, historiographical compilation was a normative historiographical practice, and it was far from being the slightly sus­ pect activity that it would become in early modernity and beyond. (The sixteenth-­ century antiquarian John Leland, for example, thought Howden was “in many ways a laudable man,” but condemned him for his plagiarism: “­eager for glory,” said Leland, Howden had “avidly pilfered” [strenue compilauit] Simeon of Dur­ ham’s “book-­boxes,” passing off Simeon’s words for his own.)13 Compilation, rather, was a “conscious creative choice,” and when Gervase of Canterbury dis­ avowed authorship altogether in his Chronica by claiming that he wished “to compile rather than write,” he was presenting that move as a positive, even mor­ ally virtuous, decision.14 History-­writers’ compilation of ­earlier histories is fi­nally attracting the attention it deserves.15 And it is fi­nally being considered as a le­ gitimate and creative rather than derivative and unimaginative practice.16 For the most part, this attention has been stimulated by the so-­called New Philology,17 whose adherents (such as Cerquiligni) argue that copied texts are never just cop­ ies but are also always originals and that copying a text was always an act of au­ thorship. In this view, copying a scriptum into a chronicle was an original authorial intervention.18 From the point of view of this book, the g­ reat advantage of t­ hese new perspectives on compilation is that scholars have now done some serious thinking about the relationship between texts that compile and texts that are compiled, or between compilatory reproductions and the “original” texts that they draw from. And that thinking breaks with the tradition of approaching his­ tories that quote scripta as doubly divided texts, carved up first on the plane of contiguity between narrative and “rec­ord” (or scripta) and then split along the plane of repre­sen­ta­tion between historiographical reproductions of scripta



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and “original” witnesses to them. My aim h ­ ere is not to restore documentary history-­writing to some putatively pristine unity. Rather, I want to approach that history-­writing in a manner more faithful to the meaningful ambiguity of its intertextuality. As Gian Biago Conte has argued regarding poetic imitation, history-­writers’ use of scripta should be studied in terms of “texts and the struc­ turing of texts” rather than as “a hunt for sources for ‘Quellenforschung.’ ”19 Conte’s maxim serves as a rallying cry h ­ ere b­ ecause, as I argued in the previous chapter, by embedding scripta in their narratives, history-­writers used t­ hose scripta to tell stories that they had emplotted and to tell stories that the scripta themselves did not necessarily tell. Chroniclers arranged scripta “into a hierarchy of signifi­ cance,” as Hayden White might put it, by assigning them “dif­fer­ent functions as story ele­ments in such a way as to disclose the coherence of a w ­ hole set of events considered as a comprehensible pro­cess with a beginning, m ­ iddle and end.”20 In other words, chroniclers created new—­and original—­stories by reusing and re-­ presenting the documentary material of the past. This means that on the one hand history-­writers preserved scripta by giving them archival “aid and assistance”: ­these writers gave the scripta a chance of survival that they had ­little hope of on their own. But that assistance came at a price: historians could use scripta to tell stories that they themselves had crafted, even if t­ hose scripta had originally been created to ad­ dress their own, potentially very dif­fer­ent stories to audiences in the ­future. All this being said, however, I want to question w ­ hether the notion of histo­ riographical rewriting is the most useful way of thinking about the documentary practices I am exploring in this book. If it is one ­thing to claim that history-­ writers ­were engaged in rewriting when they reused other histories, it is another to claim that reproducing scripta also made them rewriters. Kretschmer argues that historiographical rewriters performed a “conscious creative act” when they com­ piled their histories.21 But does reproducing a scriptum in a chronicle ­really amount to rewriting it: does it ­really amount to entirely overwriting that scriptum’s rhe­toric with that of the chronicle? In this chapter I want to think about how best to understand the compilatory practices of Angevin history-­writers. I ­will do so by thinking both in terms of textual practices and rhe­toric and in terms of the wider cultural purposes and consequences of historiographical quotation.

Rewriting and Reframing It is certainly true that when a history-­writer reproduced a scriptum in his his­ tory, he was subordinating that text to a new perspective, a new point of view,

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and a new purpose. As Meir Sternberg has demonstrated (in work that reveals the many advantages of reading supposedly nonliterary texts in literary ways),22 texts that quote other texts interfere with ­those other texts. According to Stern­ berg, no ­matter how direct or accurate any given quotation may be, “to quote is to mediate and to mediate is to interfere.”23 This would be true even if a text ­were reproduced in identical words in another discourse: “even if the original could be copied down to the last detail—­its transplanting and framing in a new envi­ ronment would impose on it a new mode of existence . . . ​a communicative sub­ ordination of the part to the ­whole that encloses it.”24 Sternberg’s analy­sis of quotation suggests that history-­writers’ scripta ­were not simply derivative texts, which is how traditional diplomatic scholarship might view them. Yet neither does Sternberg’s analy­sis suggest that quoted scripta entirely lose their identity as in­de­pen­dent texts, which is what the notion of rewriting tends to imply. Rather, Stenberg demonstrates that quoted texts are ambiguous texts, belonging si­mul­ ta­neously to two dif­f er­ent discourses, each with its own perspective and purposes and whose precise relationship is “only contingently resolvable.”25 A quoted text was not the same text as the original.26 But nor was it entirely dif­fer­ent. A text that quoted—­reframed—­another did not absorb it completely, even if it gave it a “new mode of existence” when it did so. Sternberg’s model of quotation-­a s-­reframing offers a power­f ul model for thinking about history-­writers’ use of scripta, b­ ecause it offers a ­middle way between the poles of “conscious creative” rewriting and slavish textual repro­ duction. I want to illustrate the usefulness of Sternberg’s idea of reframing ­here by looking closely at one par­tic­u ­lar work of late twelfth-­century history-­ writing, namely William FitzStephen’s Vita of Thomas Becket, which he wrote in the early 1170s. In the Vita, FitzStephen quotes the complete text of seven of Becket’s and his adversaries’ letters in direct discourse (Anne Duggan has shown that the Vita was familiar with thirty-­one o­ thers).27 The ambiguity that Sternberg attributes to quoted discourse is not so much evident in the nar­ rative’s ­handling of the letters as in t­hose letters’ codicology. For the codex containing the Vita, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 287 (hereafter D),28 does not fully incorporate the letters that it quotes. Instead, t­hose letters feature on small, loose pieces of parchment, which the scribe inserted between the leaves of the narrative that they illustrated, along with symbols informing the reader (or a ­future scribe) where exactly in the narrative ­those letters be­ longed.29 The letters are transcribed in the same hand as the narrative. But al­ though the scribe clearly inserted the letters in the codex ­a fter transcribing the narrative, the idea of including the letters was no afterthought: the narrative



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anticipates their presence by including stock phrases that medieval authors used to introduce other texts (such as “[N.] scripsit in hec verba”).30 As Mary Cheney has suggested, the textual history of FitzStephen’s Vita “pre­sents many puzzles,”31 and this manuscript is not a fair copy. But as Cheney has also noted, some of the letters are found in dif­fer­ent places in other manuscripts of Fitz­ Stephen’s Vita. Cheney concludes from this that the letters ­were “clearly not in ­ ere also position in D’s exemplar” e­ ither.32 This could mean that the letters w transcribed onto loose leaves in D’s exemplar but w ­ ere unavailable to the scribe when he copied the Douce manuscript of the Vita. At some point they had been separated from that manuscript. Or it could mean that t­ hose letters belonged to an unbound collection of documents that ­were associated with the exemplar of the Vita but not irrevocably bound to it. ­Either way, however, someone at some point had separated the letters from the Vita. Letters and narrative ­were closely associated with one another in the textual history of FitzStephen’s Vita. But they ­were not indissolubly joined:33 notwithstanding the similarities between epistolary and narrative discourses that I explored in the previous chapter, MS D made very tangible the distinction between ­those two discourses. MS D thus manifests, in a peculiarly material way, the problematic auton­ omy of quoted discourse. Quotation always involves reproducing a text in such a way that “what is reproduced forms an integral part of some work and can be easily detached from the new ­whole in which it is incorporated. . . . ​It is some­ thing which the new structure can never completely absorb . . . ​[and it is] not so much separate as separable.”34 The Douce manuscript depends on the text of the letters to make its rhetorical point, but FitzStephen had no guarantee that that they would remain ­housed within the new framework he had given them. So, while in one sense FitzStephen’s narrative imposed Sternberg’s “new mode of ex­ istence” on the letters it so loosely ­housed, ­those letters remained nevertheless wholly in­de­pen­dent of that narrative. The ambiguity of ­these quoted letters’ status, I suggest, is what gave the letters their power in the first place. FitzSte­ phen (or his scribe) had no real interest in diminishing the impression they gave of textual autonomy b­ ecause textual autonomy was what made them power­ful. It made the letters resemble relics—­touch-­relics—­embedded within a narra­ tive about them.35 And by reframing rather than rewriting them—by emphasiz­ ing their status as in­de­pen­dent texts—­the Vita gave them new meaning as components of Becket’s cult. All the while, however, they left their old meaning as transactions between Becket and his friends as enemies intact. When FitzStephen and writers like him reframed a scriptum as (or in) his­ tory, therefore, they drew attention to that scriptum’s autonomy and marked it

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out as potentially separable from their own text. The Douce manuscript strikingly embodies that separability. But FitzStephen’s manuscript is not just a codicologi­ cal curiosity. Other history-­writers in this period w ­ ere similarly attuned to the potentially rather loose association that existed between the narratives that they composed and the scripta that they quoted. Sometimes, in fact, history-­writers seem to be attuned to the strategic possibilities of the potential separability of scripta from the histories that contained them. When Roger of Howden rec­ords the capture of Richard I at the hands of the German emperor Henry VI (d. 1197) in his Chronica, for example, he produces a Rus­sian doll–­like piece of writing, whose canny use of quotation gestures ­toward the shocking outlandishness of the episode it related and fully exploits the autonomy of quoted discourse. How­ den’s own narrative of Richard’s capture is fairly straightforward and fairly minimalistic: he relates Richard’s departure from the Holy Land,36 his shipwreck on his journey home,37 and fi­nally the fact of his capture, briefly noting that the servants of the duke of Austria had found Richard “sleeping in some hovel and captured him” (having first extracted information about his whereabouts from his one remaining companion).38 In order to learn the full story of Richard’s cap­ tivity, however, Howden makes his readers rely on the text of two letters that he goes on to quote. The first of t­ hese was a letter that Henry VI had sent to Philip Augustus. That letter tells a much more detailed story about how the emperor came to have Richard “in his power.”39 The second letter had been sent by Wal­ ter de Coutances to Hugh du Puiset, his co-­justiciar in ­England (and prince-­ bishop of Durham, d. 1195), to tell him the bad news about Richard. In his letter, Coutances announces that “­things had happened for the king that would not profit the kingdom or the king’s subjects,”40 and he summons Puiset to a coun­ cil to discuss what had happened. But he does not, in fact, enumerate exactly what t­ hose “­things [that] had happened” w ­ ere. Coutances laments that “we are compelled to say that which we would have preferred not to,”41 but he only gets as far as saying that “I have de­cided to send over to you a transcript of the German emperor’s letter—­which he sent to the king of the French about the capture of our lord the king of ­England—­folded up (involutum) in this our page before you.”42 Neither Howden nor Coutances, it seems, ­really wants to address Richard’s capture directly: Howden’s narrative is very sparse, and even Coutances mentions only the emperor’s letter about the m ­ atter. He does not himself even reproduce that letter’s text, preferring instead to “fold up” a copy of it within his own. It is as if the news Coutances was dealing with, which involved a violation of the norms of diplomacy (and a bouleversement of the right order of the world), is traumatic to the point of being taboo.43 But by sending a transcript of the em­



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peror’s “original” announcement along with his own letter—by quoting it, in a way—­Coutances avoids having to announce the capture himself. Instead, he makes Henry VI’s letter do that work for him. Coutances’s use of “quotation,” however—­and Howden’s use of quotation ­after him—is more than just a trick that t­ hese writers used to distance themselves from the uncomfortable truths the emperor’s letter told. By allowing Puiset to inspect a copy of the emperor’s letter, the truth of the ­matter would have been plain for the bishop to see. Given the po­liti­cal atmosphere of rumor and coun­ terrumor that characterized the early 1190s in Western Eu­rope,44 conveying the original and written basis of the information he was sharing was an essential move, b­ ecause, as Howden himself seems to imply, written information was more reliable than rumor.45 But it was also a smart move on Coutances’s part to con­ vey Henry’s words in their original form without Coutances’s words to intro­ duce them, b­ ecause, in that way Henry’s malice would be laid bare. (Henry writes, for example, of the “most plentiful joy” that the news of the capture of this “­enemy of our empire and turbator of [Philip’s] kingdom” would surely bring him.)46 Fi­ nally, by maintaining the physical separation of the emperor’s letter, while as­ sociating it (folding it up) with his own, Coutances could also attempt to direct his addressee’s response to Henry’s letter. “­There is no need for your tears,” he urges Puiset from his loftily detached position, “but for your courage; for the at­ tacks of fortune are to be met not with lamentations but, with sorrow sup­ pressed, to be treated as a test of character.”47 Howden thus reframed a scriptum that itself had reframed another. He did so partly, it seems, for strategic reasons: by revealing, like FitzStephen’s scribe, the material basis of his story, he was able to shape his readers’ understanding of what he was telling them. Reproducing the emperor’s letter placed the emperor’s own malicious words before the eyes of his readers. Reproducing the letter that had originally reframed the emperor’s letter, meanwhile, enabled him to redirect its author’s exhortations for courage ­toward his own readers. The example of Howden’s and Coutances’s folding up of the emperor’s letter and the example of FitzStephen’s MS D with its contingently quoted correspon­ dence reveal some of the potential advantages of the separability of quoted dis­ course. But not ­ every history-­ writer who quoted scripta thought that that separability was such a good ­thing. In Herbert of Bosham’s Historia of Becket, for example, Bosham takes extreme mea­sures to make his narrative seem insepa­ rable from the scripta it quotes. Unlike FitzStephen, Bosham did not quote any of the letters exchanged between Becket and his adversaries, directing his readers ­toward Alan of Tewkesbury’s collection instead.48 But ­there was one notable

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exception to Bosham’s documentary reticence, one scriptum that he emphatically did not suggest his readers should go and find elsewhere. Bosham appended a copy of the Constitutions of Clarendon to his Historia, and he did every­thing he could to make his readers consider it an integral part of his work. For Bosham, the “deadly chirograph” on which the Constitutions ­were inscribed was the very materia dissensionis between Becket and Henry II: it was the “first and final cause of all chaos and conflict”—­“the root of all evil.”49 The scriptura is a reference point to which Bosham repeatedly returns; it is central to his story. So Bosham takes the very unusual step of insisting that anyone transcribing his “history-­book” (volumen historicum) in the f­ uture should always also copy that scriptum at its end.50 Bosham’s solution to the potential separability of quoted discourse is to insist vociferously on the integrity of texts and the unifying power of authorial intention. Despite the fact that Bosham was interfering with the Constitu­ tions of Clarendon himself by reframing them, he was terrified by the prospect that other writers might do the same t­ hing to his own Historia in the f­ uture. He was especially worried, he said, by the “many” writers apparently out ­there, “who forge something new from something old—­their own [work] from someone else’s—­lopping off the more necessary t­ hings as if they w ­ ere superfluous, and keeping the superfluous ­things as though they ­were more necessary.”51 Such writers, Bosham says, w ­ ere “corrupting (corrumpentes) the t­ hings they find in the original by mutilating [them], and by interpreting them according to their own understanding (iuxta sensum suum).”52 And rather than “following the meaning of the [original] author (mentem auctoris) in the author’s own words, they drag [­those words] round to their own meaning.”53 According to Bosham, to divide a text up, to truncate, augment, or recast it—or even to omit one of its scripta—­would be to wrench it away from the determining power of its au­ thor’s intentions. Bosham directly addresses ­these ­f uture readers that he feared so much: “If you, whoever you are, are able to put together (condere) a history book . . . ​write it. [But] do not lazily make your new one out of my old one, which I painstakingly worked on. . . . ​Get me to correct mine if you can. But if not, compose your new [book], leaving mine untouched (intactum).”54 Bosham then takes on the voice of an early-­medieval charter-­scribe, pronouncing anath­ ema on anyone who might alter his text in the ­future. “I  pray, and desire,” Bosham says, “and (if I dare) I prohibit in the name of the martyr himself any of this Historia’s readers to mutilate it or cut it short.”55 Bosham graciously allows posterity to make excerpts from his Historia in order to read them out in church on Becket’s feast day, but he repeatedly enjoins his readers not to “mu­ tilate” his work.56 Bosham had reframed the Constitutions of Clarendon by



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copying them and binding them to his own work. He refused, however, to allow his own work or its version of the Constitutions of Clarendon to be rewritten in the ­f uture. What, then, accounts for Bosham’s vociferous determination to keep scriptura and narrative together? Part of the answer seems to be that Bosham thought that the scriptura recording the Constitutions was a physical manifestation of evil, which both proved Becket’s sanctity and had to be con­ tained by it. (If FitzStephen’s letters ­were like relics, Bosham’s scriptura was like an antirelic.) Other letters from the tempus dissensionis, which Bosham did not reproduce, w ­ ere nothing more than illustrations of Becket’s travails, which his readers could peruse elsewhere, unguided by him.57 But when it came to material as volatile as the Constitutions of Clarendon, Bosham seems overcome by a quasi-­Platonic distrust of the autonomy of writing. It should not be left to go off by itself, he implies, unaided by some kind of interpretive framework to shape its reception.58 FitzStephen’s and Bosham’s Lives of Becket, and Howden’s and Coutanc­ es’s use of Henry VI’s letter, reveal si­mul­ta­neously the power of documen­ tary quotation and its limitations. Quoting scripta meant that ­those scripta became ele­ments in stories that FitzStephen and Bosham and Howden them­ selves had emplotted; in FitzStephen’s case, however, they also became memorial objects that functioned as part of a living cult. The stories that Fitz­ Stephen and Bosham told about Becket gave ­those scripta an interpretive framework that they lacked as stand-­a lone written artifacts. But ­because ­those scripta maintained something of their former autonomy even when such writ­ ers as FitzStephen and Bosham reframed them in their narratives, ­there was no guarantee that the framing that ­those writers gave them would endure. Quoted scripta ­were detachable from the narrative frameworks that enclosed them: innumerable other pos­si­ble frameworks existed to give ­those scripta new lives and dif­f er­ent meanings in the f­ uture. What ­these writers did not do, therefore, was wholly rewrite the scripta they quoted. The texts that they had fashioned from the scripta of the past may well have been the product of a “conscious creative act,” as Marek Kretschmer puts it, but ­those texts could never be en­ tirely their own.

Reframing and Remediation So far in this chapter, and indeed so far in this book, I have mainly been think­ ing about the textual mechanics of documentary quotation. But documentary

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quotation is not a narrowly textual prob­lem. FitzStephen’s use of letters from the Becket conflict places him in the vanguard of efforts to celebrate and promote Becket’s cult, which is one of the most striking social phenomena of the Eu­ro­pean High M ­ iddle Ages. Meanwhile, the examples of Gerald of Wales’s multiple quotations of the papal bull Laudabiliter and Roger of Howden’s use (or non­ use) of the scripta from the St. Andrews dispute (both of which I explored in the previous chapter) show that documentary quotation potentially had po­liti­cal and social consequences as well as textual ones. Scripta such as Laudabiliter maintained something of their autonomy when they ­were quoted: they re­ tained their identities as in­de­pen­dent and authoritative written objects when history-­writers reframed them, which meant that they could be reused or rede­ ployed for other purposes in the f­ uture. (To return to my opening example in Chapter 1, Edward I was able to use a chronicle to retrieve written proof of his right to rule Scotland precisely ­because the chronicler who originally reproduced the Treaty of Falaise reframed and embedded it within his narrative rather than rewriting it as narrative.) On the other hand, the scripta that Angevin histori­ ans quoted lost something of their autonomy once their own perspectives had been subordinated to that of the narrative into which chroniclers inserted them. But ­because narrative is such a power­ful way of giving meaning to the utterances of the past, and b­ ecause giving meaning to the past is such a power­ful way of mak­ ing it memorable, scripta had much to gain from historical narrative’s “aid and assistance.” It mattered a g­ reat deal which scripta would receive that aid and which would languish—­unglossed, unexplained, and forgotten—in the archive. As Anne Duggan says, Gerald’s reframing of Laudabiliter within a prophetic nar­ rative about Angevin rule over Ireland “permanently reshaped the story, the memory, the history of the Anglo-­Norman-­A ngevin acquisition of the domin­ ion of Ireland,” and it continued to do so long a­ fter the Age of the Angevins. At this point, therefore, I want to broaden my focus in order to think about the cultural rather than just the textual dynamics of documentary reframing. In par­tic­u­lar, I want to look more closely at the connections between the stories that history-­writers made scripta tell and the memory that Duggan, quite rightly, says that they s­ haped. And, while instinct might tell us that story, history, and mem­ ory are all somehow related, the perspectives of the field of cultural memory stud­ ies insist on the deep connections between ­those phenomena. Cultural memory studies would argue, for example, that when FitzStephen and Bosham reframed scripta in their narratives, they w ­ ere not mechanically reproducing texts but mak­ ing cultural interventions with far-­reaching implications. According to Jan Assmann, one of the leading theorists of cultural memory, the texts that consti­



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tute a given society’s cultural memory are always “constituted on the basis of prior communication.” ­These “cultural texts,” as Assmann calls them, are messages that are “repeated, remembered, recovered, and referred to.”59 Unlike Herbert of Bosham, who insisted on the determining power of the original mens auctoris, Assmann argues that it is not the original speaker of a message who generates a cultural text “but the repeater—­the messenger and the commentator.”60 It was not Becket who created a cultural text when he wrote his letters, therefore, but FitzStephen and other l­ ater users of t­ hose letters; it was not Henry VI but Walter de Coutances and Roger of Howden who worked to have the story of Richard’s capture remembered. The precise textual relationship between an original scriptum and its reproduction—­whether it retains its autonomy or surrenders it to a new framework, w ­ hether it is original or derivative—is thus less impor­tant, Assmann seems to suggest, than the act of reproduction itself. Other pioneers in cultural memory studies make the same point. According to Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, for example, “Cultural memory relies on . . . ​repurposing, that is, taking . . . ​a memory-­matter . . . ​from one medium and re-­using it in another. In this pro­cess, memorial media borrow from, incorporate, absorb, critique and re­ fashion e­ arlier memorial media.”61 History-­writing is just the sort of memorial medium that Erll and Rigney have in mind. In reframing scripta, history-­writing repurposes them (even if it never quite “absorbs” them). The scripta that history-­ writers repurposed—­Becket’s letters, the Constitutions of Clarendon—­are all “­earlier memorial media,” which history-­writers put to new use. Bosham repur­ poses the Constitutions of Clarendon by turning a set of injunctions produced in order to do one ­thing (to assert the limits of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the reach of royal power) into a “cultural text,” which was never to be forgotten by ­those who opposed that vision of politics. FitzStephen repurposes Becket’s let­ ters by using them as evidence for Becket’s sanctity. Reframed by FitzStephen and Bosham, t­ hese scripta ­were to be remembered as the cause of a martyrdom. They w ­ ere not just another chapter in administrative history, dutifully repro­ duced for the sake of posterity. Becket’s Lives deal with exceptional material, of course, and his letters are exceptional texts. They ­were, or they became, devotional instruments, which worked in ways quite distinct from the kind of scripta that Howden and Diceto, and chroniclers like them, reproduced in their chronicles. Yet I would argue that even t­ hese secular chroniclers w ­ ere at work repurposing memory m ­ atters when they reframed scripta within their narratives. In the rest of this chapter I want to sketch out how this repurposing worked, and I want to show how the reme­ diating dynamics that cultural memory studies have identified intersected in

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these chronicles with the medieval theory, practice, and art of memory. In ­doing this, I want to argue that history-­writers aimed not to reduplicate the tex­ tual residue of the past when they reframed scripta but rather to promote the “ac­ tive engagement with the past” that Erll and Rigney identified with memorial remediation. When Angevin historians reframed scripta, that is, it was a “per­ formative, rather than . . . ​reproductive” gesture.62 The connections between documentary quotation and memory are evident, I argue, in the theoretical reflections that Angevin historians offered about the role of scripta in their histories. Although Roger of Howden never offered any commentary on his methods, Ralph de Diceto and Gervase of Canterbury ­were two of the most theoretically aware historians of the period. They offered lengthy reflections on their historiographical practices. And although their re­ flections on the role of historiographical scripta differ in their details, they share some striking similarities. The first is that both Diceto and Gervase con­ nect the reproduction of scripta with the memory, and with the visual me­ chanics of the memory in par­tic­u­lar. Diceto and Gervase suggested, in other words, that the scripta that they reproduced ­were meant to work on their read­ ers’ memories—­and that they did so by appealing to their readers’ eyes. The sec­ ond similarity between Gervase and Diceto is that both of them concede that reframing scripta to have them remembered might lead to their own histories being rewritten somehow in the ­f uture. But rather than being worried about that potential rewriting, as Herbert of Bosham had been, Diceto and Gervase seem actively to encourage it. That encouragement leads to the third similarity between their metahistorical commentaries: the rewriting Gervase and Diceto encouraged seems intended to help their readers learn about the past and to engage with it. That learning about and engagement with the past was in­ tended to help readers to remember the past. Indeed, in the theory of memory that Gervase and Diceto sketched out, reading, learning, and remembering ­were indissolubly linked pro­cesses. I want to turn now to Gervase of Canterbury’s comments about the scripta he reframes in his Chronica and the effect he says that they would have on his readers’ memory. The close relationship between memory and ­these scripta is al­ ready implicit in the word—­munimenta—­that he uses to refer to them. (That word derives from the Indo-­European root men, “which expresses one of the fun­ damental functions of the mind, memory.”)63 But Gervase also invokes his reader’s memory explic­itly. He does this in a kind of rhetorical insinuatio, in which he apologizes to his readers for the presence of so many munimenta in his account of Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury’s “persecution” of the cathedral



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priory.64 Gervase explains that he had had to include t­ hose munimenta so that his readers would see them and remember them. Once his readers had “inspected” (inspicere) the munimenta, he said, t­ hose scripta could then be “stored away in the memory’s strong-­box (in arca memoriae),” and they could be redeployed, if necessary, at some point in the ­f uture.65 For Gervase, by being able to see (or rather to “inspect”) the munimenta that he had framed within his narrative, his readers would be able to commit them to memory. Gervase’s use of the term arca memoriae ­here betrays his debts to the medieval theory of the memory as per­ fected by Hugh of St. Victor, whose work on history-­writing Gervase appears to have known. Hugh’s theory of memory was itself indebted to the ancient and medieval understanding of memory as a fundamentally visual phenomenon: that which was remembered, according to this understanding, was e­ ither apprehended by the eyes or translated into memorable images by the mind.66 As Mary Car­ ruthers explains, the visual coding that was fundamental to medieval memory technology “allows the memory to be or­ga­nized securely for accurate recollec­ tion.” This recollection “permits not just reduplication of the original material, but sorting, analy­sis, and mixing as well—­genuine learning, in short, rather than ­simple repetition.”67 So, as well as making the munimenta easily available for “ac­ curate recollection,” Gervase hoped that they would allow his readers to “genu­ inely learn” about the rights of Christ Church as they remembered them.68 (This was learning of a very practical kind: if Gervase’s readers ­were to read and remem­ ber the munimenta, Gervase says, they would “know what remedy to apply to which affliction” and “know the appropriate and exemplary response . . . ​to which objections” should they arise in the ­future.)69 Gervase thus considered reading history to be a transformative pro­cess, whereby readers would see texts, such as Christ Church’s munimenta, before recategorizing them and remembering so that they could redeploy them l­ ater. Strikingly, moreover, Gervase suggests that this pro­cess meant that the structure of his chronicle could be changed, if nec­ essary, in the f­ uture. As he explains, “I have inserted many letters—­which is un­ usual in chronicles—so that, once they have been examined and stowed in the memory’s chest, the narrative might be abbreviated, and it might be more pre­ cisely and profitably understood.” 70 The extensive commentary that Gervase’s narrative offered the munimenta was dispensable, therefore, once they had been correctly committed to memory. But they could not be remembered properly without it. In Gervase’s system, scripta, narrative, and memory each work to reinforce one another. The original munimenta, he tells his readers, w ­ ere stored in the church of the Holy Trinity at Christ Church;71 his readers could access

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the originals if they wanted to. But, locked in the muniment room at Christ Church, the originals lacked the interpretive framework that Gervase’s nar­ rative gave them. They lacked meaning, in other words, so they risked being forgotten; they risked “dis­appear[ing], aging and being left to gather dust,” like the other “thinglike pieces of writing” that make up literate memory cultures.72 Through the “sorting, analy­sis and mixing” that Gervase encourages and the didactic commentary he offers on the munimenta, he transfers them from fore­ ground to background, latency to presence—­“ from storage memory to func­ tional memory,”73 as Jan Assmann puts it. Gervase thus articulates in his Chronica what the Douce manuscript of FitzStephen’s Vita physically em­ bodied and what Herbert of Bosham so feared. If writing w ­ ere to be remem­ bered, it had to be reproduced elsewhere anew. And ideally it should be embedded within a new framework of interpretation at the same time, which itself was open to further rewritings and remediations in the ­f uture. Ralph de Diceto does not address ­these ­matters as directly as Gervase did. But Diceto was as concerned as Gervase was to actively engage his readers with the past he recorded—­and to have them remember the scripta that he reframed in his narrative. Like Gervase, Diceto connects the memory with the sight. This is evident from the innovative system of marginal images (or signa) that he de­ ployed in his chronicles in order to highlight twelve discrete historical subjects that t­ hose chronicles, among o­ thers, dealt with (­these subjects include “contro­ versies between regnum et sacerdotium,” for example, and the “dissensio that oc­ curred between king Henry II and his three sons”).74 Diceto’s signa, which are reproduced in Figure 1, are clearly related to the finding aids that can be found in many manuscripts from the ­later twelfth c­ entury and that, as Richard and Mary Rouse have shown, revolutionized reading practices in this period.75 But according to Diceto himself, ­these images function first of all as mnemonics: he says that he added the images to the annals ­because they ­were so useful for “stim­ ulating (excitandam) the memory.”76 Diceto’s use of t­ hese visual mnemonics put him at the cutting edge of con­ temporary memory technology.77 He had prob­ably learned the technique in Paris from Hugh of St. Victor,78 the foremost mnemotechnician of the age, whose work on memory and history—­the Chronicon—­Diceto partly quoted in the preface to his Abbreviationes chronicorum.79 Hugh’s teaching on memory seems to have influenced Diceto’s use of visual signa in two ways. First of all, the idea of a vis­i­ ble system of classification seems to be indebted to Hugh’s emphasis on the rela­ tionship between seeing and remembering: the distinctive appearance of individual manuscript pages, Hugh taught, could help their readers remember

Figure 1. ​Ralph de Diceto’s list of mnemonics, from his Abbreviationes chronicorum. London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8, fol. 1v. Reproduced with permission.

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the information they contained;80 if a reader w ­ ere to remember where on a page certain words ­were written, they w ­ ere more likely to be able to recall them in the ­future. The second way that Hugh seems to have influenced Diceto is perhaps more profound. The very idea of classifying knowledge was essentially a Victo­ rine one:81 according to the part of Hugh’s Chronicon that Diceto quoted, “The content of wisdom’s store-­house (thesaurus, archa), which is the memory, must be classified according to a definite scheme” (the paraphrase of Hugh is that of Mary Carruthers).82 “Dispose and separate each single ­thing into its own place,” says Hugh, “so that you may know what has been placed h ­ ere and what t­ here. Confusion is the m ­ other of ignorance and forgetfulness, but orderly arrangement illuminates the intelligence and secures memory.”83 Like a money-­changer who keeps his dif­fer­ent coins in purses subdivided into many dif­fer­ent compartments, students should arrange what they learn into compartments: “Having sorted the coins and separated out each type of money in turn, the [money-­changer] puts them all to be kept in their proper places, so that the distinctiveness of his com­ partments may keep the assortment of his materials from getting mixed up, just as it supports their separation. . . . ​His ready hand without faltering follows wher­ ever the commanding nod of a customer has caused it to extend, and quickly, without delay, it brings into the open, separately and without confusion, every­ thing that he ­either may have wanted to receive or promised to give out.”84 By dividing up and classifying the historical knowledge that his histories contained, therefore, Diceto attempted to help his readers learn about it and recall it in the ­future. The real radicalism of the system of historiographical reading and remem­ bering that Diceto set out, however, lies in the f­ uture that his signa mapped out for his own work. Diceto’s symbols did not only draw attention to the dif­fer­ent kinds of knowledge that they contained. They also signaled to his readers how they themselves might reconfigure that knowledge at some ­later moment. His signa helped his readers, in effect, to recompose its ele­ments, to reframe and re­ write them.85 By marking up his chronicle as he did, that is, Diceto made it di­ visible and he made it rewritable.86 He made it quotable, both in the modern and medieval senses of that word (quotare, as Mary Carruthers explains, could mean in the M ­ iddle Ages “ ‘to number’ a book, dividing a longer text into numbered subdivisions, such as chapters”).87 As with manuscript finding aids, which—as the Rouses have shown—­enabled preachers to “create new structures” from au­ thoritative texts “when responding to the needs of preaching,”88 Diceto also handed over to his readers a good deal of scope to “create new structures” when they read his history. It was almost as if he was inviting t­ hose readers to reframe,



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rearrange, or rewrite parts of his history in the f­ uture. Diceto’s chronicles, like Howden’s and Gervase’s chronicles, w ­ ere ordered and governed strictly by chron­ ological order; when they reframed scripta in their narratives, they used that order to give them meaning. But when Diceto marked up his text with his mne­ monics, he invited his readers to do something radically dif­fer­ent. That is, he encouraged his readers to read in a nonlinear way, in the manner of late twelfth-­ century scholastics. In fact, like t­ hose scholastics, he invited his readers to re­ compose his text and to do so thematically as well as chronologically.89 So, for example, if some f­uture reader ­were to extract all the entries Diceto had de­ noted as being “about the dissensio between Henry and his sons” and to put them into chronological order, they would end up with a fairly concise history of the wars between the two kings.90 Or, if someone extracted all the notices “about the persecutions of the Church,” they would end up with something like a his­ tory of Christian persecution, which might resemble a short and condensed ver­ sion of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. Furthermore, the “quotability” of Diceto’s history extended to its scripta as well as its narrative.91 So if Diceto invited his readers to reconfigure his narrative, he also invited them to recompile his scripta. ­Were someone to extract all the entries that Diceto had marked up as asserting the “privileges of the Church of Canterbury,” they would end up with something looking a bit like a cartulary or perhaps a shorter version of the Epistolae Cantuarienses.92 If they ­were to extract all the notices marked as relating to Walter de Coutances, one of Diceto’s likely dedicatees, they would end up with something like a letter collection (which is exactly what the antiquarian John Bale originally thought t­ hose entries ­were when he first read them).93 Diceto’s signa provided his readers, therefore, with a pattern for repurpos­ ing its atomized contents, a blueprint for rebuilding his histories. But by providing this pattern for rewriting, Diceto was not encouraging a rewriting free-­for-­a ll. In fact, Diceto used his signa to exert control over f­uture rewritings of his text. Rewrite this, he seems to be saying, but not that; rewrite my work, by all means, but do it like this. Diceto’s stance, therefore, is interventionist and overtly didactic. If his readers ­were ­going to rewrite his chronicles, he would be the one to shape what they rewrote; he would be the one choosing what they would remember. His rewriters would not be the ones to remediate his text: that was the work of his own mnemonic commentary. By marking up and classifying his history in this way, then, Diceto offered a commentary on that history, which was far from being neutral. If he marked an entry in the reign of Henry II with the signum denoting “persecutions of the Church,” for example, he thereby bound it to a universal structure of Christian history that first occurred in the

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reign of Nero.94 (So what was Diceto saying about Henry II? Was he a new Nero, as Becket’s supporters had claimed?)95 Similarly, by assigning a special signum to entries “about the dissensio between Henry II and his three sons,” Diceto gives that category an almost universal and transhistorical quality—on a par with the persecutions of the Church.96 Diceto thus used his history to teach by providing a visual commentary for his annals and their scripta—­and encouraged learning by inviting his readers to “rewrite” them as they read. His signa provided his readers with visual and mem­ orable summae—­which his teacher Hugh of St.  Victor had defined as “the princi­ple[s] upon which the entire truth of the m ­ atter [rests]” and to which 97 “every­thing ­else is traced back.” By encouraging what Carruthers called “gen­ uine learning” about the past—by encouraging sorting, mixing, and analy­sis—­ Diceto also encouraged the active engagement with the past that Erll and Rigney associate so strongly with cultural memory. And he offered the “interpretation, the effort to reconstruct meaning,” that Jan Assmann has shown is so impor­tant to the way that literate cultures prevent written texts from being forgotten in the archive.98 Diceto’s signa and Gervase’s reflections on the visual nature of remem­ bering thus drive home the connection between textual reproduction and memory, of both an individual and a cultural sort. What we seem to be dealing with, more specifically, is the interplay between the passive and active dimensions of cultural memory. According to Aleida Assmann, the active dimension of cul­ tural memory “supports a collective identity” and is “built on a small number of normative and formative texts, places, persons and artefacts, and myths which are meant to be actively circulated and communicated in ever-­new pre­sen­ta­tions and per­for­mances.”99 The passive dimension of cultural memory, on the other hand—­“the store­house for cultural relicts [sic]” or the “archive”—­consists in the “storing of documents and artefacts of the past.”100 ­These documents and arti­ facts lack the normative status that would make them the foundations of collec­ tive identity, but they are nevertheless “deemed in­ter­est­ing or impor­tant enough to not let them vanish on the highway to total oblivion.”101 Although in the mod­ ern West “­these two functions of cultural memory have come to be more and more separated,” they are “not sealed against each other.”102 Rather, t­ here is a huge amount of interplay between canon and archive: memorial ­matter might be pulled from the archive and raised to canonical status. (This seems to be what Gervase is attempting when he reproduces Christ Church’s munimenta in his Chronica.)103 Equally, “ele­ments of the canon can also recede into the archive,” or they may be “estranged” from the canon and “reinterpreted by framing them with ele­ments of the archive.”104 It is “exactly this interdependence of the dif­fer­



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ent realms and functions that creates the dynamics of cultural memory and keeps its energy flowing,” Assmann suggests.105 And it is exactly this interdependence that history-­writers both describe and demonstrate when they reproduce the scripta of the past in their histories.

* * * Of course, ­these historians would not have understood their own practices in precisely the way that modern cultural memory studies might do ­today, and not all high-­medieval history-­writers shared the sophisticated theoretical framework that Diceto and Gervase w ­ ere using, e­ ither when they w ­ ere reading history or when they w ­ ere writing it. But it is worth stressing that the relationship among seeing, remembering, and engaging with the past that Diceto and Gervase sketch out w ­ ere not just m ­ atters of arcane historiographical theory in the Age of the Angevins. The con­temporary chancery practice of making inspeximus char­ ters, for example, also combined textual reproduction on the one hand with sight and with memory on the other; and inspeximus charters, like history-­writing that reproduced scripta, aimed at pulling ­those scripta from the archive. By way of conclusion to this chapter, I want to think a ­little bit more about inspeximus charters, b­ ecause they lay bare the social strategies by which textual reframing worked to embed the scripta of the past within cultural memory—­and b­ ecause they make so clear the connections between the high-­medieval theory of memory and its practice. Like Gervase in his account of his munimenta, in­ speximus charters foreground the verb inspicere, and as in Gervase’s account, ­those charters also aimed to reanimate the texts of the past by having audiences engage with them.106 When somebody made an inspeximus charter, he or she would renew a grant made by one of his or her pre­de­ces­sors by reproducing in a new charter, u­ nder a new protocol and in their own name, the exact words of the charter by which the grant was originally made. Inspeximuses appealed to the sight ­because they depended on the new donor having seen an old charter (which is why the grantor used the words inspeximus at the beginning of the new charter confirmation).107 The practice of confirming previous charters was an ancient one, but inspeximus charters insisted in a new way on repeating ex­ actly the text of an e­ arlier charter. The conjunction of visual proof and precise verbal reproduction that inspeximus charters required was very power­ful ­because it had the potential to remake—or to destroy—an older text. As the Chronicle of B ­ attle Abbey suggests, by only alluding to the existence of an ­earlier charter (by using the formula “sicut carta illa, vel illius N testatur”),108 any ­later

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charter “would seem to require the evidence (testimonium) of ­earlier (char­ ters).”109 But with the full recitation of the previous charter’s text, ­there is an assumption that the new charter supplants the old. The ­Battle Abbey chroni­ cler, reporting on Henry II’s inspection and recitation of the privilege granted to ­Battle Abbey by William I, attributes this view to Henry himself: “If the clause we avoid [i.e., sicut carta N testatur] ­were to have been put in the ­later charter,” argues Henry, “it would confer ­little without the presence of the ­earlier. But now, since in the ­later one no mention has been made of the original proto­ types (pre­ce­dentibus originalibus), this charter alone would be enough, even if all the o­ thers had been lost.”110 It is no coincidence then that Henry and the monks of ­Battle describe his maneuver not as a confirmatio of the charter but as a renovatio.111 In structural terms, this procedure amounts to the imposition of Sternberg’s “new mode of existence” on the contents of a previous charter,112 whose words w ­ ere reframed within a new structure. From the perspective of cultural memory, meanwhile, the inspeximus procedure represents a radical form of memorial repurposing. It gave the texts of the past new life by repeating their words elsewhere. The power of that new existence was such that far from merely replicating the text of the old discourse and making it do the same work as previously, the renewed discourse could potentially be used for purposes dia­ metrically opposed to what was originally intended.113 “Inspected” charters could thus gain their authority afresh—or lose it at once—­through the repeti­ tion of their contents. It seems unlikely that Gervase was directly influenced by the practice of making inspeximus charters when he described how his readers might commit the texts he reproduced to their memories, even if his Chronica, like an inspexi­ mus charter, repurposed memory ­matter by presenting its verbal form before the eyes of its audience. But it is nevertheless impor­tant to acknowledge that in the case of Gervase’s munimenta, just as in the case of inspeximus charters and Ralph de Diceto’s marked-up annals and scripta, the expectation was that t­ hose who reproduced scripta aimed at stimulating some kind of action on the part of their audiences. When Gervase reproduced scripta for his readers to “inspect” and when Diceto marked up his text for ­future recompositions, they ­were asking their readers to do something with ­those scripta and to remember them as they did it. When FitzStephen’s scribe reproduced Becket’s letters, he stimulated devotion to Becket’s cult by putting Becket’s writing into his readers’ hands. When Her­ bert of Bosham reproduced the Constitutions of Clarendon in his historia, he too demanded action: he wanted the world to “see and despise the cause first of the archbishop’s exile and ultimately of his death.”114 When Walter de Coutances



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“quoted” Henry VI’s letter about Richard I, he did so to demand his audience take heart rather than succumb to despair (“this is not time for your tears . . . ​but for your fortitude”). And when someone like Henry II “inspected” an old char­ ter and reused it in a new one, he too was demanding that his audience do some­ thing. He demanded that they stand witness to a memorial per­for­mance that re-formed the memory of the past. Inspeximus charters, therefore, gesture ­toward a performativity inherent in documentary quotation, and that performativity can also be detected when history-­writers reproduced scripta in their histories. The example of inspeximus described in the Chronicle of ­Battle Abbey, furthermore, reveals another impor­tant dimension of documentary quotation that one can also often observe in history-­writing. That is, history-­writers very often stress the public character of documentary practices: as well as being performative, history-­ writers from this period stress that scripta ­were often accompanied by per­for­ mances when they ­were used. Angevin historians’ use of documentary quotation in their histories belongs, therefore, to the realm of praxis and to the public sphere. And it is to the practical realm of documentary per­for­mances that I want to turn my attention now.

chapter 3

Literate Sociability

“In order to remember the deeds and the words and the conduct of the ances­ tors,” recommends Wace in the prologue of his Roman de Rou (written 1160– 74), “­people should read out books and histories and stories at festivals.”1 “Many ­things that happened long ago,” he goes on to say, “would have been forgotten if writing[s] (escripture) had not been composed—­and then read and recounted— by clerks.”2 As a commendation of the pedagogical value of history and of the vernacular written word, Wace’s comments are well known.3 But Wace’s empha­ sis on the public staging of writing—on the per­for­mance of written t­ hings be­ fore audiences at festes—­has escaped critical attention. This is curious ­because Wace articulates in an arrestingly clear way the distinctively public nature of high-­medieval remembrance. According to Wace, literate clerks gave material form to memory by rendering it into writing.4 But he also insists that memory was embodied: written memory was expressed by the voice, and remembrance was staged in the public assembly. This book so far has chiefly focused on the relationship between historio­ graphical and documentary texts in the Age of the Angevins, and I have argued that history-­writing worked to reframe, repurpose, and remediate scripta, embed­ ding them in cultural memory as they did so. But, as Wace suggests in his Rou, that pro­cess of remediation was not solely a textual phenomenon, undertaken by worthy scribes in the silence of their carrels. Rather, memorial remediation was a deeply social and deeply sociable business. Cultural memory depends on engaging p­ eople with the “mnemonic products” of the past; it does not just in­ volve reusing them but also embedding them within social life. And it is the so­ ciable and social dynamics of memorial remediation that I want to bring into focus now and in much of the rest of this book: I want to think more carefully about who remediated texts and for whom and in what social settings. I want to



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think about the way that textual remediation bound members of literate social networks together. And I want to argue that far from being a purely textual op­ eration, quoting documents in histories often involved a physical per­for­mance of writing. As when Henry II inspected ­Battle’s charters before the abbey’s as­ sembled monks and vari­ous secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries,5 such physical per­for­mances took place before an audience and w ­ ere bound up with the exer­ cise of literate power.

Performing Documents, Performing History Before I go on to explore in detail what that literate power looked like in practice—­and to think about who choreographed per­for­mances of histories and documents and about who listened to them—­I want to explore the way that history-­writing and scripta converged when they w ­ ere performed in public. So, if in Chapter 1 I argued that the structure and form of scripta and history-­writing sometimes make them hard to distinguish from one another, ­here I want to ar­ gue that their common dependence on public per­for­mance makes such distinc­ tions even harder to draw. Memorial remediation involved public per­for­mances, and t­ hose per­for­mances break down the bound­aries that modern scholarship tends to erect between history-­writing and its documentary “sources.” I argue this not only on the basis of the way that Wace connects both history and scripta with commemorative per­for­mances at public occasions ( festes)—­because Wace was not the only historian in this period to do so. If we shift our focus for a moment from the Angevin espace to the lands of the counts of Guînes in Flanders, we find another example of scripta being publicly performed in close proximity to histo­ ries (and other stories). In Lambert of Ardres’s History of the Counts of Guînes,6 which he wrote near Calais in the late 1190s, Lambert rec­ords a remarkable scene in which a party of knights and clerics, including both Lambert and his dedica­ tee, Arnold of Guînes, w ­ ere confined to the c­ astle at Ardres b­ ecause of the aw­ ful weather. According to Lambert, Arnold liked to socialize with old men who would tell him “stories and tales and histories” (eventuras et fa­bulas et historias) about the old days.7 ­These stories included most of the high-­medieval literary and historiographical canon: Arnold apparently liked hearing stories about Char­ lemagne, Roland, and Oliver, and about Arthur and the “histories and stories of the En­glish,” such as Gormunt and Isembard, Tristan and Isolde, and Merlin and Merchulf.8 On this occasion, one of ­these old men entertained Arnold and his friends with stories about Arthur and the Roman emperors; another told them

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stories about his own campaigns in the Holy Land. And then Arnold asked Walter de l’Écluse, a layman, to tell the party about the deeds of the ­people of Ardres (“ardensium historia et gesta”),9 an account that takes up the next forty or so chapters of Lambert’s history. Lambert says that Walter offered this history aloud in every­one’s presence (“aperto ore coram omnibus”). As if to drive home the physicality of this per­for­mance, and the physical embodiment of Walter’s vet­ eran authority, Lambert adds that Walter “combed his beard with his right hand in the way that many old men do” as he told his story.10 The most striking ­thing about Walter’s narratio,11 however, is that in the course of this extempore oral per­for­mance, Walter recited two scripta, just as a chronicler might have done as he wrote his chronicle. The first scriptum was a charter recording the installa­ tion of canons in the church of Ardres by Arnold’s grand­father;12 the second was a charter recording the transfer of that church to the Abbey of La Chapelle.13 Walter pre­sents the charters complete with their protocols and witness lists. He pre­sents them, that is, as if he ­were reading out from the original written texts; he even mentions p­ eople “whose names w ­ ill be written below” (“quorum nomina subscribentur”), a key indicator of their writtenness. Yet even though Walter was telling his story as if he w ­ ere a chronicler writing a history, it is clear that he was not reciting from a written text at all. He apologizes for his defective memory on both occasions, and in the second case he excuses his faltering ren­ dition of the scripta in the vernacular (materna . . . ​lingua nostra laicalis), a lan­ guage, he worries, that would not fully express the meaning of ­those scripta.14 (As Lars Boje Mortensen explains, Walter’s apologies are “directed specifically to the poor capellani et clerici who have to strain themselves to reconstruct men­ tally the real, and legally impor­tant, wording of the documents.”)15 Lambert’s account of this rainy-­day storytelling party is of course to be taken with a pinch of salt. It is part of a complex literary game that plays history off against poetry and both off against memory (Walter introduces the first charter using a line from Virgil’s ninth eclogue: that is a poem about remembering songs and about the mnemonic power of m ­ usic and is not about writing at all.)16 And Lambert and Walter must have had pretty remarkable memories, b­ ecause the charter that Walter had “recited” from memory had been enacted a hundred years previously; Lambert recorded Walter’s recitation twenty years l­ ater still. Never­ theless, Lambert, just like Wace, conjures up a very easy association between tell­ ing stories, writing history, and remediating scripta—­and with remembering them together in public. In Lambert’s world, the modern categories of epic and romance and history and documents could occupy a single commemorative space.17 And that space was filled with ­people who ­were listening to a viva voce



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recollection of a past that they collectively identified as being their own. Within the social space that Lambert imagines, therefore, such distinctions as the one that Gervase of Canterbury had drawn between “documenta virorum fidelium” and “scripta autentica”18—­what trustworthy men had taught him and what “au­ then­tic documents” had shown him—­begin to blur. As Walter de l’Écluse’s nar­ rative remediation of La Chapelle’s charters shows, “scripta” and “documenta” could be combined within a single per­for­mance of the past. Wace and Lambert wrote unusual texts, and their depictions of the written word ­were self-­consciously complex and possibly contrived. But even conventional chroniclers such as Rigord de Saint-­Denis (d. ca. 1209), whose Gesta Philippi Augusti is rarely noted for its literary innovation, blurred distinctions between tex­ tual genres that modern academic disciplines define at least partly on the basis of their supposed relationship with per­for­mance. In the prologue to his Gesta Philippi, Rigord expresses his hope that his chronicle would “enter the publica monumenta by the hand of the king himself.”19 Some historians have thought that Rigord meant ­here that he hoped his history would find a home in the royal archives. That, ­after all, would be an appropriate sentiment for a chronicler such as Rigord to have articulated: he had a bureaucratic frame of mind and had faith­ fully copied into his history scripta that originated in the royal chancery.20 But Rigord signals that he too expected his librum gestorum, as he called it, would be read aloud in public, just like the livres et gestes that Wace described in his Rou. Rigord worries, for example, that “when something new is recited (recitatur) in the hearing (in auribus) of the many, the listeners (auditores) tend to split into two camps: the one applauds what it hears (audit) and declares it worthy of praise; the other, meanwhile . . . ​denigrates even ­those t­ hings which are spoken (dictis) well.”21 Rigord’s aural and oral vocabulary (aures, auditores, audire; recito, dicere) makes clear that Rigord envisages his text to be both a script for an oral per­for­ mance and a material object to be consigned to physical safekeeping.22 The fact that Rigord copied the phrase about a listening audience almost verbatim from Walter de Châtillon’s Latin epic the Alexandreis (one of the most successful lit­ erary texts of this period) drives home its performative overtones.23 And the fact that Rigord had borrowed his phrase about the publica monumenta from the Alexandreis too24 underscores the con­temporary fluidity between what we now think of documentary, historiographical, and literary cultures.25 Publica monumenta ­were ­things to be remembered in public, which appealed si­mul­ta­neously to the ear and to the eyes. They w ­ ere monuments, which had a tangible and phys­ ical existence that underpinned a more immaterial performed presence. ­Whether we are dealing with “literary,” historiographical, or documentary texts,

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therefore, it appears that in the effort to have them remembered, ­those texts ­were directed as much ­toward the ears of an audience as they ­were ­toward the scrinium, or archive.

Assembly Literacy In the histories written by Rigord, Wace, and Lambert, scripta are located in the realm of public remembrance and public per­for­mance, and ­these writers invoke the per­for­mance of scripta alongside and within the per­for­mance of stories of many sorts. And although Rigord, Lambert, and Wace each imagine laypersons’ relationship with written memory slightly differently, all of them locate scripta and history at the heart of an elite culture that expressed its identity by remem­ bering the past at social events. The memorial sociability that Wace, Lambert, and Rigord delineate, however, was not merely a sociable phenomenon. It was a distinctly po­liti­cal one too. In very general terms, this memorial sociability was po­liti­cal b­ ecause it helped shape the remembering community’s identity. B ­ ecause memorial sociability involved physically gathering the remembering community together, it made very clear who belonged to that community and who did not, who shared their identity and who did not. As Gabrielle Spiegel has suggested, “All texts, to the degree that they formed part of the oral culture of lay society or entered into it by being read aloud, enjoyed a public, collective status as ve­ hicles through which the community reaffirmed its sense of historical identity.”26 Meanwhile, the specific way that the gathered community experienced the past made it a shared experience for that community. The community’s members all heard the same story being told about the past; they all saw the books and scripta (or escripture) on which that story was inscribed too. And they all witnessed that written story being remediated through the voice of a literate storyteller. The occasions at which the past was remembered in the Age of the Angevins ­were, moreover, also po­liti­cal in a more precisely delimited way. This is ­because the gathered—­remembering—­public on the one hand and the gathered—­ political—­public on the other so often overlapped when they w ­ ere convened in this period. As Jan Assmann explains in his account of early memorial cultures, and as Wace implies when he says that ­people should remember the deeds of their ancestors at festes, the memorial public was not an everyday phenomenon. In early memorial cultures, says Assmann, commemoration “often takes the form of a fes­ tival. . . . ​By recalling its history and reenacting its special events, the group con­ stantly reaffirms its own image; but this is not an everyday identity. The collective



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identity needs ceremony—­something to take it out of daily routine. . . . ​One might . . . ​perhaps even speak of everyday memory and festival memory.”27 I would argue speculatively that the kind of festive and special occasions that might have seen the community gathered together to remember ­things ceremonially may also have been occasions at which the po­liti­cal public ­were gathered together to do the business of government. Timothy Reuter memorably characterized high-­ medieval po­liti­cal sociability as “assembly politics.”28 Rather than assuming that high-­medieval rulers governed continuously, and that the po­liti­cal public had a permanent existence, Reuter emphasized the staged and highly social occasions—­“assemblies”—in which the po­liti­cal public momentarily came into being before dissolving again when t­ hose occasions ended. 29 Reuter firmly rejected modernists’ claims that a public sphere did not exist in the M ­ iddle 30 Ages: ­there was a public in the ­Middle Ages; it just was not convened all the time. Instead, communities “embodied themselves as a po­liti­cal public” at social gatherings. It was t­ here that they w ­ ere “empowered and enabled to practice pol­ 31 itics.” I would argue that the kind of assemblies that Wace imagines, in which the written word was performed for memorial purposes, would have often coin­ cided with the po­liti­cal assemblies that Reuter describes. That does not mean that at ­every assembly ­people read out histories. But at many assemblies, scripta re­ cording the past—­scripta telling stories about the past—­would have been read out in the course of po­liti­cal per­for­mances. Some of ­those assemblies, such as the council Henry II held in Clarendon in 1164 (at which he ceremoniously promul­ gated the constitutions that Becket opposed so fiercely), w ­ ere po­liti­cally momen­ tous. But o­ thers w ­ ere simply a part of the practice of government. And it is a­ fter all an itinerary of assemblies—rather than of kings or even the “government”— that Howden and Diceto tracked in their chronicles; Howden’s and Diceto’s chronicles might even be thought of as histories of assemblies and the scripta per­ formed in them. In ­Table  2, the nine consecutive entries from five pages of Howden’s Gesta (selected more or less at random) illustrates this point. Of ­these nine entries from September 1174 to February 1175, only two (the fire at Canter­ bury and the bishop of Norwich’s death) did not involve any kind of public as­ sembly, although they would prob­ably have led to one taking place. It is unclear ­whether Henry II was involved in a public meeting with Henry the Young King at Le Mans in February, but it might have gone without saying that an assembly took place. (It is hardly likely that two kings would meet without their own reti­ nues, the retinues of their followers and leading citizens from the towns in which they met.) Archbishop Baldwin’s consecrations and his legatine visitations would all doubtless have been staged and public occasions. Five of the entries

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­Table 2. Assemblies Recorded in Howden’s Gesta Other ­People

Page Number1 Person

Event

Place

Date

77

Henry II

Colloquium

Tours

Henry’s sons2

79

Gilbert FitzFergus

Not stated

80

Roger of Howden

Homines suos congregavit et cum eis consilium iniit Colloquium

Feast of St. Michael (30 Sept.) Not stated

80

Richard, archbishop of Canterbury

Feast of St. Clement (23 Nov.) Vari­ous

Uctred and Gilbert of Galloway

81 81 81 81

Henry II Henry II

81

Henry

Not stated

Episcopal Vari­ous consecrations, legatine visitations Fire at Canterbury Death of William, bishop of Norwich Curia Argentan Fuit . . . ​apud . . . ​ Le Mans cum Colloquium

Gisors

Not stated Not stated Christmas Purification of the Virgin Mary (2 Feb.) Feast of St. Matthew (24 Feb.)

Henry the Young King Henry the Young King, Louis VII

1From volume 1. 2This entry reproduces the concordia made between Henry and his sons. Howden, Gesta, 1:77–79.

specifically mention assemblies—­three colloquia, a curia, a congregatio. At the first of ­these assemblies a signed and authenticated charter was its outcome. But we can imagine the written word being involved at vari­ous stages in the other assemblies too. If this rather crude schema suggests in general terms that ­there was a con­ nection between history-­writing, the per­for­mance of the written word, and as­ sembly politics, close readings of assemblies that history-­writers rec­ord in the Age of the Angevins show that connection more compellingly. The mutually rein­



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forcing social and memorial dynamics of assembly literacy are perhaps most evi­ dent in the assemblies that took place in the aftermath of social breakdown, and I want to pause h ­ ere to explore more closely how history-­writers treated some of ­those assemblies. “The characteristic form of public po­liti­cal action” in this pe­ riod, argued Reuter, “was . . . ​that of opaque ritualized be­hav­ior symbolizing clo­ sure and reaffirming an order which should at if at all pos­si­ble be seen not to have been threatened.”32 Any number of examples of assemblies recorded by An­ gevin history-­writers could be cited ­here to show that assemblies aimed to pub­ licly restore social relations. But one in par­tic­u­lar stands out for the way that it connects assemblies and public remembering with scripta and history-­writing. The example is found in Ralph de Diceto’s account of the reconciliation between Henry II and his son Henry the Young King ­after the latter’s rebellion of 1173– 74. Diceto reports in his Ymagines historiarum that once the Young King had been defeated and had regained his f­ ather’s f­ avor by d­ oing homage to him, “nearly all the magnates of ­England [­were] called together at Westminster, and, with the Young King pre­sent, a letter was read out containing t­ hese words.”33 Diceto is relating an act of reading h ­ ere, and he reproduces the words that its audience (Henry’s audience) heard.34 The letter was addressed by Henry II to all his fideles and presented a narrative in the first person describing how he had come to for­ give his son. Henry relates that the Young King had come before him and a large audience at Bur-­le-­Roi (Burum) in Normandy on the day before Palm Sun­ day.35 Henry’s son threw himself at his feet (Henry says), and with a ­great out­ pouring of tears, the Young King begged his f­ ather to forgive him for all that he had done and to accept his homage and his promises that he would never defy him again.36 “I was moved by pity,” relates Henry, “and understood that he spoke from the heart, so I set aside my anger and indignation against him and admit­ ted him into my paternal f­ avor.”37 Henry goes on to describe how he had accepted his son’s homage. And then he rehearses the promises that the Young King had made him, among which was a promise to ask the magnates of ­England to swear they would deny the Young King counsel and aid should he ever break faith with his f­ ather again. This is where Diceto’s version of the letter ends. Diceto then states that on the very day in May 1175 that the letter was read out at Westmin­ ster, the En­glish magnates made precisely the promise to Henry II that had been set out, as if prophetically, in the letter that he had addressed to them.38 Henry II’s letter provides a prime example, then, of the way the public use of the written word could be choreographed in order to maximize its memorial potential. It is worth spelling out the po­liti­cal valences of this choreography: what happened at Bur had included vari­ous forms of staged symbolic be­hav­ior, such

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as public weeping, oath-­taking, and the d­ oing of homage. Th ­ ese per­for­mances had been recorded in writing, possibly publicly, and this act was itself pregnant with symbolism.39 The written account that resulted comprised an authoritative narrative of what had happened at Bur, which was written from Henry II’s per­ spective and ruthlessly excluded his defeated son’s own voice. At the Westmin­ ster meeting called to hear the letter being read out, a po­liti­cal community that had been deeply divided was gathered together for the first time since the civil war. The community had been summoned both as a sign of reestablished unity and as a demonstration of the elder Henry’s unchallenged rule. So it was impor­ tant that t­ hose pre­sent heard his story, together, before they gave their oaths of loyalty to signal their assent to its validity. The Young King, it seems, silently stood by. A si­mul­ta­neously controlled and shared auditory experience in which a nar­ rative was performed appears therefore to have been a mechanism through which po­liti­cal equilibrium was reestablished. A written scriptum took center stage in this pro­cess. The narrative’s embodiment in a tangible physical form, meanwhile, added to its finality and objectivity: something had been done at Bur, and the letter was its physical product. The canny use of tenses in the letter’s nar­ rative, meanwhile, ensured that the letter could function as a script for the ­future as well as a memory of what had happened in the past. This script set out what the wider po­liti­cal public needed to do and say—­what they needed to prom­ ise—in order for them to play their part in the reconciliation that the letter si­ mul­ta­neously recalled.40 At the Westminster assembly, both the diachronic and synchronic dynamics of social reconciliation ­were thus in play. Members of the po­liti­cal community gathered at Westminster articulated their horizontal rela­ tionship with each other t­ here and then: they w ­ ere all Henry’s subjects, and they ­were gathered together in his seat of power. At the same time, they also articu­ lated their identity with the united po­liti­cal community that preceded the Young King’s rebellion, with the po­liti­cal community that had come back together at Bur, and with an i­ magined po­liti­cal community that would be united in its fi­ delity to Henry II in the f­ uture. One of the most remarkable t­ hings about Diceto’s scriptum is that a nearly identical dynamic underlies another piece of history-­writing composed in the af­ termath of the Young King’s rebellion. The text in question (which I explore in much greater detail in Chapter 5) is Jordan Fantosme’s Estoire of the war between Henry II and the Young King. The Estoire is a text which, like many vernacular texts, has often been associated with per­for­mance.41 Moreover, Jean Blacker and Matthew Strickland have convincingly read the Estoire a work of reconciliation,42



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which does its work by presenting once-­a ntagonistic factions with a single chivalric code of conduct. As in Henry II’s letter, this script for po­liti­cal be­hav­ior is figured as both a per­for­mance and a material object. The Estoire’s assonating laisses evoke the chansons de geste,43 and the poem begins with an injunction for its audience to listen: “Hear true history!” (Oëz verraie estoirë, line 1), Fantosme demands. But the Estoire also insists on its writtenness, on the way that “­these verses that are written ­here speak” (si cum ces vers parolent ki sunt ici escriz, line 872). Given the Estoire’s conciliatory aims and its insistence both on its orality and its writtenness, it makes sense to imagine this text being performed before an assembled po­liti­cal community, much as Henry II’s letter was. As an oral dis­ course it imposed on its once-­divided audience a singular script for f­ uture be­ hav­ior. And as a written text, it proclaimed to its audience that the reconciliation it prescribed had already been accomplished through its embodiment in mate­ rial form. Like a finis—­the archetypical document that ended a dispute in this period—­the Estoire ended the war by enclosing it in an authoritative document. And just as the audiences of fines might hear the declaration “causa finita est”—­ the dispute is now over—at the end of its recitation, so Fantosme’s audience heard the words “la guerre est or fenie” (the war is now finished)—as Fantosme ended the Estoire.44 In Fantosme’s Estoire, as in Henry II’s letter, normal social relations ­were restored through the recital of the written word before an assembled pub­ lic. Assembly literacy—­which combined public gathering, public storytelling, and the per­for­mance of the written word—­could thus work as a conciliatory practice—­a conciliatory practice, that is, which used per­for­mances of the writ­ ten word to “engineer,” orchestrate, and manage “common memory narratives” in order to “remember a common past but forget divisive events.”45

Literate Networks The kind of assembly literacy that I have sketched out ­here is an impor­tant di­ mension of the sociability of memorial practices of the Age of the Angevins. But the per­for­mance of written narratives (­either “documentary” or historiographi­ cal) before an assembled public amounts to only one dimension of that sociabil­ ity. History-­writing and scripta w ­ ere also sociable, I would argue, b­ ecause of their distinctive textual and material qualities. The combination of writtenness and narrativity that they shared (which I explored in greater depth in Chapter 1) meant that the stories they told could circulate far beyond their original per­for­ mance context. As physical objects, that is, scripta and the histories that quoted

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them could travel a long way. As I showed in the Chapter 2, moreover, narrative scripta could be remediated in any number of new textual and performative sit­ uations, and they could be used to tell a story again and again in multiple social contexts (to take an example from the previous chapter, the letter that Henry VI sent to Philip Augustus announcing that he had captured Richard I would have been performed before the French royal court, before Walter de Coutanc­ es’s entourage when he received the letter, before Hugh du Puiset’s “princely” court when he received the copy that Coutances had made, and before what­ever audience might have gathered to hear Roger of Howden’s chronicle being recited). The po­liti­cal publics whose needs ­these texts served, therefore, might have been gathered together in a single assembly (as Wace, Lambert of Ardres, and Timo­ thy Reuter envisaged), but ­those assemblies ­were connected to ­others that took place throughout a po­liti­cal landscape coordinated by space and time.46 Scripta and history-­writing forged links between publics, in other words, and ­were per­ formed before them as well: they forged links between past publics and ­future ones and between publics that w ­ ere gathered and ­those that ­were scattered. The power­ful combination of retellable narrative and physical portability that is so typical of scripta is evident in a number of ­those scripta that history-­ writers in this period reproduced. The scriptum recording Henry II’s expurga­ tion for the murder of Becket at an assembly at Avranches, which Roger of Howden reproduced in his Chronica, provides a particularly good example of the way that written narratives originating in per­for­mances at public assemblies cir­ culated beyond t­ hose assemblies via literate networks.47 This par­tic­u­lar narra­ tive was written by the cardinal-­legates who had witnessed Henry’s expurgation, and it was addressed to Henry in the second person. It pre­sents an account of Henry’s actions at the assembly—­recounting how Henry had promised loyalty to Pope Alexander and his successors and how he had made other guarantees to the Church. It also tells Henry directly that he had sworn that he “neither or­ dered nor wanted [Becket] to be killed,” and it reminds him that “you w ­ ere greatly saddened when news of his death reached you.”48 By way of conclusion, the char­ ter adds that “in order that [this] might be firmly held in the memory of the Roman Church, you ordered your seal to be applied” to the letter.49 This act of sealing presumably would have taken place following a recitation of the scriptum before Henry and o­ thers gathered at Avranches. Part of this scriptum’s power thus lay in its public monumentality: it was embodied in a sealed and authorized ob­ ject; it had been drawn up in public for explic­itly memorial purposes. And part of its power lay in the expectation that the story it told would be retold again—­ remediated—as it circulated more widely. The Norman chronicler Robert de



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Torigni, who also recorded the expurgation in his chronicle, indicates that ­those who choreographed the events in Avranches always intended for a written story about it to be disseminated to multiple publics. Torigni states that Becket’s causa was formally closed (“finita est’ ”) as a result of Henry’s negotiations with the legates at Savigny, Avranches and Caen. The “public letters (littere publice), which ­were drawn up and kept by the many ­people who had met ­there,”50 he goes on to say, w ­ ere testimony to the m ­ atter’s resolution. Th ­ ose who had seen Henry making his promises, it seems, ­were given a transcript of what they had wit­ nessed, possibly bearing their own subscriptions as guarantors of the truth of the narrative the transcript related. The subsequent wide diffusion of this narra­ tive is evident from the way that Roger of Howden presented it in his chronicle. First he offered his own narrative of the assembly at Avranches, which he did simply by recasting the charter’s own narrative into the third person.51 He then transcribed the charter itself, with its second-­person address to Henry.52 Fi­nally, he reproduced a letter from the legates to the archbishop of Ravenna, which gave their own third-­person rendition of the story but which other­wise used the same words as the original.53 The archbishop of Ravenna, presumably, had l­ ittle personal interest in the m ­ atter. But it was in Henry’s interest and in the interest of the Church that as many ­people as pos­si­ble knew about the reconciliation. And the fact that an En­glish chronicler (Roger of Howden) had access to a copy of a letter destined for northeastern Italy also suggests that it was impor­tant that ­those who w ­ ere to know about the reconciliation should know who e­ lse knew about it too. Of course, the texts u­ nder discussion h ­ ere w ­ ere responses to exceptional po­ liti­cal crises, and as such they demanded exceptionally high po­liti­cal theater to resolve them. But as John Hudson has noted, “any document recording a trans­ action involving laymen” from this period generally stemmed from an abnormal social situation and aimed to “restore workable social relations.”54 The restora­ tion of workable social relations was the archetypical purpose of public assem­ blies,55 of course, where the written word was used as an essential part of the staging through which closure was achieved. However, as Timothy Reuter sug­ gested, many less controversial ­matters “from appointments to bishoprics, abba­ cies, and high secular posts down to the granting of privileges appear . . . ​to have been carried out, suitably staged, at public assemblies.”56 The conclusion of such business, moreover, only represents a part of the social activity that would have taken place at them. They frequently coincided with liturgical festivals whose public cele­bration would have cemented any business transacted: the reconcili­ ation between the Henries at Bur, for example, took place on the day before Palm

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Sunday, and the conference at Avranches took place on Rogation day. And the business that took place at the assemblies themselves, fi­nally, did not finish when ­those assemblies came to an end. Rather, the conciliatory work that took place at assemblies continued to be undertaken when written stories about t­ hose as­ semblies w ­ ere transmitted to new audiences. This is not to suggest, however, that all the scripta reproduced by ­those writ­ ing or reciting history in this period w ­ ere of an explic­itly conciliatory nature. Many of them, such as the newsletters about military campaigns explored by John Gillingham, ­were more straightforwardly narrative texts, written solely for the purposes of conveying information or disinformation.57 It is reasonable to as­ sume, however, that even t­ hese texts would have found their primary audience in a gathered po­liti­cal community accustomed to hearing the written word re­ cited for pragmatic, liturgical, and literary purposes. Newsletters conveyed ur­ gent practical knowledge in narrative form to the po­liti­cal elite, and recital was the only way this knowledge could have been diffused to a public that was still only quasiliterate.58 The letters themselves, in fact, sometimes hint that their senders expected them to be recited aloud or at least to be accompanied by oral per­for­mances. Ralph de Diceto and Roger of Howden, for example, both repro­ duce a letter sent by the Byzantine emperor Manuel Comnenus to Henry II re­ lating his campaign against the Persians in 1176.59 The emperor provides a digested narrative of the campaign in the letter, but he also promises Henry that the “prin­ cipes nobilitatis tuae” who had fought alongside him, and presumably carried the letter to Henry, would narrate to him the full story.60 Aside from offering a further example of the variety of high-­medieval doc­ umentary per­for­mances, the emperor’s letter opens up a much broader dimen­ sion of the po­liti­cal sociability of the written word in this period: as with the Compromise of Avranches, the wide circulation of Comnenus’s letter among his­ torians suggests that elite secular society was routinely using networks of writ­ ten communication to circulate impor­tant po­liti­cal information that would prob­ably be delivered to a wider audience in oral form. In addition, it suggests that writers of history ­were embedded within t­ hese networks, receiving written information and diffusing it further by including it in their histories and thereby making it available for f­ uture per­for­mances. The crucial t­ hing about this form of literate sociability is that the po­liti­cal information whose circulation it encour­ aged was not confined exclusively to the narratives of scripta: in Comnenus’s letter, as in many similar letters, the protocol is almost as impor­tant to its social purposes as the narrative.61 The protocol explained that the emperor wrote to Henry as his “dearest friend” ­because of the “love” between them and ­because



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of the blood relationship that existed between their ­children.62 The emperor’s let­ ter, together with its narrative, thus formed part of a transaction that was con­ stitutive of a diplomatic alliance based on friendship and kinship, and this alliance, just as much as the news that the narrative related, had an enduring pub­ lic significance that t­ hose writing history preserved when they reproduced it. And as in the case of the Compromise of Avranches, the emperor’s letter was ef­ fective as a piece of diplomacy precisely ­because the information that its form and content conveyed would be widely diffused. So not only would many ­people come to know the news that Comnenus related to Henry—­but every­body who heard and saw the letter and its news would know that Comnenus wanted Henry especially to know it. Many such letters appear in late twelfth-­century histories, and although some had been exchanged between rulers, a significant proportion had been exchanged between high-­ranking administrators. Diceto, for example, reproduces a newsletter about the emperor Henry VI’s conquest of Sicily and the birth of his son, which the emperor had sent to Diceto’s friend Walter de Cou­ tances.63 It was no doubt Coutances who sent this letter to Diceto.64 The proto­ col of the emperor’s letter to Coutances—­like the protocols of the many letters that Coutances himself sent to Diceto,65 whom he addressed as his “dearest and beloved friend”66—­are couched in the same language of intimacy as Manuel’s letter to Henry.67 Similarly, when William de Longchamp sent Diceto a letter that exculpated Richard from the murder of Conrad of Montferrat, William said he did so ­because of the “affection” that Diceto had shown him (and ­because he hoped that Diceto would “do something with it in [his] chronicles”).68 The point ­here is not only that chroniclers ­were friends with high-­ranking administrators and that high-­ranking administrators used the language of friend­ ship to persuade chroniclers to reproduce written information favorable to the interests of their own po­liti­cal networks. Nor is it simply that a clearly defined “government” circulated news (or propaganda) to an information consuming public or that it did so via a sympathetic network of history-­writers. The sort of literate sociability that I have been outlining in this chapter, rather, suggests that history-­writers ­were involved in the public per­for­mance of reciprocal literate friendships and that historical writing was a crucial vehicle for enacting that friendship.69 Diceto, for example, made a habit of having lavish historiographi­ cal texts produced in the St. Paul’s scriptorium and then dedicating them to the ­great administrators who had corresponded with him. Diceto dedicated a col­ lection of excerpts from his chronicle to Archbishop Hubert Walter (d. 1205),70 and he ended that collection by reproducing the letter announcing Hubert’s ap­ pointment as papal legate in 1195.71 He dedicated an epitome of his chronicles to

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William de Longchamp,72 which wishes him well and reproduces the letters that appointed him papal legate and regent of E ­ ngland.73 (Diceto’s dedication to Longchamp defends his simultaneous and controversial wielding of both tem­ poral and spiritual power by comparing him to Alcuin; Richard, by implication, is Charlemagne).74 According to Malcolm Parkes, the scribe of this manuscript “modified his handwriting for this book to produce a customized image on the page for a recipient of par­tic­u­lar importance,” and indeed the studied elegance of the collection made for Longchamp “may reflect not only the recipient’s sta­ tus but a closer personal relationship between Ralph . . . ​and Longchamp.”75 Evi­ dence from Diceto’s own working copy of the Ymagines historiarum (London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8, which also contains the hand that produced the compilation for Longchamp), meanwhile, suggests that he intended to dedicate a copy of that entire chronicle to Walter de Coutances,76 the orchestrator of Longchamp’s ultimate downfall and the object of his subsequent revenge.77 Blue crosses, with dots placed between the strokes—­and which closely resemble the mnemonics discussed in Chapter 2—­appear in one of the manuscripts of the Ymagines historiarum whenever Coutances is mentioned in the work’s t­ able of contents.78 The same manuscript also contains a note praising Coutances’s ser­ vices to the Church of Rouen and expressing the hope that, by the grace of God, he would “provide for [it] . . . ​for a long time in the ­future.”79

* * * Taken as a group, in fact, many of t­ hose who held g­ reat public office in the early part of Richard’s reign—­a nd who circulated scripta and written narratives—­ cultivated close relationships with ­people writing history. Diceto dedicated his­ tories to Coutances, Longchamp, and Hubert Walter, and t­ hese men patronized other historians too. Longchamp was the dedicatee of an early version of Gerald of Wales’s Itinerarium Kambriae.80 Hubert Walter commissioned Gerald to  write a prose history of the crusade.81 Meanwhile, Hugh du Puiset, even though he was a throwback to an era of less literate secular power, wielded pub­ lic power as justiciar of the north in Richard’s absence, cultivated the friendship of Roger of Howden, and provided both information and scripta that Howden repeated in his chronicles.82 (Puiset’s taste for historiography is also suggested by the epitome of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae that was dedicated to him).83 Indeed, Howden and Diceto on the one hand and the high-­powered administrators who patronized them on the other closely resemble the hommes d’ écriture that Paul Bertrand has recently identified as members of



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a self-­confident and self-­conscious “graphic community” of administrators in thirteenth-­and fourteenth-­century France.84 ­These hommes d’écriture knew each other well and carved out their social role through their mastery of writing. And they expressed that role, at least in the Age of the Angevins, through writ­ ing history for their literate friends or through asking their literate friends to write it. Th ­ ere thus seems to have been a circular quality to the pro­cess by which written information was disseminated and performed in this period. Hommes d’ écriture patronized by power­ful po­liti­cal figures wrote histories for them that reflected the literate instruments of their power back at them. And although the fit is not quite perfect, that circularity resembles the “circle of writing” that Michel de Certeau thought so crucial to the foundation of history as an academic discipline in early modernity. According to Certeau, the “intellectual ­labor” of history-­writing “by priority . . . ​ranks the very ones who have written in such a way that the historical work reinforces a sociocultural tautology between its authors (a learned group) its objects (books, manuscripts), and its (educated) public.”85 Neat distinctions between a propagandistic literate government and an opinion-­forming literate “public,” therefore, need some nuancing. In the late twelfth ­century ­there was a considerable overlap between members of ­those two groups and literate exchanges between them that flowed both ways. The dedica­ tees of historical writing had themselves created and circulated much of the writ­ ten information that became the basis of historical narratives in which high-­ranking administrators had starring roles. And it is likely that they, and members of their social circles, would have been pre­sent when such documents—­ and the histories that quoted them—­were performed in public. The audiences and authors of scripta and the authors and audiences of history-­writing thus did not occupy discrete social spaces in this period. On the contrary, they constantly rubbed shoulders. Furthermore, t­ here may well have been a dynamic and even vocal interaction between ­those propagating written narratives and t­hose hearing and seeing them, just as Rigord had fearfully ­imagined. It perhaps is in this circulation of scripta and histories, and scripta in histories, that the impact on historiographical culture of the “rise of the literate mentality” and of new forms of literate sociability that emerged in this period is most apparent. That impact can be mea­sured through the sheer number of doc­ uments included in the chronicles written in this period, and it can be felt in a variety of subtler and more pervasive ways. Above all, the changing structural and linguistic characteristics of histories written in this period show that their authors ­were making use of the newly efficient writing and reading technologies

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that ­were facilitating the large-­scale production and circulation of scripta. Some forms of historical writing, indeed, began to take on characteristics of documen­ tary discourse itself to such an extent that it is sometimes hard to distinguish between longer newsletters and shorter histories. Lars Boje Mortensen has shown that ­those writing history elsewhere in Eu­rope in this period increasingly employed a new form of vernacularizing Latin prose, suited to quick composi­ tion and easy comprehension.86 Mortensen has called this new discursive form “fast historiography” in order to distinguish it from the elaborate sorts of his­ tory written by William of Malmesbury and his pre­de­ces­sors.87 Historians of subsequent generations, which surely includes the likes of Ralph de Diceto and Roger of Howden, had begun to use written Latin as a speedier medium of com­ munication. The Latin of their histories adapted vernacular terminology and ­adopted romance syntax,88 making them readily available for simultaneous trans­ lation for secular elite society or possibly even aural comprehension on the lat­ ter’s part. The narratives of fast historiography (like the narratives of letters and even charters) had ­simple, report-­like structures and sacrificed rhetorical play for the sake of linear clarity.89 The language and structure of fast historiography, therefore, lent itself to viva voce recitation, just like the scripta it reproduced, which ­were themselves already marked by a narrative rather than dispositive char­ acter. The language and structure of fast historiography meant that it could eas­ ily absorb documentary and other extraneous narrative material. And this in turn gave it a public and collaborative complexion that was entirely in keeping with the public space occupied by written narratives—­a public space Wace and Lambert of Ardres ­imagined so vividly. The development of “fast historiography” enabled written historical narra­ tives to be circulated and performed in the abbreviated and excerpted form that Diceto had made his specialty and that he had directed ­toward the ­great admin­ istrators in his social circle. But it was not just Diceto: it is clear that the texts that would respectively become Howden’s Gesta and his Chronica circulated in abbreviated forms before they ­were “completed” by any modern sense of that word.90 Gervase of Canterbury used Howden’s Gesta in 1188 (or thereabouts) as the basis of his own annals for the years 1171–79,91 but the Gesta as we have it ­today was not finished ­until 1191–92.92 As John Gillingham has shown, William of Newburgh used Howden’s Chronica and must have done so before 1198 when Newburgh died,93 but as David Corner demonstrated, the Chronica was not ac­ tually completed ­until 1201–2.94 William Stubbs, meanwhile, suggested that Diceto’s account of the Young King’s rebellion might originally have been com­ posed as a stand-­alone work that he incorporated into his Ymagines only at a l­ ater



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date.95 Fi­nally, certain medieval library cata­logues tantalizingly mention histo­ riographical works composed about discrete subjects that have not survived ­today (such as the Itinerarium Jeresolimitanorum de recessu Ricardi regis de Messana, de recessu regis Franchiae de Acon, de morte regis Anglorum, listed in the cata­logue of Durham cathedral priory).96 Although literacy penetrated Angevin elite society ever more pervasively in this period, the literate sociability based on the circulation of written documents, narratives, and histories did not replace the assembly politics, or rather the as­ sembly literacy, in the course of which ­those documents ­were drawn up and per­ formed. By recognizing the sociability of the written word in this period and by recognizing the importance of textual per­for­mances to po­liti­cal interaction in par­tic­u­lar, the collection and deployment of written rec­ords by historians begins to look less like a fundamentally passive activity. Meanwhile, the alignment of vernacular historiography primarily with orality and commemoration rather than writtenness and monumentality begins to appear less secure, and some of the noise of written practices returns to dispel the silence of the Latinate archive. Fi­nally, merely acknowledging the sociability of the written word involves ques­ tioning the tendency to divide medieval public life into the differentiated spheres of court and bureaucracy. When the per­for­mances surrounding the written word are taken into account, the court loses its apparent mono­poly on the politics of conduct and be­hav­ior, and a nascent bureaucracy appears to have been less ex­ clusively governed by reason. So while the use of the written word for po­liti­cal purposes may well have formed part of the pro­cess of the routinization of charisma,97 it remained bound up with the spectacles of charismatic rule.

chapter 4

Literate Per­for­mances and Literate Government

History-­writing and the scripta it reproduced are witness to both the new and the old forms of literate sociability that characterize the Age of the Angevins. In terms of the new, scripta and historical narratives circulated at a rate and in a volume that they had never done before, and they circulated through ever-­ thickening networks of literate friendship. But this newly and intensively liter­ ate form of sociability did not replace older forms of literate sociability, in which writing took center stage in public and po­liti­cal per­for­mances. In this chapter, therefore, I am ­going to zoom in on just ­those po­liti­cal and literate per­for­mances and on the power­ful men who choreographed them. Focusing on the dynamics of literate power allows a more nuanced picture to emerge of the close relation­ ship, which generations of scholars have detected, between Angevin history-­ writing and the period’s increasingly sophisticated administrative government. Instead of thinking of literate government as a monolith, I want to focus on the individuals who participated in government and their relationship to t­ hose who wrote history. I want to foreground how they experienced literate power and how they wielded it, as well as how history-­writing itself was enmeshed with the lit­ erate per­for­mances through which the period’s politics w ­ ere practiced. Of course, the intimate relationship between the two dazzling cultural achievements of the Age of the Angevins—­its highly literate government and its prolific historical writing—­has long been acknowledged. At the heart of this re­ lationship lay a mastery of literate technology, which was shared by t­ hose who wrote history and t­ hose who participated in literate government. It is a mastery that is epitomized above all by ­those “civil servant historians,” as Beryl Smalley once called them, who did both.1 I would argue, however, that when “civil ser­



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vants” wrote documentary history in this period, they did not always do so in an official or public capacity and did not do so at the behest of the royal govern­ ment. Ralph de Diceto, for example, assisted at Richard I’s coronation; he was demonstrably—­physically—­close to royal power.2 Yet he did not dedicate a sin­ gle one of his many historiographical works to Richard himself. Similarly, Roger of Howden served Henry II as a clerk and followed Richard I on crusade. But he apparently dedicated neither of his histories to a king. Howden and Diceto, therefore, ­were not “court” historians, even if they wrote in the royal court’s shadow.3 And while they had close connections with literate administrators who worked for the king’s government—­while they ­were literate administrators—­that did not necessarily make them “government” or “civil servant” historians either. As I argued in the previous chapter, Howden and Diceto belonged to a cir­ cle of literati that encompassed both history-­writing’s literate audiences and its literate authors. To be sure, t­ hose literati sometimes participated in literate gov­ ernment. But the social and literate circle that they moved in was structured as much by personal relations as it was by official duties. Evidence for the highly sociable (but not necessarily governmental) complexion of this literate circle can be found in the patterns of patronage that ­shaped t­ hese histories. In the rest of this chapter I ­will zoom in on ­these Angevin literati (or hommes d’ écriture) in order to think more closely about how they used and experienced writing in their professional lives—­and how ­those experiences ­shaped the history that they wrote. I argued in Chapter 3 that it was the public per­for­mance of written texts that made ­those texts so po­liti­cally effective. But h ­ ere I want to think more closely about the sort of power that using writing in this period implied, and in par­tic­ u­lar about what using writing implied about the relationship of literate power to government. I want to do this first b­ ecause Angevin chroniclers’ associations with “central government” have long been thought key to interpreting their chronicles.4 But perhaps more impor­tant, I want to do this ­because the ­whole category of high-­medieval “government” has recently come u­ nder critical pres­ sure. Indeed, a number of medievalists, led most recently by Thomas Bisson, have called the notion of “government,” at least as it is usually understood in relation to the High M ­ iddle Ages, into question. For Bisson, historians of the twelfth ­century have spoken of “government . . . ​without qualification and [they] con­ tinue to do so.” Yet, “when simply defined as the exercise of power for social purpose, government became the (wobbly) end of a story that, in the twelfth ­century, begins and persists with the powers and liabilities of lordship.”5 Lord­ ship, for Bisson, means “personal commands over dependent p­ eople,” a power “effluent in expression, affective in impact.”6 The ­g reat advantage of Bisson’s

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vision of the twelfth ­century—in which the power that ­people felt fluctuated between that of lordship and government, and in which apparently governmental structures could nevertheless turn out to be “animated by lords” 7—is that it enables us to apprehend both writing and history-­writing as being related to practices of lordship as well as to practices of government. Now, government is often thought to be si­mul­ta­neously a consequence of rising literacy and the cause of it.8 Writing, however, has never been thought of as having much to do with lordship per se. However, I argue that writing could serve lords just as well as it could the state and that even ­those “in government” used the written word for unofficial as well as official purposes. Moreover, the per­for­mances that often surrounded writing in this period had precisely the affective impact that Bisson identifies with lordship. To describe t­ hese per­for­mances only in terms of govern­ ment, therefore, is to obscure the way that lordship, or at least unofficial power, structured the literate per­for­mances that history-­writers recorded. History-­writers’ “involvement” with government has nevertheless meant that figures such as Roger of Howden have often been thought of as if they w ­ ere amateur historians with a day job in an office, and as if they used and desired scripta just as ­those caricatured figures might do so t­oday.9 To be sure, history-­writing hommes d’écriture would have used at least some of the scripta they subsequently reproduced in their histories in the course of their administrative work (the Assize of the Forest of 1184, which Howden reproduces in his Chronica, is a good example: he would have been responsible for executing it as a justice of the forest.)10 But that does not mean that such administrators as Howden experienced the written word as a passive ve­ hicle of communication, whose manifestation in physical form was entirely second­ ary to the information it contained. History-­writers treat scripta as if they w ­ ere much more dynamic texts than that. Far from being inert and neutral or passive props in per­for­mances of power, history-­writers treated the scripta they reproduce as if they w ­ ere events in themselves, which exerted a social force both when they w ­ ere originally deployed and when they ­were redeployed in history-­writing. And that social force has as much to do with literate lordship as it did with government.

Literate Lordship and Acts of Reading In order to think more about lordship, government, and literacy and about their connections with history-­writing, I ­will now offer close readings of three inci­ dents involving the written word—­three “literacy events,” as scholars of literacy ­ ese incidents sometimes call them11—­that Angevin history-­writers recorded. Th



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all reveal t­ hose writers’ deep sensitivity to the nuanced po­liti­cal uses of writing and of the per­for­mances surrounding it. The first example comes from William FitzStephen’s Vita of Becket. In that text, FitzStephen recounts an incident that took place in 1159, when rival factions of Roman cardinals had elected two dif­f er­ ent candidates as pope (Alexander III and Victor IV). The schism at Rome meant that Henry II faced a delicate decision. Should he support Victor, who was the imperial candidate, or the reformist canon-­lawyer Alexander III, whose election the French king Louis VII (Henry’s rival and often his adversary) had already confirmed?12 The custom was that the En­glish clergy would not recog­ nize a papal election before the king had, so Archbishop Theobald of Canterbury held his peace.13 The archbishop of Rouen and the bishop of Le Mans, however, rushed ahead and recognized Alexander III before Henry had given them per­ mission to do so. According to FitzStephen, Henry was furious (“rex vehementer commotus . . . ​[et] iratus”),14 and as a punishment, “he had letters (breves) written ordering that [the bishop’s] h ­ ouse at Le Mans should be destroyed.”15 In order to make this a very public humiliation, Henry “held the signed ­orders in his hand and, displaying them publicly (ostendens publice), said to ­those pre­sent ‘now the ­people of Le Mans ­will hear what their bishop is ­really like!’ ”16 This seriously upset the clergy who w ­ ere pre­sent, and it especially upset Becket.17 So Becket (who was still Henry’s chancellor at this point, although FitzStephen is keen to make it seem that deep down he had always been a champion of the Church) came up with a cunning plan. He connived with the royal messengers to ensure that they would ­ride only very slowly to Le Mans to give the order to destroy the ­house.18 While the royal messengers ­were making their dilatory way to Le Mans, Becket interceded on the bishop’s behalf. His intercession was successful, and Henry agreed to make peace with the bishop, assuming that his ­house would by then have already been destroyed. So Henry ordered Becket to write the bishop a new letter, this time making peace with him. Becket craftily sent his own mes­ senger to bear this letter, telling him to rest “neither day nor night” u­ ntil he got to Le Mans.19 Sure enough, Becket’s messenger bearing the letter of peace over­ took the royal messengers who w ­ ere carry­ing the order to have the h ­ ouse de­ stroyed. And he managed to display the letter of peace before the royal messengers ­were able to display (ostendere) the order for the h ­ ouse to be destroyed. By this “honest trick” (dolus bonus), says FitzStephen, Becket saved the bishop from an unjust punishment, and he demonstrated his devotion to the clerical cause even when he worked for its fiercest adversary.20 Becket’s dolus bonus is what medieval administration looked like in action. As FitzStephen rec­ords it, this was a po­liti­cal event that was replete with per­for­mances

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of power and performative from one end to the other. Henry enacted his ira regis by publicly inscribing words on parchment in a way that threatened, indeed au­ thorized, vio­lence.21 The piece of parchment itself was central to the public per­ for­mance of that royal anger and its violent redress. Deployed in the right place at the right time, it had the power to destroy, just as its absence had the power to save. The precise choreography of a literacy event thus exerted a force stronger even than its orchestrator’s original intention. Henry  II had ordered the de­ struction of the bishop’s h ­ ouse: the king wanted it gone. But his letter of peace prevailed over his mandate of destruction b­ ecause the former was displayed in public before the latter. Although Henry’s move was a per­for­mance, and although it was highly per­ formative, that move was also in some senses a bureaucratic one. ­A fter all, he had his o­ rders written ( fecit scribi) by professional scribes, and he had them de­ livered by the professional messengers who made the system of literate royal government pos­si­ble.22 But if this was bureaucracy, it is a long way from the Weberian archetype that shapes modern ideas about what bureaucracy (medi­ eval or modern) looks like. According to Weber, “Bureaucracy develops the more perfectly the more it is ‘dehumanized,’ the more completely it succeeds in elimi­ nating from official business love, hatred, and all purely personal, irrational, and emotional ele­ments which escape calculation.”23 Henry’s move was thoroughly ­human and perfectly emotional. And rather than being structured by discipline, which “like its most rational offspring, bureaucracy, is impersonal,” this trans­ action was entirely personal in nature.24 Discipline, according to Weber, is “in­ trinsically alien to charisma,” and its content “is nothing but the consistently rationalized, methodically prepared and exact execution of the received order . . . ​ [in which] the actor is unswervingly and exclusively set for carry­ing out the com­ mand.”25 In this incident, Becket exploits the inexactitude of Henry II’s system of government, which in this case badly misfired, and this governmental “sys­ tem,” if that is what it was, seems to imbue the written word with charisma rather than replacing charisma with writing. J. R. Strayer thought that the expansion of literacy in high-­medieval ­England stimulated the emergence of the En­glish state ­because “it is difficult to create per­ manent, impersonal institutions without written rec­ords and official docu­ ments.”26 This much is certainly true. But it is less certain that Strayer was right in assuming that “the written document is the best guarantee of permanence and the best insulator between an administrator and personal pressures.”27 When harnessed by the power of lordship, written documents w ­ ere not necessarily a guarantee of anything, least of all insulation from personal pressure. Indeed, the



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written word itself could bring personal pressure to bear on o­ thers, as another example of literate lordship that a history-­writer recorded in this period makes clear. This time the writer is Richard of Devizes. In his account of Richard I’s early reign, Devizes makes the exercise of power through writing seem to be as much a feature of substate activity as evidence for the state’s emergence. The in­ cident took place during the strug­gle between William de Longchamp (bishop of Ely, sometime royal justiciar, royal chancellor, and one of Ralph Diceto’s dedi­ catees, d. 1197) and Hugh du Puiset (bishop of Durham, sometime justiciar, and one of Howden’s likely patrons) over their respective authority during Richard I’s absence on the Crusade. Throughout that strug­gle, Puiset and Longchamp vied for power through the sight and sound of scripta as well as through physical coercion. In this par­tic­u­lar skirmish, Puiset had cornered Longchamp and his war band at Blythe near Lincoln. Puiset had with him a letter from the king, which made him assume that Richard had empowered him to speak freely of “the business of the republic, as if nothing could be done without his say-­so.”28 He acted, that is, as if he w ­ ere r­ unning t­ hings himself, and when he had finished saying to Longchamp t­ hings about which “he should have stayed s­ ilent,” Puiset played what he thought was his trump card. He commanded Longchamp and every­one e­ lse “to be s­ ilent,” and he read out a letter from the king (presumably this was a letter appointing him justiciar of North­umberland). Devizes calls this letter a “club” (clava)—­a weapon—­which was to be recited (recitanda) for all to hear, displayed (monstratur) for all to see.29 Unfortunately for Puiset, his display of writing and his show of power misfired as badly as Henry II’s had in Le Mans, since Longchamp had somehow already heard the letter’s contents elsewhere and had already secured an epistolary counterweapon in response. (Puiset’s letter would have been “much more fearsome,” Devizes comments, had its contents not been heard already.)30 So Longchamp met writing with writing and weapon with weapon, and tricked Puiset into coming alone to the c­ astle at Tickhill, presum­ ably ­under the misapprehension that he would be receiving Longchamp’s sub­ mission. At that point, Longchamp forced his deceived episcopal colleague to read, with his own lips, a letter from Richard that the king had written a­ fter the letter that Puiset had recited. The letter that Longchamp wielded contained a very dif­fer­ent mandate. When Puiset was getting ready to answer, the chancel­ lor said, “The other day, when you w ­ ere speaking, it was my time to keep s­ ilent. Now, in order to make you realize that while you keep ­silent it is my turn to speak. . . . ​You ­will not leave ­here till you have given hostages that you ­will sur­ render to me all the ­castles you hold, for I seize you, not as a bishop seizing an­ other bishop, but as the chancellor seizing a castellan.”31 Longchamp promptly had

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Puiset confined to h ­ ouse arrest in his manor at Howden,32 where he presumably spent his time complaining about it to his friend Roger, Howden’s history-­ writing parson.33 The apparent neutrality of the written word, therefore, could spill over—­ did spill over—­into the vio­lence of hostages, ­castles, and castellans in the blink of an eye. Richard of Devizes, who was supposedly witness to the dawn of a newly bureaucratic age, sounds more like Fulbert of Chartres (bishop of Chartres, d. 1028), the voice of the age of ­castles. For in this situation, as in the one at Le Mans, writing was a physical intervention in a game of personal power. It mattered who read it, when they read it, and how they read it; it mattered who was ­silent and who spoke when they brandished a scriptum in their hands. Using writing had tangible po­liti­cal consequences. Devizes’s anecdote, together with FitzStephen’s story about Le Mans, offers a rather dif­fer­ent perspective on high-­medieval administration than the one usually offered by accounts of “government” in this period. As Bisson has argued, although “what we may speak of as ‘government,’ something culturally distinct from lord­ ship . . . ​intruded, pervasively so, even brutally” in the reign of Henry II, “the story of government” was periodically “drowned out by that of lordship and depen­ dence.”34 So although Puiset and Longchamp may have been bureaucrats in some sense of that word, in Lincolnshire they w ­ ere demonstrably not operating as part of a bureaucratic machine. They w ­ ere using the written word h ­ ere to wield their personal power, not the public power of an institution. According to Max Weber, bureaucratic discipline is “alien” not only to charisma but also to “status honor, especially of a feudal sort. . . . ​The berserk with manic seizures of frenzy and the feudal knight who mea­sures swords with an equal adversary in order to gain per­ sonal honor are equally alien to discipline,” says Weber.35 Longchamp and Puiset’s literate showdown may not have been the work of frenzied berserkers, but ­here they resemble nothing so much as Weber’s feudal knights mea­sur­ing swords. The swords (or “clubs”) they mea­sured, in this case, just happened to be fashioned from writing. And when Longchamp came up with the ­lawyer’s solution of arresting Puiset “as the chancellor seizing a castellan” rather than as “a bishop seizing an­ other bishop,” he only emphasized the fact that the roles of academic ­lawyer, eccle­ siastical dignitary, secular administrator—­and strongman—­were thoroughly confused in the late twelfth ­century.36 When someone wielded power by using writing, it could be less a signal that “government” was at work than proof that lordship had appropriated one of government’s defining technologies. ­These incidents of literate lordship combine literate per­for­mance and per­ formativity: literate lords accomplished tangible ­things by having scripta read out



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and displayed in public; they performed speech-­acts that took written form. In­ deed, the incidents at Le Mans and Tickhill closely resemble what the anthro­ pologist of writing Béatrice Fraenkel has called “acts of reading,” that is, “a scene of reading which also bears witness to an act.”37 In acts of reading, such perfor­ mative utterances as Henry II’s order to destroy the bishop’s h ­ ouse and Richard I’s appointment of Puiset to be justiciar of the North retain their performative force even ­after they have been translated into writing,38 all the while they har­ ness “the par­tic­u­lar force of reading in a public place.” In ­these situations, Fraen­ kel argues, “It is not only the message which has this force. . . . ​It is also the fact that it is on display in public.” In both ­these incidents, the public display of writ­ ing is absolutely fundamental to its effectiveness. In reports of acts of reading, meanwhile (i.e., in reports such as t­ hose of FitzStephen and Devizes), Fraenkel says that “the emphasis is more on the situation in which the message is received than on what it means. It is the fact of ‘looking at’ and not just reading the in­ scription that has an effect.”39 The per­for­mances that surround the acts of read­ ing at Le Mans and Tickhill—­the reading aloud, the demands for silence, the brandishing of parchment, and the menacing postures that we can only now imagine—­all work to amplify the force of the publicly seen text. Acts of reading depended on lordship for their coercive potential, all the while they helped make acts of lordship coercive in the first place.

Writing Acts If t­ hese accounts of public reading lay bare the mutually reinforcing interplay between literate and lordly force, that interplay is also clear from accounts of pub­ lic writing acts from this period. Gervase of Canterbury offers just such an ac­ count when he reports how Richard I put an end decisively to the interminable negotiations between Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, and the monks of Christ Church Cathedral Priory about who had the right to appoint the con­ vent’s prior. Gervase reports that when Baldwin and the monks fi­nally agreed to submit to royal arbitration, Richard demanded that that agreement be put in writing, in public. When the monks requested yet another delay, Richard lost patience: “I w ­ on’t [grant it],” he fumed. “I w ­ on’t wait any longer for you. . . . ​Sum­ mon me a scribe to write down, in front of us all, [the names of] the judges I’ll nominate.”40 Using this sort of public writing meant that every­one could see that Richard had made a decision, and every­one could see what Richard had de­cided. Another public writing act from the Age of the Angevins, and perhaps the

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defining writing act from this period, is the drafting, in public, of the chirograph recording the Constitutions of Clarendon. This scriptum was the flashpoint of the conflict between Henry II and Thomas Becket, and although historians t­ oday tend to be more interested in the contents of the chirograph than the pro­cess that created it, it is the latter that catches the attention of con­temporary history-­ writers, almost all of whom had something to say about it.41 For contempo­ raries, the episode was absolutely central to the conflict between Becket and Henry, and if we think of it as a writing act rather than a bureaucratic maneu­ ver, it is clear why. By having the Constitutions written down, Henry was turn­ ing unwritten customary princi­ples into lex scripta,42 and while Becket as primate possibly could have agreed to the former, accepting the latter from the king’s hand would have meant submitting to secular jurisdiction. And d­ oing so in public would have multiplied the force of that submission. So, according to most con­ temporary accounts, Becket agreed verbally and in private to uphold the customs of the time of Henry I but refused then to put his seal publicly to the scriptum putting ­those customs in writing. It is striking how closely con­temporary history-­ writers focus on the way Henry made Becket accept the written constitutions in public. Although it is unclear exactly when during the council of Clarendon Henry had the chirograph drawn up,43 contemporaries report that it was de­ signed to be ­either created in public or subsequently read out and then divided in public, and it was the combination of the publicness and the writtenness of the procedure that (according to Becket’s supporters) lay at the root of its insidi­ ousness. Edward Grim’s Henry II makes clear to Becket that this publicness was only fair: Becket had impugned the laws of the kingdom in public (said Henry), so he should make amends by confirming their validity in audientia publica.44 By receiving a part of the chirograph in public view (“in the sight [conspectus] of the bishops and magnates of the kingdom,” as Herbert of Bosham put it),45 Becket was both validating its contents and enacting a kind of submission to Henry. Al­ though chirographs ­were typically used for treaties and other agreements be­ tween ­people,46 ­there was ­little in this ceremony that suggested a relationship of equality between Becket and Henry as the respective heads of regnum and sacerdotium in ­England. Rather, the procedure had ­every characteristic of a charter-­ giving ceremony, as if the Constitutions ­were being conceded to Becket in an act of lordly indulgence. Its graphic publicness was central to its po­liti­cal force: every­ one in the audientia publica could see that Becket had accepted the written Constitutions by accepting part of the chirograph. His accountability was en­ sured by the way that Henry disseminated the scriptum, which was divided into three, one part ­going to Becket, one to the archbishop of York, and one to the



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royal archives.47 By disseminating it in this way, Henry multiplied the written witnesses to Becket’s act of submission, compounding the affective power of lord­ ship with cool administrative strategy.

Acts of Reading, Writing Acts, and Literate Government Chroniclers in the Age of the Angevins moved in the shadows of such strong­ men as Henry II and Richard I, and they ­were friends with such strongmen as Longchamp and Puiset. They wrote for them; they may even have been strong­ men themselves.48 So they, and hommes d’ écriture like them, would frequently have been involved in occasions in which the written word was used as an in­ strument for making personal conflicts vis­i­ble and for making them public. How­ den’s and Diceto’s professional life, if we can speak of such a t­ hing, thus involved participating in literate per­for­mances, ­either by viewing them as spectators or by choreographing them themselves. Writing had a starring role in t­ hose per­for­ mances, and writing was itself performative in the sense that it was the writing that was ­doing t­ hings in t­ hose incidents. Literate lordship is as impor­tant a context in which to situate the history-­ writing of the Age of the Angevins as literate government. That context is impor­tant not b­ ecause Howden, Diceto, and other history-­writers spent all their time surrounded by literate lords, although they may have spent much of their time in their com­pany. Literate lordship is a useful framework for under­ standing ­these texts, b­ ecause the strategies of publicness and per­for­mance that animated literate lordship can also be detected in some of the more straightfor­ wardly governmental documents that Angevin history-­writers reproduce. Un­ derstanding the connections between literate lordship and literate government, therefore, promises to shed light on the relationship of history-­writing to both ­these phenomena and the relationship with each of them in turn. Perhaps more impor­tant, understanding t­ hese phenomena promises to reveal the common in­ terests that history-­writing, government, and lordship all shared in the written word’s visibility and in the publicness of the written word. I want to turn to the question of writing’s visibility now. In each of the literacy events that I have discussed in this chapter, the visibility of writing has been funda­ mental to the moves that literate lords used writing to make. And it is very striking that Howden and Diceto also emphasize the public and highly vis­i­ble character of the written word even when they are recording literacy events that are often thought to be routine and bureaucratic rather than charismatic or lordly.

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Howden’s account of the General Eyre of 1194 offers a very good example of this. In September 1194, Howden says in his Chronica, “itinerant judges ­were sent to hear pleas throughout ­every county of ­England on behalf of the king and proceeded according to the form of the categories written below.”49 The capitula that Howden then reproduces prescribe the form that t­ hese hearings should take, complete with the per­for­mances that should accompany them. The capitula Judaeorum, for ex­ ample, stated that “all the debts and pledges of the Jews are to be embreved. . . . ​And six or seven places should be appointed in which the Jews are to make their loans; and two lawful Jews, two lawful Christians and two lawful scribes should be ap­ pointed, and all loans are to be made before them, as well as a clerk of William of Sainte-­Mère-­Église and William de Chemillé. And charters of the loans ­shall be made [before them] in the form of a chirograph. . . . ​And the clerks of the aforesaid William and William should have a roll of transcriptions of all the charters, and if the charters should be changed, so should the roll.”50 The capitula then prescribe an elaborate system of cross-­sealing and stipulate that one part of the chirographs should be kept in a triple-­locked chest (“in arca communis”), one key of which would be held by the two “lawful” Christians, one by the two “lawful” Jews, and one by the two clerks. Howden reports that Richard I ordered a similar procedure to be followed when he levied the so-­called carucage of 1198 (the carucage was a form of aid levied on each carucate of plough-­land). According to Howden, the carucage was to be collected jointly by one knight, one clerk, and the sheriff: “And by the king’s command they levied first two, and then three shillings on ­every caru­ cate of ploughable land, and all this was put down in writing (in scriptum redigebantur). And accordingly the clerk had one roll, and the knight another, the sheriff a third and the seneschal of the barons a fourth roll relating to the land of his lord . . . ​and the sheriff answered to the Exchequer in re­spect of t­ hese rolls in the presence of the bishops, abbots and barons assigned to this [task].”51 ­These examples of governmental writing suggest that royal administration depended on the same coercive publicness and visibility that also animated lit­ erate lordship. Th ­ ese two royal statutes explic­itly invoke (or convoke) a viewing audience for the literacy events they prescribe. The capitula Judaeorum stipulate that chirographs, which ­were shared scripta by definition, should be made be­ fore an audience of ten whose presence alone validated the deeds the chirographs recorded. The 1198 statute stipulates that when the sheriff had collected the ca­ rucage and had publicly recorded the sums received on his roll, he must answer for his roll at the Exchequer, “in the presence of the bishops, abbots and barons assigned to this [task].”52 When the sheriff presented his accounts, therefore, he played a part in a literate spectacle that was already notable for its theatricality.53



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Indeed, the Exchequer itself offers a further example of the centrality of per­ for­mances to literate government. In Richard FitzNigel’s con­temporary ac­ count of the Exchequer, the Dialogus de Scaccario, FitzNigel (who himself also wrote a now-­lost work of universal history) makes clear that public accountabil­ ity, one of the defining features of government, depended on the visibility and publicness of writing acts.54 According to the Dialogus, when a sheriff returned his accounts at the Exchequer, this was an event that took place—­literally—on a stage. The return was ­there for all to see. FitzNigel figured the Exchequer as a “tournament,” in which “­battle” was joined between sheriff and trea­surer. This was not a private b­ attle, therefore, but one fought before a judicial audience who sat so they could “see and judge” it.55 Once a sheriff had read his account out aloud, and the judges had seen and heard it, that account was subject to further public re-­viewings and public rewritings. The scribes sat in such a way that the clerks of the officers of the Exchequer could oversee and survey the rolls that they wrote. According to FitzNigel, the trea­sur­er’s scribe would sit next to the trea­ surer, “in order that nothing was written that would escape his eyes.”56 Next to the scribe of the chancellor’s roll sat the clericus cancellarii, who “ ‘ by the trust­ worthiness of sight’ (oculata fides) ensures that his roll corresponds to the other in e­ very detail.”57 Superficially, the visibility of the rolls and the pro­cess of en­ rollment at the Exchequer, just as in the carucage and in the enbreving of Jewish debts, was simply a means by which scribes could avoid making m ­ istakes and by which their overseers could detect fraud. (The overseer’s scribe “must have the eyes of a lynx not to make any m ­ istakes,” says the student in FitzNigel’s dia­ 58 logue). Yet the publicness of writing in t­ hese situations was about more than just quality control. The high visibility of writing was essential to its social power: it served to bind together t­ hose who saw the transactions, as joint witnesses to (and of) them. This has distinctly po­liti­cal implications. As with the renewal of charters by inspeximus,59 ­these scripta become res publicae, by which the validat­ ing audience at the moment of inscription and the audience who reviewed them when they ­were reproduced in history-­writing w ­ ere both constituted and bound to one another.

Vis­i­ble History, Vicarious Recollection The examples of literate per­for­mances that I have been surveying in this chapter suggest that we need to be more attuned to the social dimensions of the scripta that historians reproduced and that we need to understand the scripta they

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reproduced as events—­literacy events and historical events. The big question that this opens up, however, is what the relationship was between the literacy events that history-­writers recorded and the historiographical copies of the scripta that had once been ­those events’ focus. How, in other words, did history-­writing evoke the performative power of writing, given that the per­for­mances that had once surrounded that writing ­were now over? History-­writers themselves, for exam­ ple, sometimes seem to acknowledge that the performative presence of a scriptum, with all the trappings of lordly power that came with it, could not easily be evoked in a new context. Roger of Howden, for example, reports that Adam of St. Edmunds, a clericus and familiaris of Count John, had been caught red-­handed by the mayor of London with written mandates “to arm [Count John’s] ­castles against his ­brother the king.”60 Once the mayor of London had handed the let­ ters over to Hubert Walter (who was at this point Richard I’s justiciar), Hubert “convened the bishops, earls, and barons of the kingdom before him, [and] showed (ostendit) them Count John’s letter and its contents (litteras . . . ​et earum tenorem).”61 Just as the physical presence of a scriptum was crucial in FitzStephen’s Le Mans episode, in this case the oral exposition of the contents of the letter would have been incomplete without the public display of the original letter it­ self. Hubert Walter’s act of reading bore witness to Adam’s writing act: not only did every­body hear evidence of John’s guilt, but they could see it too. John’s man­ dates w ­ ere both visual evidence of his treachery and its physical manifestation.62 In a letter that one of Becket’s clerks sent to his master from this period, mean­ while, the clerk makes a similar point, emphasizing that a scriptum’s power was only truly effective when both its contents and its written medium ­were in play. Becket’s clerk reports how he and his colleagues had “set forth the king’s customs [i.e., the Constitutions of Clarendon] orally (verbo narrauimus)” to Empress Matilda, Henry II’s ­mother, “­because Master H[erbert] had lost the sheet of parchment (scedulam).”63 This oral exposition, presumably from memory, did not satisfy Matilda, who “commanded us to send to you for a copy of the customs themselves (propter consuetudines illas).” When they fi­nally found a copy, she “or­ dered us to read them out in Latin and expound them in French (eas latine legere, et exponere gallice).”64 The implication is that Matilda did not just need to know what ­those customs ­were but needed them physically in her presence, voiced in French but si­mul­ta­neously presented in all their Latin writtenness, in order to judge ­whether Becket’s complaints about them w ­ ere justified. The distinctions that t­ hese incidents reveal between a material scriptum and its immaterial tenor—­between its physical form and its contents, meaning and force—­suggests that history-­writing could not wholly re-­create the performative



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force of a scriptum’s original physical presence. At best, history-­writing could de­ pict a two-­dimensional image of its physical form and describe the per­for­ mances that had once accompanied it. That is, history-­writing could show how a scriptum had been both a literacy event and a historical one, but it could not re-­create that event in its entirety. This does not mean that scripta had once been charged with meaning and force “in the plenitude of experience,”65 only to lose it once they w ­ ere alienated into the external sphere of written history. As Ann Rigney argues, the contrast between supposedly “lived memory” and history—­ lived memory’s external, written counterpart—is more apparent than real. Writ­ ten history is not a less immediate form of memory than any other, argues Rigney; all shared memories of the past “are the product of mediation, textual­ ization and acts of communication.”66 Cultural memory, Rigney writes, is “al­ ways ‘external’ . . . ​in that it pertains by definition to other ­people’s experiences as ­these have been relayed . . . ​through vari­ous public media and multiple acts of communication. . . . ​To the extent that cultural memory is the product of repre­ sen­ta­tions and not of direct experience, it is by definition a ­matter of vicarious recollection.”67 Rigney’s model of vicarious recollection is a power­ful tool, I think, for un­ derstanding medieval documentary culture and its historiographical inflections. The notion of vicarious recollection allows us to grasp how the social power of scripta could transcend the confines of the literacy events that created them and live on in the histories that re-­created them, even if the performative presence of the original scripta could not. The clearest con­temporary historiographical ex­ ample of this pro­cess can perhaps be found in Roger of Howden’s account of the marriage between Henry II’s ­daughter, Joanna, and William II, the king of Sic­ ily (d. 1189). Howden uses a fairly straightforward narrative in his Gesta to tell the story of how Joanna traveled to Sicily in 1177. But when he goes on to repro­ duce the charter by which William granted her dowry, the public and vis­i­ble po­ tential of documentary discourse ­really comes to the fore. Howden pre­sents the wedding charter as if it not only corroborated the fact, which Howden notes in his own narrative, that Joanna “dotata est honorifice” following her wedding and coronation.68 Rather, Howden pre­sents the charter as a means by which his au­ dience could themselves see the vehicle by which that gift was given.69 As the ru­ bric for the charter in Howden’s Chronica puts it, “This is the charter of William king of Sicily, which he made for Joanna d­ aughter of Henry king of E ­ ngland for her dowry, and by which he endowed her on the day of her wedding.”70 As How­ den pre­sents it, the charter in the chronicle is not a copy of an original.71 He pre­sents it rather as if it w ­ ere the original. And rather than being some token of

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Figure 2. ​William of Apulia’s seal, as depicted by Roger of Howden in his Chronica. © British Library Board. London, British Library, Royal MS 14 C II, fol. 160 v.

owner­ship, some symbol of possession, proving her rights over her new lands, the charter’s text claims to embody the act of giving in its very writing: “­Because it is truly appropriate for our highness that such a noble and con­spic­u­ous marriage should be honored by a fitting dowry, through this document (per hoc scriptum) we give and concede the county of Monte Sant’Angelo to our beloved wife the queen in dowry, as it is written below.” 72 Howden reproduces the entire text of the charter in all its remarkable solemnity. The charter enumerates who wrote it



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(William’s notary Alexander), how it was sealed (with a golden bull impressed by William’s typarium), and who witnessed its donation (no fewer than thirty of William’s familiares signed it). It also states exactly when and by whose hand it was given. To complete the picture, Howden reproduces William’s bulla too.73 By reproducing the scriptum in its entirety, and by depicting the bulla that authenticated it, Howden connects his chronicle and its readers (his audience) to the literacy event that the charter recorded and to its original audience. What the charter’s original audience saw, Howden’s readers see also; they can witness the scriptum, even if they ­were not themselves inscribed on the charter’s witness list.74 The highly visual strategy that Howden adopts h ­ ere is surely related to a de­ sire, on his part, to establish the authenticity of the scriptum that he was offer­ ing his readers (“I saw the original scriptum with my own eyes,” he seems to be telling them, “and this is what it looked like”). But Howden also gestures h ­ ere ­toward the strongly visual nature of history-­writing, which it shared with docu­ mentary discourse on the one hand and with literate lordship and government on the other. As Alfred Hiatt has stated, in the ­Middle Ages “the experience of documentation [was] visual as well as lexical,” and “documents [­were] to be seen as well as read.”75 What historians offered their audiences when they reproduced scripta, ­either lordly or governmental, was a kind of vicarious eyewitness testi­ mony to the literacy events that they recorded. The oculata fides of the chancel­ lor’s clerk at FitzNigel’s Exchequer, who oversaw ­others as they produced scripta, can a­ fter all also be found being claimed as the authority for the history written by FitzNigel’s contemporaries, who emphasized that they wrote about what they had seen: Herbert of Bosham explic­itly invoked “oculata fides” to emphasize his own role as an eyewitness.76 The connections between eyewitness, history-­writing, and scripta that their common interest in oculata fides suggest, furthermore, are also implicit in medieval theories of history. According to Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, whose definition of historia was more or less axiomatic in the Age of the Angevins,77 historia took its name from the Greek verb historein (to see or to know), and “among the ancients no one would write history u­ nless he had been pre­sent and had seen what was to be written down.”78 Nor was it just the quality of its eyewitness testimonium that made history visual for Isidore. History was also visual ­because it was committed to writing. As  D.  H. Green explains, “[Isidore’s] founding of history on what an eyewitness had beheld for himself should have confined it to con­temporary history . . . ​[but] if a gap thus opens up between the original eyewitness and the historian’s account, this has to be bridged in a reliable way if his account is to be as reliable as if composed by the eyewit­ ness. Isidore sees this reliable bridge in writing.” This doubly visual conception

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of history means, Green suggests, that “reliable written sources may replace eye­ witnesses in a civilization whose historical consciousness is matched by a high degree of literacy.”79 Of course, the “replacement” of eyewitnesses with reliable written sources meant that the “witness” that history-­writers offered their read­ ers when they reproduced literacy events was qualitatively dif­fer­ent from the wit­ ness of t­hose who experienced t­hose events firsthand. Yet history-­writing evoked, albeit in an indirect and vicarious way, the per­for­mances of power that surrounded writing in the Age of the Angevins, ­whether that writing was used in the “routine” course of government or wielded by literate lords. The examples of literacy events and their repre­sen­ta­tion in history-­writing that I have been exploring ­here suggest, therefore, that we need to rethink history-­ writers’ relationships with literate government. Writers in the Age of the An­ gevins w ­ ere as interested in the lordly inflection of literate power as they w ­ ere in its governmental counterpart. This does not mean that we should assume ­these histories had nothing to do with government, ­because they clearly did. But we should think more carefully about exactly how that government used writing and how history-­writers responded to that use. As ­these examples show, literate gov­ ernment did not happen ­behind closed doors in this period. Or rather, if it did, ­there ­were plenty of ­people inside to see it happening.80 So if a history-­writer re­ produced a scriptum in his chronicle, that did not necessarily mean that he had private or even particularly privileged access to it. On the contrary, the written word in the High ­Middle Ages was most po­liti­cally effective—­perhaps only truly effective—­when it was used in public. The pro­cesses outlined in the capitula Judaeorum and in the instructions for collecting the carucage, which insist on gathering together an audience for writing, suggest that chroniclers appropriated the public role for writing that administrative scripta demanded. Chroniclers gave scripta a new audience, in other words. Scripta ­were thus power­ful po­liti­cal tools ­because they demonstrated that their authors had the means to call on literate resources and the authority to summon an audience to see them in action. And they ­were more power­ful still if their authors had the cultural capital to call on a history-­writer to set that literacy event before the eyes of posterity. So instead of providing evidence for medieval chroniclers’ personal fascination with “offi­ cial documents” and with central government, the reproduction of scripta in chronicles shows that chronicles themselves participated in the public prolifera­ tion of scripta, on which the power of literate government—­and literate lords—­ depended.

chapter 5

Literate Languages

Before the history-­writers of the Age of the Angevins reproduced scripta in their histories and before ­those scripta had circulated through history-­writers’ net­ works of literate friendship, they had been performed in public as literacy events. Scripta ­were spectacles of lettered power: like the escripture that Wace had invoked in the prologue to his Roman de Rou, historiographical scripta had been litte e retraite—­read and recited—­before an audience constituted to witness their presence. Before they went on to circulate more widely as writing, therefore, au­ diences experienced scripta as a combination of sight and sound. Th ­ ose scripta ­were displayed for all to see, and they w ­ ere voiced and spoken by a reader. But although chroniclers’ prose preserves the vis­i­ble written instruments of literate lordship in Latin, the acts of reading t­ hose scripta represented would not neces­ sarily have taken place in that language. Largely but not exclusively monolingual though scripta ­were,1 they belonged to a multilingual world. What documents’ scribes had written in one language, their audiences would likely have heard in another when someone was reciting them.2 So, for example, when William de Longchamp read out Richard I’s letter ordering him to arrest Hugh du Puiset (which I discussed in Chapter 4), he would likely have done so in French as well as in Latin, which Hugh’s own war band—­and perhaps the famously unlearned Hugh himself—­could not easily understand. This kind of multilingual practice was entirely typical of the period’s literate culture. An anecdote that Gerald of Wales offers in his Life of Geoffrey Plantagenet (half-­brother of Richard and John and archbishop of York, d. 1212) suggests that simultaneous translation was en­ tirely necessary for the kind of public epistolary warfare that engulfed William de Longchamp and brought about his downfall.3 Gerald reports that when Walter de Coutances met Count John and other ­great En­glish magnates near Reading in order to announce his own quasiregal authority over ­England, Coutances

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“had . . . ​vari­ous copies of letters that he had brought back from the king read out in public (in publica audientia legi fecit) . . . ​with the Bishop of Coventry [i.e., Hugh de Nonant] accurately translating every­thing for the barons” who w ­ ere pre­ sent.4 Literate and po­liti­cal culture in this period ­were thus dynamically poly­ glot, and if it is true that the literate lords of the Age of the Angevins defined their social position partly on the basis of their relationship with writing,5 the social valences of using writing ­were compounded by the social valences of using par­tic­u ­lar languages. On the one hand, literate lords spoke French in the higher courts and in the Exchequer where they operated (and prob­ably in the chancery too).6 On the other hand, they owed their position at least in part to their mastery of written Latin.7 And as polyglot mediators between the Anglophone culture of the governed and the Francophone culture of the government—­a mediatory task that William de Longchamp infamously got wrong8—­literate lords ­were in contact with three dif­fer­ent languages at once, each of which had a distinct relationship to writing.9 In this chapter I put the languages of literate lordship and government and the languages of Angevin history-­writing center stage. I do this not simply b­ ecause multilingualism forms part of the background to the historical writing of the Age of the Angevins or ­because multilingualism is an impor­tant dimension of its cultural context, although of course it is both. I do this, rather, ­because the production of history-­writing in multiple languages is in itself testimony to the changing configuration of literacy in this period. If the relationship between spo­ ken language and written language and the relationships between dif­fer­ent lan­ guages of writing underwent profound changes in this period,10 ­these changes ­were driven partly by figures like Walter de Coutances and William de Long­ champ, who patronized history-­writing and used the written word to exercise their secular power. Moreover, b­ ecause history-­writing was a genre that was so dependent on the written word—­because it was epistemologically so closely in­ tertwined with the written word—­history-­writing itself played a central role in reconfiguring the landscape of literacy and language. Just such a reconfiguration is traced out in the prologue to Wace’s Roman de Rou, which is a text, as I have already argued, that offers power­ful witness to the literate per­for­mances fundamental both to this period’s literary and admin­ istrative cultures. Almost the entire prologue of Wace’s Rou is an encomium for the vernacular written word, and in it Wace argues for that medium’s usefulness for a carefully but capaciously defined social group. For Wace, writing offered stability in a crumbling world that was ravaged by the passage of time. “Tute rien turne en declin,” says Wace, “Tut cheit, tut moert, tut trait a fin, / Tut funt, tut



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cheit . . . ​tuit murrunt, e clerc e lai, E que mult ad curte duree / Enprés la mort lur renumee / Si par clerc ne est mis en livre” (Every­thing decays, every­thing falls into ruin. Every­thing dies, every­thing comes to an end . . . ​every­one dies, clerks and laypeople alike, and . . . ​their fame does not survive a­ fter their death if it is not set down in a book by a clerk).11 In fact, he adds, “Meis par les bons clers ki escristrent, / E les gestes as livres mistrent, / Savum nus del viez tens parler, / E  de oevres plusurs cunter” (We [only] know how to talk of ancient times ­because of the good clerks who wrote ­things down, and who set down histo­ ries into books).12 To be sure, observations about the written word such as ­these are not uncommon in Latin history-­writing from this period (their contemptus-­ mundi tone brings to mind Henry of Huntingdon’s Historia Anglorum, written in the 1120s–30s).13 But unlike Latin writers, who ­either lauded the virtues of the written word in general or assumed that the written word in general meant writ­ ten Latin, Wace ­here is making a case for the use of the written vernacular. Wace argues for written vernacularity (or vernacular writtenness) partly through the very fact of writing history down in French. He argues for it partly through his insistence that only written history had the power to rec­ord the sort of linguistic change of which vernacular history-­writing itself was a consequence. (Wace meditates at length, for example, on how linguistic changes [what he calls the “muement de languages”] have conspired to rob many places of their original names:14 “We would be able to say ­little or nothing about the transformations of ­these names,” Wace says, “and about the deeds we are speaking about, if p­ eople had not had them written down.”)15 And the vernacularity of the writing that Wace has in mind, fi­nally, is clear from the way that he suddenly lurches into the pre­sent tense at the end of his prologue. Unlike the handsomely endowed—­ and presumably Latinate—­history-­writers of the past, Wace complains, he could barely scrape together enough “to hire a scribe for a month.”16 So Wace appeals directly “to the rich and power­f ul ­people (la riche gent) who have property and money: it is ­because of them that books are made, and good tales composed and performed well.”17 Wace is appealing for money to write the kind of book that his elite audience was hearing at that very moment—­a history book, that is, written in French. Wace h ­ ere is arguing for the importance of vernacular written history, and he is arguing for vernacular history’s importance in the social life of a secular elite whose members valued the written word.18 Wace is arguing, in other words, for a convergence between a par­tic­u­lar social group—­the rich and power­ful men and ­women who performed their social status at the kind of public assemblies I ex­ plored in Chapter 3—­and a par­tic­u­lar form of textuality. French could be both

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a language of memory and a visibly bookish language of written rec­ord, Wace implies, and it therefore had utility for anyone who wielded secular power, ­whether they w ­ ere aristocrats or administrators. While Wace was unusual in making such a direct and vocal case for vernac­ ular history, he was not alone in this period in arguing that written French was a particularly appropriate medium through which to remember the deeds of the social elite. But rather than engaging in the kind of metatexual commentary that Wace had offered, some of Wace’s history-­writing contemporaries used their own documentary practices to argue that French could function as an authoritative language of elite written memory. As I w ­ ill show in more detail shortly, in Jor­ dan Fantosme’s French Estoire of the civil war of 1173–74 (a text more widely known as Fantosme’s Chronicle),19 Fantosme demonstrates that written French was not only potentially a tool of elite communication but that it could take on a historiographical—­and documentary—­role too. Simply put, Fantosme quoted French scripta in the French history that he wrote for Francophone literate lords. Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, meanwhile, did something very similar in his Vie de Saint Thomas, a text, Guernes claimed, that was in high demand among “riche umme” (rich, power­ful men).20 As Thomas O’Donnell has argued, Guernes’s “command of primary documents” in the Vie enabled it to break new ground for French history-­writing. Rather than claiming to be a translation of some ­earlier Latin history, the Vie “appropriat[ed] Latin historiographical meth­ ods.”21 And unlike Gaimar, who had based his Estoire des Engleis on ­earlier Latin and En­glish texts in the mid-­twelfth c­ entury,22 Guernes “wagered that his French-­language history could be taken as authoritative without reference to Latin or En­glish originals.”23 ­Because Guernes’s and Fantosme’s pioneering use of French scripta offer such a good illustration of this period’s literate and linguistic innovation, I am ­going to focus on t­ hose texts in most of the rest of this chapter. And b­ ecause ­these texts are less well known than ­those by Gaimar and Wace, I w ­ ill introduce them in detail before ­going on to analyze their use of scripta. Written within a few years of one another in the early 1170s,24 and possibly in some sort of adversarial dia­ logue,25 Guernes’s and Fantosme’s texts, audiences, and biographies share strik­ ing similarities. Both texts ­were written shortly ­after the deeply traumatic events that they narrated: Guernes started working on his Vie in 1171, in the aftermath of the bloody culmination of the Becket conflict; Fantosme wrote his Estoire in the wake of the rebellion of Henry the Young King and his En­g lish and Scottish baronial allies against Henry II, which took place three years ­after Becket’s death (the Young King was Henry’s eldest son and heir, whom Henry



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had had crowned king in 1170). Perhaps b­ ecause of their traumatic content, both texts are highly innovative in their literary form. Like Wace and Gaimar, Fantosme and Guernes wrote in French. Unlike them, however, they did not use the octosyllabic rhyming couplets favored by authors of romances.26 Fan­ tosme wrote his Estoire in epic French verse, using a paratactic style and a novel prosodic form that partly resembled that of the chansons de geste, the archetypi­ cal stories of feudal rebellion.27 Guernes also eschewed octosyllabic couplets, even though they ­were the most common (if not exclusive) prosodic form used for saints’ lives written in French in this period; and like Fantosme’s Estoire, Guernes’s Vie was also indebted to the form of the chanson de geste.28 Both Guernes and Fantosme, therefore, experimented with using vernacular scripta in histo­ ries that w ­ ere not only written in a language generally associated more with speech than with writing but that w ­ ere also written in a form—­epic verse—­ that evoked the oralizing gestures of the epic.29 (And the epic cast of t­ hese texts’ form is underscored by their allusions to the heroes of the Charlemagne cycle and their use of motifs drawn from it.)30 ­These two histories resemble one another in their form, therefore, and both texts use French scripta as part of their formal experiments. The background of their authors was similar too. Despite impor­tant differences in their respective social positions, both Guernes and Fantosme moved in the world of lettered power; they both addressed that world in their works. Fantosme the historian was almost certainly the same figure as the scholar (and scholastic) “Jordanus Fan­ tasma,” who was master of the schools in Winchester31 and is depicted at the feet of the theologian Gilbert of Poitiers in the manuscript of one of Gilbert’s works.32 But as well as being a scholar, Fantosme was a man of the world. In his maneuverings at Winchester, he proved himself a “dangerous litigant,” using his knowledge of law and his command of writing to wrest control of the schools from a rival.33 He had served in the ­house­hold of the Bishop of Winchester, Henry of Blois (d. 1171), who was Henry I’s nephew and had acted as kingmaker a­ fter Henry I’s death—­a nd was one of the richest and most power­f ul men in the Anglo-­Norman regnum.34 Fantosme had worked alongside John of Salisbury and Becket himself in the Canterbury curia,35 and by the time he wrote his Estoire, he was “working directly u­ nder one of E ­ ngland’s most prominent administra­ tors,” Richard of Ilchester.36 (Richard was Henry of Blois’s successor as bishop of Winchester, and he was a literate lord, who “by the king’s order, . . . ​exercised the greatest power throughout E ­ ngland.”)37 Despite writing in the vernacular therefore, Fantosme moved in similar—­and perhaps the same—­circles of hommes d’écriture as his Latinate contemporaries Howden and Diceto. Like Howden’s

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sometime patron Hugh du Puiset, for example, Fantosme was a member of Henry of Blois’s h ­ ouse­hold, and together they may have numbered among ­those fratres who witnessed the bishop’s gifts to the cathedral on his deathbed along with Henry II’s confirmation of them.38 Walter de Coutances, Diceto’s friend and dedicatee, “owed his initial advancement to his ­brother, Roger Fitz­ Reinfred, who was . . . ​a member of the ­house­hold of Richard de Lucy and served regularly as a baron of the exchequer”;39 FitzReinfred was just the sort of “mid­ dling” literate lord that Geoff Rector has identified as being central to Fantosme’s audience.40 Fantosme, therefore, moved in circles of administrating strongmen who both patronized history-­writing and featured prominently within it. For Fantosme, furthermore, the war he wrote about was no abstraction: his Estoire contains eyewitness testimony to the skirmishes in the Scottish Borders, to where he may have been sent on an “intelligence-­gathering mission”41 and where he would have surely had direct contact with the kind of literate “spies” who figure prominently in the Estoire, who gathered information, bore letters, and medi­ ated between warring parties.42 Fantosme’s social world, therefore, was the world of literate lords, in which literate and physical po­liti­cal power converged. Our picture of Guernes is much murkier: we only know what he himself tells us in his Vie, but it is evident there that Guernes, like Fantosme, was highly Latinate and highly literate.43 Guernes was born in the Île-­de-­France44 and became a literate cleric and professional writer45 who, it seems, was never attached to “a strong patronage network” in the manner of Fantosme.46 But although Guernes himself operated at one remove from the kind of power­f ul literate circles that Fantosme moved in, he enjoyed patronage from t­ hose who did. As well as the many “riche umme” whom he said had sought out his work, Guernes says that his work found f­ avor with Becket’s ­sister Mary, who was ab­ bess of Barking Abbey. Mary honored Guernes with hospitality and with gifts, he says.47 Guernes also thanks Prior Odo of Christ Church, Canterbury, for provisioning him during his lengthy stay at the priory, where he rewrote the Vie.48 Odo had made power­f ul friends and enemies on both sides of the Becket ­ attle Abbey relates, he would go on to be a conflict,49 and as the Chronicle of B virtuoso choreographer of public acts of reading.50 Guernes’s Vie of Becket was thus “written ­under the eyes of the highly literate and accomplished communi­ ties at Christ Church and Barking.”51 Fi­nally, Guernes, like Fantosme, was no stranger to war, even though he, like Fantosme, was a clerk: Guernes claims that he had himself witnessed Becket taking the battlefield in Normandy back when Becket was still Henry’s chancellor: “Jeol vi sur Franceis plusurs feiz chevalchier” (I myself saw him ­ride out against the French on several occa­



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sions), Guernes says.52 (One won­ders what Guernes’s role in this campaign was, given that he had found himself on a battlefield.) Of course, ­there are impor­tant differences between the Estoire and the Vie— in details of their form, in their overall purposes, and indeed in their use of scripta—­and I do not wish to homogenize t­ hose differences h ­ ere. But it would be wrong, I think, to conclude that Guernes addressed his work to a largely aris­ tocratic audience, which had a refined literate sensibility and was appreciative of the conventions of Latin historiography, while Fantosme addressed his Estoire to the feudal warriors around the lord-­king in the royal court,53 indulging their apparently primal desire for oralizing epic.54 I would argue, rather, that the many similarities between ­these texts, and especially the similarities in the way that they locate written vernacular texts in the realm of oral per­for­mance, indicate an impor­tant potential overlap between their audiences. That is to say, both Guernes and Fantosme treat the French written word as an idiom capable of remember­ ing all ­those to whom the written word mattered—­whether they w ­ ere aristocrats with a long pedigree whose ancestry was to be monumentalized or power­ful ad­ ministrators whose mastery of writing gave them a power and a place in the world that needed to be commemorated. In their experiments with vernacular textuality, I suggest, Fantosme and Guernes forged an alliance between the id­ iom of aristocratic remembrance (French epic verse) and the written technology that defined the status of the period’s literate lords.

Jordan Fantosme’s Estoire I want to turn my attention to Fantosme’s and Guernes’s accounts of the French written word now, and I ­will begin my analy­sis by looking closely at the role of written correspondence in Fantosme’s Estoire. The first t­ hing to say h ­ ere is that letters are in some re­spects as impor­tant to the Estoire as a piece of history-­writing as they are to the Latin histories written in this period.55 And just as the letters in Latin histories w ­ ere as much a part of their content as their form—­chroniclers’ Latin scripta represented “literacy events” that had taken place in the past56—­ Fantosme pre­sents the exchange and per­for­mance of the written word as if they too w ­ ere central events in the rebellion against Henry II.57 Unlike Latin chron­ icles, however, whose form had much in common with registers and letter col­ lections and whose authors did their best to make scripta appear as if they had an entirely natu­ral place in their texts,58 Fantosme seems to use scripta in the Estoire in order to defamiliarize them. That is, he uses written correspondence

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very self-­consciously, and it seems he does so in part to draw attention to both the historiographical and social dynamics of epistolarity itself.59 More precisely, Fantosme uses written correspondence to draw attention to the vernacular epis­ tolarity that was integral to the course of the civil war—­and integral to his own account of it. It is clear from the way that Fantosme bookends his account of the conflict between Henry and his son with the exchange of messages that epistolary com­ munication is central to his account of the war. For one t­ hing, by reproducing ­these exchanges, Fantosme was able to map the physical space over which the Young King’s rebellion played out: Fantosme’s vivid descriptions of the distances messengers had to travel evoke the vast size of Henry II’s domains, which stretched from Orkney (line 359) to the “porz d’Espaine” (the Pyrenean passes, line 772). Meanwhile, t­hose descriptions also enable Fantosme to emphasize the social connections that bound ­those domains—­and their rebels—­together. Fantosme used letters, in other words, to emphasize that three distinct moments of history—­the Young King’s renunciation of his fidelity to Henry II, William the Lion’s invasion of North­umberland, and the Earl of Leicester’s invasion of East Anglia—­were all parts of the same, single rebellion. By presenting the relation­ ship between t­ hose events in epistolary form, he offered material proof both of the connections between t­ hose events and of the personal bonds between the three rebels. Fantosme also cannily exploits another dimension of epistolarity to evoke the larger po­liti­cal undercurrent of this rebellion: he uses correspondence’s strong association with absence as a way to draw attention to Henry II’s trou­ bling distance from E ­ ngland and its woes.60 Fantosme thus uses letters to evoke the macropo­liti­cal dynamics of the civil war. But he also uses correspondence in subtler ways, which seem calculated to appeal directly to his par­tic­u­lar, that is, literate and power­ful, audience. As many epics do, Fantosme’s Estoire takes ­g reat care to rec­ord the names of its protagonists, and as Geoff Rector has compellingly argued, “The most promi­ nent socio-­political ground shared” by the men that Fantosme names “is their participation in the financial and l­egal administration of the realm.” The fig­ ures whom Fantosme names include “­great men like Humphrey de Bohun (con­ stable of ­England), middling lords of local prominence like the Stutevilles, and administrative barons like Ranulf de Glanville and Richard de Lucy.”61 “­W hether by virtue of his time in the Canterbury ­house­hold or the patronage of Richard of Ilchester,” Rector argues, Fantosme “sets himself within a group of administrative barons and ministers of the royal ­house­hold, whom he systematically imagines as a coherently operating social solidarity or foedus



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amicitiae.”62 This group of men—­composed of men that I would designate hommes d’ écriture—­was, according to Rector, highly self-­conscious ­because its members shared “not just loyalty to the king, but a middling status, institu­ tional ties to the administration, and . . . ​material and tenurial interests . . . ​ that would separate them from the king’s desires.”63 The audience that Rector identifies for the Estoire thus goes a long way to explaining its overall po­liti­cal strategy, which is careful to praise and blame Henry II in a balanced way and to portray the Young King as a victim of bad advice.64 (Fantosme was hedging baronial bets, in other words, ­because ­those barons de­ pended on Henry II’s goodwill t­ oward them in the immediate term but would need the Young King’s goodwill in the ­future.) But the audience of administra­ tive barons that Rector identifies surely also helps explain the Estoire’s intense interest in the written word and how it interacted with speech in the practice of politics. In e­ very exchange of letters that Fantosme rec­ords, the complexity of the relationship between speech and to writing comes to the fore, along with an insistence that the technical mastery of writing should converge with the mas­ tery of be­hav­ior.65 Sometimes Fantosme underscores the writtenness of the lit­ erate transactions he describes. Sometimes the written word is less impor­tant than the oral messages sent alongside the letters. Sometimes the comportment of the messenger who delivered t­ hose messages comes to the fore. But, taken as a ­whole, I would argue that Fantosme’s descriptions of epistolary practices w ­ ere calculated to appeal to, inform, and form an audience whose status required them to master both speech and writing and who understood both speech and writ­ ing as po­liti­cal per­for­mance. The close interaction between speech, writing, and literate per­for­mance in the Estoire is perhaps most evident in two highly stylized and conspicuously con­ trasting accounts of the delivery of correspondence that Fantosme offers. To­ gether, t­ hese two accounts narrate the beginning of the hostilities between Henry II and the rebels. The structure of the two passages is almost identical, which in­ dicates that Fantosme designed them to be taken as a pair, and their careful construction perhaps suggests that Fantosme was narrating the outbreak of hos­ tilities with special care—­a necessary move if he wanted to tiptoe around the Young King’s culpability in the ­matter. But the structural similarity of ­these pas­ sages also highlights the fact that they treat the delivery of messages in entirely contrary ways. The first passage (lines 245–75) depicts the Young King’s appeal to William the Lion, king of Scotland, for aid in in the former’s war against his ­father. ­Here, Fantosme emphasizes the appeal’s writtenness. The second passage (lines 314–25) reproduces the message that William the Lion, in turn, sent Henry

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II, warning him that he would ally with Henry’s rebellious son if Henry did not restore William’s ancestral rights in North­umberland. In this second passage, the spoken word is decisive. Let us look more closely now at the first passage, where Henry II has just resolved to fight his son a­ fter his flight to the court of Louis VII. Henry would not give in to his son’s demands to have his own land and revenues, he decides, and the French are terrified: Espoënté sunt li Franceis de la fiere novele: Le cuer al plus hardi en t­ remble e chencele. Mes icil les cunfortë ki trestuz les chele; Irrur ad en seun cuer, li sanc li estencele. A un cunseil en vait a sa gent plus leale. En romanz devise un brief, d’un anel l’enseele. Les messagiers al jeufne rei, devant lui les apele. Ço fud li reis Lowis ki charga la novele. Vunt s’en li message, ki les briés en porterent. Passent la mer salee, les regnes traverserent, Les forez, les plaignes, les ruistes guez passerent. Vienent en Escoce e le rei i troverent. De part le jofne rei Henri les escriz presenterent: Jas orrez les paroles ki escrites i erent. ‘Al rei d’Escoce, Willame le meillur A qui nostre lignage fud jadis anceisur! Le rei Henri le jeufne vus mande par amur: Suvenir vus deit de mei, ki sui vostre seignur.’ The French are alarmed by this dire news: the heart of the boldest ­trembles and misses a beat. But he who ever leads them strengthens their resolution;66 his heart is full of anger and his blood boils with rage. He goes to take counsel with the most loyal of his intimates. He composes a letter in French and seals it with a ring. He summons before him the Young King’s envoys. It was King Louis who gave them the message they had to bear. The envoys depart bearing the letter. They crossed the salt sea, they traversed kingdoms, forests, and plains, and they crossed perilous fords. They came to Scotland and t­ here they found the king. They



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presented the letter on behalf of the Young King. Now you w ­ ill hear the words that w ­ ere written in it: “To the king of Scotland, the most noble William, who has a common ancestor with us in former members of our line! King Henry the Younger with loving greeting thus addresses you.”67 This w ­ hole transaction pre­sents a number of prob­lems that need to be unpacked. First, it seems that Fantosme is anxious that the words in King Louis’s letter, the words delivered orally to William, and the words of the Estoire’s version of the letter should be understood as being identical. He emphasizes that the letter it­ self was written “en romanz” (in French, line 245): Fantosme had not distorted its contents by translating them, he implies.68 Second, although the letter was written en romanz, the letter was nevertheless sealed (it is “un brief, d’un anel l’enseele” [a letter, sealed with a ring; line 243]). Its contents ­were thus guaran­ teed by a marker of King Louis’s personal authority and textual authenticity. And third, although the spoken word has a crucial role in this transaction, Fantosme emphasizes that the messengers’ audience—­and the audience of the Estoire—­are hearing a written text being voiced: the noun escritz stands for briés (line 252), and Fantosme promises that his audience ­will presently “hear the words which ­were written” in the letter (“Jas orrez les paroles ki escrites i erent”; line 253). The brief and its writtenness is not therefore incidental to this episode; it is not some sort of prop to lend its ­bearer authority while the real transaction took place in an extempore oral per­for­mance.69 The brief was a crucial component in a speech-­ act, an act of reading.70 Through performing that act of reading, the Young King’s messengers made an alliance with William on the Young King’s behalf. The second passage describing the delivery of correspondence (lines 314–25) closely resembles the first.71 It too describes how a king (this time William the Lion) dispatched a message having first taken counsel from his friends. In his message, William the Lion warns Henry II in Normandy that if he does not give William his ancestral rights in North­umberland, then William ­will join the Young King in defying his ­father. When Fantosme recounts the delivery of the letter containing that message, however, its writtenness seems to be almost inci­ dental to the episode. Where in the first passage the letters being carried by the messengers are mentioned, in the corresponding place in the second, it is the ­horses carry­ing the messengers; and where the messengers pre­sent the escriz to King William in the first passage, in the second they “wisely address” Henry II (“sagement l’araisunent”; line 320). Moreover, whereas in the first scene the words put into the mouth of the messenger are presented as being identical to the words

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written in the letter, in the second ­there is a clear distinction between the letter, which was handed over to Henry a­ fter he had been orally greeted (“Lur lettres puis li dunent” [then they gave him the letter; line 321, my emphasis), and the words that w ­ ere spoken (paroler) by William d’Olepen, the messenger sent to bear the letter.72 The grammar of this second message is strikingly dif­fer­ent too. In the first passage, the Young King’s own words are communicated to William the Lion in the first person, as if the messenger himself had nothing to do with the transaction.73 In the second, the messenger (William d’Olepen) speaks for himself (“Jo sui un messagier . . . ​vus vieng ci nuntier” [I am a messenger, and I come h ­ ere to you to announce]; lines 323–24). D’Olepen refers to King William only in the third person.74 William d’Olepen therefore emphasizes his own role and his physical and vis­i­ble presence in the transaction, as if he himself is part of the message: “ ‘Or veez mei ci en vostre curt!” (Now see me ­here in your court!) he demands (line 334), and he uses the first person to demand that “terme avant ne requier: / Ferai derainement par un sul chevalier” (I ­will not seek to have any ­later date appointed; I propose that [the Young King’s] claim be upheld by a knight in single combat”; lines 333–34.) Fantosme then moves on to describe a third epistolary exchange, this time between Henry II and William the Lion. H ­ ere the mechanics are slightly dif­f er­ ent again. This time t­ here is no letter for the messenger (again William d’Olepen) to bear. And rather than letting d’Olepen speak in his own person, as he did when delivering William the Lion’s message to Henry, Henry instructs d’Olepen to tell Earl David (William the Lion’s b­ rother) “ for me . . . ​to come to my aid” (“Dites mei sun frere . . . ​qu’il vienge pur mei aider”; lines 348–49, my emphasis). Then he should say to the king of Scotland on Henry’s behalf—­again, speaking for him—­“que pas ne m’espoent / Pur guerre que jo aie de mun fiz en pre­sent” (that I am not frightened by the war my son is now waging against me; lines 342–43).75 Accordingly, when d’Olepen delivers Henry’s message to William the Lion (lines 362–82), he never refers to himself as if he has any agency in the ­matter by naming himself as a subject but rather speaks entirely in the third person to re­ late Henry II’s mandement.76 What accounts for the difference between the writtenness of the message in the first passage and the spokenness of the message in the second and third, and between the dif­fer­ent ways that William d’Olepen represents his own role in the delivery of the latter two messages? Fantosme contrasts dif­fer­ent media with one another ­here, it seems, in order to comment on the Young King’s posi­ tion. According to the Estoire, it was when the Young King “ne pot ses volentez acumplir pur sun paire” (could not do his w ­ ill b­ ecause of his f­ ather, lines 23–25)



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that he de­cided to abandon him.77 As other con­temporary sources also make clear, the Young King’s inability to execute acta in his own name and ­under his own seal—to do his royal volentez through writing acts—­was a key reason for the powerlessness that made him rebel.78 According to Roger of Howden, as soon as the Young King had fled to Louis VII, Louis “immediately had a new seal made for him.”79 So, by the grace of Louis, the Young King was now able to exercise regal power for himself, a power that was expressed through using the written word.80 For all that he had a new seal, however, and despite his new freedom from his f­ ather, the Young King appears in the Estoire to be as voiceless and powerless as he was before his rebellion. And it is this literate powerlessness that Fantosme emphasizes so clearly in his accounts of writing in the Estoire. Although the Young King’s own messengers delivered his letter to William the Lion (line 246), it was in fact Louis who ordered it to be written. It was Louis who sealed it (line 245). And “ço fud li reis Lowis ki charga la novele” (It was King Louis who gave [the messengers] the message they had to bear; line 247).81 When Henry II formulated his message to William, by contrast, he is in complete control: “Ne quiert aver al respuns estrange ne parent,” declares Fantosme (He does not need anybody’s help, be it stranger or relative, to formulate his reply; line 341).82 And rather than sending his reply in writing and in the third person, as the Young King had, Henry used the unmediated power of the verbum regis, commandeer­ ing the voice and person of William d’Olepen to deliver it. Henry II’s power is thus immediate and direct. The Young King, by contrast, seems as impotent in his newly literate “freedom” u­ nder Louis as he did in his “subjection” u­ nder Henry (when, as he had complained to Alexander III, “we did not reign over any­ thing, but we ­were coerced in ­every way; we w ­ ere coerced when we should have been coercing o­ thers”).83 The care with which Fantosme constructs t­ hese scenes of literate po­liti­cal exchange makes sense if they w ­ ere directed ­toward the kind of administrating barons that Rector identifies as the Estoire’s immediate audience. But it is not just that that audience would have understood the po­liti­cal and administrative nuances of ­these literacy events. The implications of Fantosme’s account of doc­ umentary practices are wider than this: I would argue that the Estoire’s unusual insistence that the Young King’s letter was written en romanz suggests the Estoire was also an explicit statement, directed t­ oward literate lords, about the doc­ umentary potential of the vernacular written word. When Fantosme claimed to be reproducing the words of a letter written in French in a history written in French, he was also claiming that the vernacular written word could play a documentary role. He was claiming, in other words, that French could function as

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a language of written memory as well as a language of oral commemoration. The former, of course, is a role that modern scholars usually reserve for Latin prose. Michael Clanchy suggests that monastic chronicles, with their inserted docu­ ments, ­were the “most secure and productive form of rec­ord in existence in this period.”84 On Clanchy’s reading, the Latinity of such histories meant that they could both authentically reproduce rec­ords and act as a form of rec­ord themselves. According to Clanchy, this was not the case for vernacular historical writing in the late twelfth ­century. So when Fantosme versified the text of this letter writ­ ten en romanz, Clanchy thinks that “the text [Fantosme] gives is not intended to be an au­then­tic document, since he recounts it in verse as part of his narra­ tive.”85 Yet Fantosme claims that the letter was an au­then­tic document. The let­ ter was sealed, Fantosme says. And, as Philip Bennett argues, Fantosme makes ­every effort to make it seem to his audience that they ­were hearing the Young King’s own words.86 Fi­nally, the fact that Fantosme recounted this document “as part of a narrative” does not mean that could not be au­then­tic, which is what Clanchy argues. If that r­ eally w ­ ere the case, then the authenticity of most of Roger of Howden’s scripta—­many of which are the foundation of modern narratives of this period’s history and some of which are not attested outside Howden’s chronicles—­would need to be reassessed. As I argued in Chapter 2, whenever a history-­writer quoted a scriptum, ­whether in Latin or in French, he or she inter­ fered with it: he or she reframed it and remediated it and imposed on it a “new mode of existence.”87 This does not mean that t­ hose scripta ­were a less “secure” form of memory, which is what Clanchy implies.88 Rather, this kind of “remediation”—­the reuse of “mnemonic products” such as documents in new me­ morial contexts—is precisely what made the scripta memorable in the first place.89 What Fantosme does so strikingly in the Estoire is imagine the circula­ tion of diplomatic scripta through the lens of the exchange of messages, a prom­ inent plot device of the chansons de geste90 (the exchange of messages is the overall theme of Otinel, for example, a chanson de geste about a messenger that circulated in high-­medieval ­England).91 By remediating the Young King’s scriptum into a recognized genre of commemorative discourse (epic verse narrative), Fantosme worked to save it from the obscurity and oblivion of the archive. And by empha­ sizing that he was remediating a specifically French scriptum, Fantosme claimed that French had a role to play both as a language of oral commemoration and of written memory. Fantosme breaks new ground, then, by claiming that a written text that was the basis of his own history was already written in French. He was not a transla­ tor, in other words, even if he was a versifier. (And in this sense, he may have more



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in common with Stephen of Rouen, who versified papal letters in his Draco normannicus, than with Wace, who translated Latin prose histories into French verse.) So instead of presenting his history as a French rewriting of old history books, as Wace and Gaimar had, Fantosme grounded his Estoire in the unbound scripta of the pre­sent. He figures the French written word as an effec­ tive po­liti­cal instrument, and he claims the recent past for history written in French.

Guernes de Pont Sainte-­Maxence I am ­going to return to the po­liti­cal implications of Fantosme’s linguistic and formal choices shortly, but before ­doing so, I want to turn my attention to Guernes’s Vie of Becket. The Vie is a good comparator for the Estoire ­because, like the Estoire, its form is indebted to vernacular epic poetry and b­ ecause it too is overlain with markers of oral per­for­mance. Crucially, furthermore, the Vie af­ fords scripta a central role within its narrative, just like the Estoire. And just like the Latin chronicles surveyed e­ arlier in this book, t­ hose scripta are fundamental to the Vie’s overall historiographical strategy. The Vie pre­sents the texts of eight scripta in total, including six of Becket’s letters,92 the Constitutions of Claren­ don, and Henry II’s 1169 supplement to them (which w ­ ere enforced by Fantosme’s patron, Richard of Ilchester).93 Unlike Fantosme, Guernes makes no explicit comment about the language of his sources. But Leena Löfstedt has convincingly argued that when Guernes versified Becket’s correspondence, he was in fact work­ ing from French drafts of letters that ­later circulated more widely in Latin.94 Löfstedt shows, for example, that the French version of Becket’s letter Expectans expectaui, which Guernes versifies in the Vie, was textually superior to extant Latin versions.95 Löfstedt goes so far as to say, in fact, that the surviving Latin version of the letter “gives the impression of being a mediocre translation” of a text originally written in French.”96 In inverting common assumptions about the relative priority of French and Latin in this period, Löfstedt is following Guernes’s own lead. Guernes insists on the vernacularity of his text: he trumpets the quality of the French he wrote in, insisting that “Mis languages est bons, car en France fui nez” (My language is good, ­because I was born in the Île-­de-­France; line 6165.)97 On the other hand, Guernes also insists on his text’s writtenness. Despite the epic cast of the Vie, this was not to be ­imagined as a transcription of a once-­textless per­for­mance (which is how ­people once understood epics such as the Song of Roland). This, rather,

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was a history-­book. Guernes repeatedly refers to the livre he has written: “Ne tut ne puet pas estre en mun livre noté” (not every­thing can be noted down in my book), he apologizes at one point, drawing attention to the finite bounds of his codex.98 He also invokes the writing pro­cess, with all its erasures and reinscrip­ tions.99 And he complains about the thieving scribes who stole an early version of the Vie (lines 151–55), indicating that he i­ magined the Vie to have a textual ex­ istence from beginning to end. Fi­nally, Guernes gives Becket’s correspondence as significant a role in the Vie as Becket’s Latin biographers did, not only pre­ serving “the diplomatic detail such as protocol and date” of Becket’s letters but also intervening in his narrative to offer comments on t­ hose protocols.100 All in all, therefore, Guernes actively solicits comparison between his own writing in French and Latin writing about Becket. He situates himself among “tuit cil qui del saint traitié unt/U romanz u latin” (every­one who has written about the saint, ­whether in French or in Latin; lines 6173–74), as if claiming that his vernacular Vie had all the authoritative bookishness of its Latin counter­parts. What marks Guernes out h ­ ere from his Latinate rivals, however, is the way that he constructs his own position as the mediator between a written text (his livre, together with its scripta) and an audience who hears it (oïr) being recited. As well as being a book, Guernes claims that the Vie is a “sermun” (“sermon” or “speech”; line 6156);101 Thomas is the one “dunt preecher m’oez” (whom you hear me preach about; line 166),102 he tells his audience. Guernes had recited his sermum, he says, “mainte feiz . . . ​a la tumbe al barun” (many a time at the saint’s tomb; line 6158). Guernes’s pose h ­ ere is clearly related to that of the romance narrator—­the clerkly intermediary between written authority and lay audi­ ence.103 But whereas romance narrators generally claimed to mediate a text written in one language to an audience hearing it in another, the linguistic in­ terfaces in this text work differently. If Löfstedt is right, then at least some of the texts that Guernes was mediating w ­ ere already written in French. Guernes, therefore, is not translating the texts that he pre­sents to his audience. He is giv­ ing voice to them as well. Just as Fantosme promises that his audience w ­ ill “hear the words written” in the Young King’s letter, Guernes asks his audience to “oez les capitles que li reis enveiad / As bailliz del païs” (listen to the capitula that the king sent to the country’s sheriffs) in 1169 (lines 2681–82). And he reassures his audience that “tost vus avrai conté ço que escrit i ad” (it w ­ ill not take me long to tell you what was written in the documents; line 2685). Fantosme and Guernes thus play the role of literati giving spoken renditions of written texts to listening audiences. They play exactly the same role, that is, that Wace had mapped out for literate clerks in his Rou, who would “read aloud”



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the “books and histories and stories” that they had written down in French.104 The texts that Fantosme and Guernes “recited” in this way included scripta orig­ inally written in Latin (such as the Constitutions of Clarendon) and scripta orig­ inally written in French (such as the Young King’s letter and Becket’s draft of Expectans expectaui). And t­ hose texts include the French history-­books they had written themselves, in which ­those scripta ­were embedded and by which they ­were remediated. So when Guernes compares his Vie to other, mendacious vitae of Becket and claims that “ci purrez le veir e tut le plain oïr” (­here you can hear the truth and the full story; line 164), that deictic “ci” (“­here”) refers si­mul­ta­ neously to the “­here” of Guernes’s livre and the “­here” of an i­ magined per­for­ mance; the two versions of his text are ­imagined to be one and the same. For his part, meanwhile, Fantosme never lets his audience forget that they are hearing a written account of the civil war, even in Estoire’s most “epic” moments. In his description of the defense of Dunwich by its burgeis, for example, Fantosme speaks/writes about how valiantly “se defendirent la gent de Dunewiz, / Si cum ces vers parolent ki sunt ici escriz (the p­ eople of Dunwich defend themselves, just as ­these words that are written ­here say; lines 871–72).105 For Fantosme, therefore, the written word speaks; so when he demands, in the first line of his poem, that his audience should “oëz verraië estoire,” that verraië estoire is surely not just “true history” in an abstract sense but also this true history—­this true history-­book—­ that you are hearing being read aloud right now.106 ­Future reciters of ­these texts would have at their disposal all the markers of orality that the texts provided them. But ­those reciters would never be able to dispense with the written book before them, in which the history itself inhered and to which they gave a voice. Fantosme and Guernes thus insist that a reader could recite their histories at some point in the ­future and could do so using the same written material from which ­those texts had originally been fashioned. Fantosme and Guernes are therefore confident about the capabilities of written French: they posit that medium as a stable, secure, and productive repository of historical knowledge, a documentary domain, whose continuing social utility and presence was ensured by its demands to be repeated and remediated—­and remembered—­through speech. Fantosme and Guernes, therefore, argue that French history-­writing could be in some sense a documentary form of discourse: like Latin prose, it could re­ mediate scripta, and like Latin prose, it belonged to a world of books and writ­ ing. Yet if this analy­sis is right, one won­ders why Fantosme and Guernes both­ered to write history in French in the first place: had they wanted to, they could have written unproblematically authoritative historical narratives based on unprob­ lematically authoritative scripta, and they could have done so in Latin. So what

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did writing in the vernacular allow them to say or do that they could not do or say in Latin? The answer to this question lies partly in the new generic possibili­ ties that writing in the vernacular broke open and partly in the new memorial possibilities that new vernacular genres brought along with them. And it lies above all in the relationship between t­ hose new possibilities and the audiences whose interests they addressed. For example, when Fantosme and Guernes in­ voked the French epic tradition, they invoked a tradition that typically commem­ orated the distant chivalric past. However, unlike most epics, Fantosme’s and Guernes’s histories w ­ ere not interested in that distant past.107 Guernes and Fan­ tosme, rather, used their histories to imagine a very modern and highly literate form of chivalry, which combined physical heroism with a mastery of public speaking and public writing.108 And it is this combination that comes to the fore in Fantosme’s and Guernes’s accounts of the written word in action. In ­those ac­ counts, Fantosme and Guernes associate scripta with the authoritative status and authoritative public be­hav­ior of t­ hose who used them. As I have argued throughout this book, scripta quoted in history-­writing from this period pre­ sented as if they ­were historical events in themselves rather than evidence for them. What Fantosme and Guernes do so compellingly in their histories is fore­ ground the status of t­ hose who participated in t­ hose historical-­literacy events,109 and they use the naming strategies of vernacular epic in order to do so. Indeed, ­there is a sense in t­ hese texts that the status and be­hav­ior of ­those involved in writing acts are as impor­tant to t­ hose acts as the written word itself.110 So when William the Lion sends a message to the Young King agreeing to be his ally in rebellion, Fantosme describes how Willame de Saint Michiel ferad icest message E Robert de Husevile, kar ambesdous sunt sage; Suvent s’unt en busuine prové de vasselage Bien sevent en riche curt parler en maint language. . . . Si cum ces chevaliers unt trové lur seignur Ove le rei de France, Lowis l’empereur, Dïent lur messages süef e senz irrur Si que bien l’entendent de France li cuntur. William of Saint-­Michel and Robert of Huseville ­will bear this message, for they are both wise men; they have often and in difficult times given proof of courage; they are skilled in delivering appropri­



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ate speeches in power­ful courts. . . . ​As soon as t­ hese knights have found their liege lord with the king of France, the Emperor Louis, they give their message coolly and dispassionately, so that the nobles of France understand it clearly.111 To be trusted with writing, Fantosme implies, one had to know how to speak well and how to behave well.112 Fantosme thus celebrates the messengers’ wis­ dom, their willingness to serve, their reputations, and their skill in delivering their message in the right register; he also underlines the arduousness of their journey. The final proof of the messengers’ virtue, moreover, lies in their jour­ ney’s success: they are correctly understood, and they return with what they wanted, a sealed “chartre” and an order from Louis VII that they should “Dites al rei d’Escoce . . . ​‘La terre est tute sue qu’il a demandee’ ” (tell the king of Scot­ land “the land he has asked for is all his”; lines 456–58). On Fantosme’s account, therefore, behaving well and speaking well promise material and written re­ wards.113 A similar dynamic is evident in Guernes’s descriptions of literacy events in the Vie. In his account of Adam de Senlis’s mission to request the pal­ lium for Becket,114 Guernes foregrounds the precise qualities of his and the other envoys’ speech. Like Fantosme, Guernes names the chief envoy, Adam de Senlis, and he praises the fame and learning of Adam and his clerical retinue: Guernes calls Adam de Senlis “prudume e renumé” (Guernes, line 597; Fantosme had called the envoy Robert de Huseville “sage” and “prové de vassalage” [Fantosme, line 423]); Adam’s companions, meanwhile, w ­ ere “bon clerc . . . ​des arz, de decré e de lei (clerks skilled in the arts, in the canons and in law; line 601).115 And, as in Fantosme’s Estoire, Guernes’s Vie states that when the envoys each presented their case, “Mult parlerent bien e clergilment tut trei” (all three spoke very learn­ edly and well; lines 602–3).116 The envoys’ skillful deployment of a par­tic­u­lar form of eloquence thus overcomes the cardinals’ avaricious re­sis­tance to grant­ ing the pallium. The triumph of spoken virtue h ­ ere is in marked contrast to Ralph de Diceto’s account of the same episode. According to Diceto, ­after it had been announced to Alexander III that Becket had been elected archbishop, “the [En­ glish] bishops’ letter and the letter of the prior and convent of the Holy Trinity, and the king’s letters too, w ­ ere recited in public in the hearing of the cardinals in consistory, [and] once the petition was made, they all gave their ready and joy­ ful assent.”117 For Diceto, the public recital of a clutch of letters from a number of dif­f er­ent interested parties proved the una­nim­i­ty of Becket’s election and put its legitimacy beyond doubt. But although the letters w ­ ere “in medium recita­ tis” by someone, Diceto does not articulate who among the del­e­ga­tion did what

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or how they did it.118 By using a series of passive constructions, in fact, he gives the impression that the written word, albeit voiced, did its magic all on its own. Guernes’s account of this mission is very dif­f er­ent. Instead of just saying that the letters ­were recited to the cardinals in consistory, he names them, and he focuses on their heroic eloquence.

* * * Guernes’s and Fantosme’s accounts of the convergence between heroic elo­ quence and literate competence—­and between epic and history—­make sense if we understand them as being directed ­toward the sort of literate lords whose writing acts, and whose patronage of history-­writing, I explored in the previous two chapters: literate lords, that is, such as William de Longchamp, skillful be­ sieger of ­castle and author of a manual of Roman law procedures, and ­those of an e­ arlier vintage, such as Ranulf de Glanville, who captured William the Lion on the battlefield and (according to Howden) compiled the Liber de legibus Anglie.119 By invoking the defining virtues of literate lordship, Fantosme and Guernes sought to shape an ideal a­ fter which that lordship might be formed. By specifically invoking the virtues of literate lordship in French, meanwhile, they carved out a legitimate memorial space for literate lords in the vernacular me­ morial idiom of secular martial culture. By valorizing more broadly the role of written French itself, Fantosme and Guernes offered the literate lords in their audience a new formal model for how they—­and their interests and exploits—­ might be remembered. Latin prose writing was the medium of royal rec­ord and the medium of much of the royal business that hommes d’ écriture undertook as part of their day-­to-­day work. Latin prose history-­writing was associated, therefore, with royal power or, to be more precise, with royal power at the point at which it intersected with the power of institutions, both secular and reli­ gious. But while hommes d’ écriture routinely used Latin prose to commit ­things to official forms of written memory, that written memory did not have much to say about them as a group. So while literate lords ­were used to using written Latin to remember ­others’ interests, they did not necessarily use it to foreground their own; they may have been a self-­conscious group united by their tenurial interests and their professional competences, but they lacked a memo­ rial medium by which they could distinguish themselves from the interests of the Crown itself. According to Geoff Rector, Fantosme’s Estoire aimed to ad­ dress precisely the “failures of memory” that led to war in the first place: the Estoire’s “central desire and cause [is] to generate praise and sympathy for the



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‘epic’ suffering of the barons, who are . . . ​improperly remembered and rewarded by the king. By locating the cause of the war in failures of memory—­do you not remember at all?—­Jordan suggests that the errors continue in the pre­sent and offers his history, an act of remembrance, as a corrective.”120 Rector is surely right that the redress for which the Estoire argues takes the form of an act of remembrance. What I want to emphasize is that this memorial redress has a lin­ guistic dimension: the Estoire puts forward French not only as language of writ­ ing but also a language of written memory that had a par­tic­u­lar po­liti­cal utility for Fantosme’s baronial audience. While Latin history-­writing often empha­ sized the per­for­mances surrounding the written word and acknowledged that ­those per­for­mances charged the written word with po­liti­cal power, per­for­ mance itself was built into the kind of vernacular history that Fantosme and Guernes wrote. Both the Vie and the Estoire, that is, imagine that written his­ tory was a form of literate per­for­mance, just as Fantosme and Guernes ­imagined that their history-­books would be performed in the f­ uture. And as a form of liter­ ate per­for­mance, vernacular history inscribed the ideals of literate lordship—­ mastery of speech, mastery of writing, the evocation of martial valor—in its very telling. It inscribed the practices of literate lordship, in other words, at the very heart of history and at the very heart of its writing. If literate lords had much to learn and much to gain from t­ hese French writ­ ten histories, I do not want to give the impression that administrative barons ­were the only pos­si­ble audience for ­these texts (the letter en romanz that Fan­ tosme reproduced, a­ fter all, was sent by one king to another, even if it would have been written down and conveyed by an homme d’ écriture). Wace had made it clear that French writing belonged to a much broader elite memorial culture, which embraced a larger group than just an administrative elite. Although Wace addressed his Rou ­toward Henry II himself,121 he makes it clear that this French history-­book, written for public per­for­mance, was not just for Henry to enjoy and to learn from: it is also addressed to the “baruns” and “noble dames” who surrounded Henry.122 Like the king, ­these men and ­women participated in a cul­ ture of “noblesce” and “largesce,”123 in which nobility, wealth, and generosity went hand-­in-­hand with the patronage of French book production. Furthermore, when Guernes and Fantosme invoked the Roland cycle, they invoked a story-­ world that belonged to the ­whole Francophone social elite. It did not belong just to the French of France; it belonged neither to the younger generation of the Young King nor to the older one of his ­father; it was the common property of Becket’s supporters and of his adversaries (in the thirteenth ­century, Osney Abbey had a manuscript of Roland in its library as well as a chapel dedicated

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to Becket in Oxford).124 And this explains, perhaps, why Guernes mentions so many pos­si­ble audiences for his Vie: the “meint riche umme” who had got hold of the early draft of the Vie that had been pirated by his scribes,125 the pilgrims in Canterbury who had heard him reciting the Vie at Becket’s shrine, and Mary Becket and the nuns of Barking Abbey who had rewarded him with hospitality. The multiple audiences that Guernes invokes for his Vie surely suggest that at least he viewed written French history to be an inclusive idiom within the con­ text of the social elite. For his part, Fantosme names no audience other than the seignurs whom he addresses in the second-­person plural,126 but it is tempting to conclude that he avoided naming an audience in order to make that audience as broad as pos­si­ble. So by saying that ­these texts mirror the preoccupations of literate lords, that they argue ­those literate lords should be properly remembered, I do not mean that only literate lords would ever hear them. What I do mean is that t­ hese texts brought literate lordship into the mainstream of memorial culture: if literate lords and their literate per­for­mances ­were to be remembered, then they needed a broad audience to do the remembering. In seeking to address that audience, Fantosme and Guernes forged an idiom that would remember and valorize both literate and physical power. William de Longchamp and Walter de Coutances ­were skilled leaders of feudal armies and bands of mercenaries, but did any of their contemporaries (or anyone ­today) remember them for their martial prowess? That is exactly how the Estoire sought to remember Ranulf de Glanville. And it is exactly how Guernes sought to remember Becket, the warrior of Christ.

Afterword

The practice of [En­g lish medievalists] obviously varies a good deal . . . ​ but t­ here are certainly dominant features. One is an unwillingness to use any level of magnification other than that of the incipient nation-­state: no to devolution and no to Eu­ro­pean integration. Another is a belief in the smack of firm government.

The history of En­glish history-­writing in the twelfth c­ entury often reads like a nativity story for the En­glish nation-­state. As the story told by Richard South­ ern has it—­and many ­others have told a similar story since—­the writing of his­ tory by En­glish monks at the beginning of the twelfth ­century was stimulated by the need to rescue and to preserve the Anglo-­Saxon past in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest. Faced with cultural and corporate obliteration, En­glish monks diligently set to work narrating the conquest and the history of the na­ tion that had preceded it. With their “families . . . ​destroyed or impoverished” by the Normans, “alone among En­glishmen they ­were left to speak for the ­people and see the catastrophe in its widest setting.”1 The au­then­tic voice of the En­glish ­people thus survived, it seems, through the pens of monks who wrote the En­ glish past. By the 1130s, Southern thought, the work of securing the En­glish past “had been accomplished.” But once secured, the En­glish past had to be defended, and by the time it reaches the ­middle of the twelfth ­century, the story of En­glish history-­writing becomes the story of the assimilation, by the descendants of the conquerors, of the newly safeguarded En­glish past. Although they had begun to identify with E ­ ngland, as Southern has it, the second generation of settlers “be­ gan to deplore their lack of French freedom.” But in the “­imagined liberties” of a distant En­glish past, such history-­writers as Gaimar and Henry of Hunting­ don offered them “the source of a pre­sent hope.”2 The E ­ ngland of the late twelfth c­ entury saw a new flourishing of historiogra­ phy, which has been the focus of this book. In this “golden age of historiography

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in ­England,”3 the story of En­glish historiography begins to address not only the growth of the En­g lish nation but also the development of the English—­ national and bureaucratic—­state. According to the standard ­grand narrative, history-­writers of this period develop an “interest in the central government”—­ which is usually taken to be demonstrated by their reproduction of the documen­ tary output of literate government. In the normative story of En­glish po­liti­cal history and historiography, therefore, it was at the point when En­glish adminis­ trators and historians started routinely to use documents that the En­glish state and its remembrancers fi­nally came of age. As Timothy Reuter sharply observed, “The production of archival material is often seen as a sign of pro­gress in itself,” so “just as the virtuous historian is [seen as] one who reads rec­ords, so the virtu­ ous state is [seen as] one which writes them.”4 Chroniclers who both read and (re)wrote rec­ords—­who participated in administration and documented it—­thus appear in the standard account as virtue personified. The g­ rand narrative of En­glish historiography does not let its new role chart­ ing the growth of the bureaucratic state eclipse its old role narrating the rise of the nation, however. On the contrary, nation and state are seen to converge in late twelfth-­century historical writing in such a way that the one defines the other. Pre-­Conquest E ­ ngland had a long tradition of literate administration, much of it carried out in Anglo-­Saxon.5 The literate basis of pre-­Conquest governmental practices survived the Conquest, even if many institutions of Anglo-­Saxon gov­ ernment and the widespread use of Anglo-­Saxon as a language of government did not.6 Post-­Conquest history-­writers and bureaucrats (and history-­writing bu­ reaucrats) are sometimes therefore thought to enact a kind of administrative patriotism through their devotion to the written word. According to Southern, while the Angevin kings of E ­ ngland w ­ ere abroad chasing their dreams of conti­ nental glory, En­glish society was forced back on a native tradition of literate gov­ ernment.7 The historiographical corollary to this is that while the Capetians inspired adulatory biographies, such as t­ hose by Rigord and Guillaume le Breton, history-­writers from E ­ ngland focused instead on the “impersonal mechanics” of government and the documents it produced.8 A tendency to align bureaucratic ways of d­ oing t­ hings with En­glishness continues t­ oday. Laura Ashe’s study of En­ glish historical writing in the long twelfth c­ entury, for example, suggests that the system of literate bureaucracy of Angevin E ­ ngland was one “whose power 9 was derived from the Anglo-­Saxon past.” By closely associating par­tic­u­lar ad­ ministrative and textual practices with a historical En­glishness, Ashe argues that the literate revolution in the 1170s and what she calls the “resurgence of En­glish identity” of the same period should be considered dif­fer­ent sides of the same

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coin.10 On this reading, the En­g lishness of the historical writing of the late twelfth ­century is guaranteed by what Ashe calls its “compulsive reverence for the written word.”11 Meanwhile, ­because it is (apparently) in ­England alone in this period that “textuality was taking the place of orality as the container and guarantor of truth,”12 textuality itself (and vernacular textuality in par­tic­u­lar) is made to become a ­bearer of En­glish identity.13 The textual practices of a thor­ oughly En­glish tradition, therefore, provide the crucial point of continuity be­ tween pre-­and post-­Conquest ­England and between pre-­and post-­Conquest En­glish lit­er­a­ture. They ultimately work to ensure the triumph of both. “En­glish” history-­writing—by which is normally meant En­glish, Norman, and Angevin history-­writing—­has for too long been identified as evidence for En­glish exceptionalism, as have the documents that that history-­writing so pre­ cociously uses. As Reuter argued, though, this apparent En­glish exceptionalism might be an illusion generated by the “surviving mix” of narratives and docu­ ments rather than proof E ­ ngland had developed a bureaucratic government ­earlier than anywhere ­else in Eu­rope. That surviving mix of evidence, Reuter em­ phasizes, “varies greatly over time and place” across medieval Eu­rope. And while individual Eu­ro­pean socie­ties “may indeed be [a] regional variation of one soci­ ety, the variety of evidence obscures this and makes it easy to fall back on a kind of nationalist nominalism.”14 The case studies that I have presented in this book, I hope, makes falling back on ­these kinds of “nationalist nominalism” harder. For one t­ hing, the specific configuration of history-­writing, documents, and literacy that crystallized in the Age of the Angevins did so through pro­cesses that w ­ ere si­mul­ta­neously bigger—­ and much smaller—­than that of state formation.15 The scripta that feature in this period’s history-­writing w ­ ere instruments of lordship at its most personal and affective, as well as of government at its most impersonal and efficient; lit­ eracy was a tool of social and po­liti­cal power used by po­liti­cal actors who oper­ ated both above the level of the nation-­state and below it. So, on the one hand, scripta ­were energized and activated through intensely local per­for­mances, in which power was wielded (and thwarted) face-­to-­face. On the other hand, ­those scripta ­were often the products of a supranational entity, the Church. Meanwhile, the communities with whom literate po­liti­cal actors interacted w ­ ere less “na­ tional” than that of the nation-­state. The mobility of scripta meant that they constantly crossed national borders (which, in the case of the transnational An­ gevin éspace, w ­ ere anyway highly permeable). Literacy events ­were calibrated in order to be si­mul­ta­neously effective as local power plays and as vehicles for so­ cial exchange embedded in wider networks of power.

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If scripta ­were instruments of local and transnational power, then this is no less true of the history-­writing that made use of them—­the history-­writing that circulated scripta, told their stories, and embedded them in the structures of cul­ tural memory. The history-­writers who reused scripta w ­ ere also engaged in a form of po­liti­cal action, though not one reducible to the politics of national iden­ tity. Quoting scripta was not the passive, dutiful, and neutral activity of the un­ imaginative. Rather, history-­writers used scripta as a form of reenactment of past literacy events and did so in order to harness the power of t­ hose literacy events, both for the times in which they wrote and for the ­future. The ­people who gen­ erate cultural texts, Jan Assmann insists, are not the original speakers of a mes­ sage, “but the repeater[s]—­the messenger[s] and the commentator[s].”16 The history-­writers who deployed scripta in their histories ­were their repeaters, and they ­were their commentators too. To be sure, when history-­writers embedded scripta within cultural memory by repeating them, they did so in order to exert a normative and formative force over their audiences: this is who we are, they ­were saying, and this is what we do. But it would be a ­mistake to identify this normative and formative force only with the politics of identity, and with the politics of national identity in par­tic­u­lar. Hugh du Puiset, Roger of Howden’s confidant if not his patron, hailed from the county of Blois. Roger de Pont-­ l’Éveque (archbishop of York, 1154–81), another of Howden’s likely patrons, was a Norman. William de Longchamp, one of Diceto’s dedicatees, was famously and stubbornly French; Walter de Coutances, another of his patrons, was archbishop of Rouen and also a proud Cornishman.17 The hommes d’ écriture to whom doc­ umentary history-­writing was addressed, in other words, might have formed an ­imagined community of literate strongmen, but it is unlikely that that commu­ nity’s identity was deeply inflected by national(ist) sentiment. Nor was that community necessarily underpinned by the mentality of “the state.” Throughout this book, I have tried to approach “documents” as mnemonic products and history-­writing as a mnemonic practice that “used, interpreted, re­ produced or changed” them.18 One of the advantages of this approach is that it has introduced a more capacious definition of scripta than the notion of “offi­ cial” or “government” documents usually allows. This capacious conception of documents enables us to break the “circle of writing,” as Michel de Certeau called it,19 that appears at first sight to link the literate producers of documents to the history-­writers who used them and back again. Writing worked most effectively when it was out in the open in this period: if administration ever did happen ­behind closed doors, t­ here would have been plenty of ­people inside watching. In the Age of the Angevins, scripta and the histories that used them inhabited the

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multilingual noise of the public sphere: they belonged to the festes i­ magined by Wace as much as they did to the silence of the muniment room. Some of the ­people pre­sent at Wace’s festes—­that is, the audience for histories and escripture-­ scripta—­would have been literate, to be sure; some of them may even have been bureaucrats. But many of them w ­ ere neither. This, presumably, explains why the most innovative histories written in this period experimented with using the ver­ nacular voice to make scripta public and memorable, to give them what Rigord (and Ovid) had called “public monumentality.”20 Once shed of their exclusive associations with the nascent national state, the sheer variety of history-­writing’s documents—­a nd their functions—­begin to shine through. But if it is clear that documents ­were not simply instruments of the nascent national state, what ­were documents in the Age of the Angevins? What did they do in the history-­writing that used them? Documents ­were many ­things. Defined narrowly, they ­were letters and charters and law codes. But de­ fined more broadly they ­were social stories: they w ­ ere instruments of literate power and repre­sen­ta­tions of that power being wielded; they ­were nodes in so­ cial networks and proof ­those networks existed. When history-­writers used doc­ uments, meanwhile, they w ­ ere d­ oing many t­ hings at once. By representing the writing acts of the past, they w ­ ere allowing t­ hose who had not been pre­sent to witness ­those acts in person to witness them “vicariously.” They w ­ ere comment­ ing on t­ hose writing acts and explaining what they meant. They ­were interven­ ing in ­those writing acts by setting them into a new framework. They ­were perpetuating the literate networks through which the scripta circulated, and they enabled ­those scripta to continue to do their social and po­liti­cal work. Above all, history-­writers in the Age of the Angevins used documents to tell stories about the past: they used them to recall, represent, commemorate, and celebrate it. They embedded the written rec­ord firmly within the realm of memory.

A b b r e v i at i o n s

ANS Bosham, Historia

CCCM CCSL Diceto,Opera EHR Fantosme, Estoire FitzStephen, Vita

Gervase, Historical Works Guernes, Vie Guernes, Life of Becket Howden, Chronica Howden, Gesta MTB ODNB TRHS

Anglo-­Norman Studies Herbert of Bosham, Vita Sancti Thomae archiepiscopi et martyris, ed. James Craigie Robertson, in vol. 3, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 155–534, Rolls Series 67 (London, 1877) Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis Corpus Christianorum: Series Latina Radulfi de Diceto decani Lundoniensis opera historica, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 68 (London: Longman, 1876) En­glish Historical Review Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. and trans. R. C. Johnston (Oxford, 1981) William FitzStephen, Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris, ed. James Craigie Robertson, in vol. 3, Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 1–154, Rolls Series 67 (London: Longman, 1877) Gervase of Canterbury, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 73 (London: Longman, 1879–80) Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, La vie de saint Thomas de Canterbury, ed. by Jacques T. E. Thomas, 2 vols. (Leuven: Peeters, 2002) Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse: La vie de saint Thomas Becket, trans. Ian Short (Toronto: PIMS, 2013) Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols., Rolls Series 51 (London: Longman, 1868–71) Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis: The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard I, A.D. 1169–1192, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 49 (London: Longman, 1867) James Craigie Robertson, ed., Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, 7 vols., Rolls Series 67 (London, 1875–85) Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Notes

introduction 1. R. W. Southern, ed. Medieval Humanism and Other Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970), 150. 2. Frank Barlow, “Roger of Howden,” En­glish Historical Review (hereafter EHR) 65, no. 256 (1950): 360. 3. Barlow, 360, paraphrasing Hans Lamprecht, Untersuchungen über einige englische Chronisten des zwölften und des beginnenden dreizehnten Jahrhunderts (Torgau: A. Nitschke, 1937). 4. For a nuanced account of history-­w riters and wax tablets, see Jeff Rider, God’s Scribe: The Historiographical Art of Galbert of Bruges (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 2001), 29–49. For wax tablets in this period more generally, see M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Rec­ord: E ­ ngland 1066–1307, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2013), 120–22; and Paul Ber­ trand, Les écritures ordinaires: Sociologie d’un temps de révolution documentaire (entre royaume de France et Empire, 1250–1350) (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2015), 54–66. 5. Launching his broadside against the positivist tradition of historiography, Michel Fou­ cault claimed that “ever since history as a discipline has existed, documents have been used, ques­ tioned, and have given rise to questions”; this much, Foucault thought, was “obvious enough.” Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.  M. Sheridan Smith (Abingdon: Routledge, 2002), 6. In a similar vein, Michel de Certeau argued that in the “historiographical operation” forged in early modernity, “every­thing begins with the gesture of setting aside, of putting to­ gether, of transforming certain classified objects into ‘documents.’ ” Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 72. 6. H.  G. Richardson and G.  O. Sayles, for example, direct a suspicious glare at Roger of Howden, whom they considered “incapable of distinguishing between au­then­tic legislative in­ struments and apocryphal enactments.” Richardson and Sayles, The Governance of Mediaeval ­England from the Conquest to Magna Carta (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), 448. Anne Duggan, meanwhile, suggests that the letters Edward Grim used in his Vita of Thomas Becket “lend additional quality to an other­wise . . . ​unreliable narrative.” Duggan, Thomas Becket: A Textual History of His Letters (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 187. 7. I am grateful to Monika Otter for her description of the “mixed and heterogeneous tex­ tuality” of the history-­writing in this period. Otter, pers. comm. 8. The “Age of the Angevins” is shorthand for “the cross-­channel lands dominated by the Angevin kings of ­England” (i.e., Henry II, Richard I, and John), although I confess that it side­ steps the question of w ­ hether t­ hose lands amounted to an empire. For a trenchant argument that the Angevins’ lands did amount to an empire, see John Gillingham, The Angevin Empire (London:

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Bloomsbury Academic, 2001); for a good overview of dissenting opinion, see Elizabeth M. Hallam and Judith Everard, Capetian France, 2nd ed. (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), 221–24. 9. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis: The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard I, A.D. 1169–1192, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 49 (London: Longman, 1867); Howden, Chronica magistri Rogeri de Houedene, ed. William Stubbs, 4 vols., Rolls Series 51 (London: Longman, 1868–71). 10. Antonia Gransden, Historical Writing in ­England I: c. 550 to c. 1307 (London: Routledge, 1996), 224. Gransden limits her observation to the Gesta ­because she, alone among recent histori­ ans, rejected Doris Stenton’s argument that Roger of Howden had written both the Gesta and the Chronica in f­ avor of William Stubbs’s argument that Benedict of Peterborough had written the Gesta. David Corner’s research, published ­a fter the first edition of Gransden’s survey, has since put Howden’s authorship of the Gesta beyond doubt. Corner, “The Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi and Chronica of Roger, Parson of Howden,” Bulletin of the Institute for Historical Research 56 (1983): 126–44; Corner, “The Earliest Surviving Manuscripts of Roger of Howden’s ‘Chronica,’ ” EHR 98, no. 387 (1983): 297–310. 11. Ralph de Diceto, Radulfi de Diceto decani Lundoniensis opera historica, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 68 (London: Longman, 1876), 1:lxxxv. 12. For Gervase of Canterbury’s documents, see Chapter 2. For the po­liti­cal importance of one of Gerald of Wales’s documents—­A lexander III’s “bull” Laudabiliter, which Gerald claimed conferred the lordship of Ireland on Henry II—­see Anne Duggan, “The Power of Documents: The Curious Case of Laudabiliter,” in Aspects of Power and Authority in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Brenda Bolton and Christine E. Meek (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), 251–75. 13. See, for example, Ralph Coggeshall, Chronicon Anglicanum, ed. Joseph Stevenson, Rolls Series 66 (London: Longman, 1875), 84–85, 110, 113–16; and William of Newburgh, Historia rerum Anglicarum, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, 4 vols., Rolls Series 82 (London: Longman, 1884–86), 1:136–39, 206–23, 45–47, 67–70, 73–74, 2:458. 14. For the letters reproduced in the Lives of Becket, see Duggan, Textual History, 175–226. 15. Jordan Fantosme, Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle, ed. R. C. Johnston (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), hereafter Fantosme, Estoire. Fantosme’s Estoire has always been edited u­ nder the title of a Chronicle, although t­ here is no evidence that it was ever considered to be such a text in the High ­Middle Ages (indeed, the only pre-­fourteenth-­century instances of the French word “croniches” or its cognates in the concordance to the Anglo-­Norman Dictionary are found in the Estoire des Engleis by Geffrei Gaimar, who uses the word specifically to refer to the Anglo-­Saxon Chronicle (e.g. “Croniz ad nun, un livre grant, Engleis l’alerent asemblant” [This voluminous book which the En­g lish have compiled is called the Chronicle], Geffrei Gaimar, Estoire des Engleis/ History of the En­glish, ed. and trans. Ian Short [Oxford, 2009], lines 2329–40). As R. C. Johnston himself notes in the introduction to his edition of Fantosme’s Estoire, “the word [chronicle], which never appears in the text, [does not] seem the most apt to describe [the] work” (Fantosme, Estoire, xiv). Johnson maintains the title for the sake of con­ve­nience; but given the fine distinctions that twelfth-­century historians made between dif­fer­ent types of history, in my own prose I w ­ ill stubbornly refer to the text as an Estoire—­which Fantosme himself calls it in its first line when he demands that his audience “Oëz veraie estoirë!” (Hear true history!, translation mine). For the high-­medieval definition of estoire, see Peter Damian-­Grint, “Estoire as Word and Genre: Meaning and Literary Usage in the Twelfth ­Century,” Medium Ævum 66 (1997). For the definition of chronica in the Latin tradition of history-­writing, see Bernard Guenée, “Histoires,



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Annales, Chroniques: Essai Sur Les Genres Historiques Au Moyen Âge” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 28 (1973). 16. Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, La vie de Saint Thomas de Canterbury, ed. Jacques T. E. Thomas, 2 vols. (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), hereafter Guernes, Vie; Guernes, A Life of Thomas Becket in Verse: La vie de saint Thomas Becket, ed. and trans. Ian Short (Toronto: PIMS, 2013), hereafter Guernes, Life of Becket. Translations from this text w ­ ill be ­those of Short u­ nless other­ wise stated. 17. Gransden, Historical Writing I, 221. 18. Michael Staunton won­ders w ­ hether the term “silver age” might not be better, given the ambition of the historians writing in e­ arlier twelfth-­century ­England. Staunton, The Historians of Angevin ­England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 2, 362. 19. According to Richard Southern, this period’s history-­writing “show[s] the same inspira­ tion” as the period’s “lit­er­a­ture of secular government,” such as the Quadripartitus, the Dialogus de scaccario, and Glanville. ­These latter texts ordered and codified—­and rationalized—­literate pro­ cesses; they “aspired in some degree to invest the routine of government with an intellectual gen­ erality.” And with their “preoccupation with the details of government” and their compilation of administrative and diplomatic documents, thought Southern, the histories written in the same period did much the same work. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 176. 20. Elisabeth van Houts judges that “it is usually a sign of a critical mind if we find a chron­ icler using charter material.” Van Houts, Local and Regional Chronicles, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 74 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1995), 33. Andrew Galloway, meanwhile, suggests that history-­writers’ use of documents in this period signals “an increase in critical discrimina­ tion and historical objectivity”—­modern qualities if ever they w ­ ere—­even if “an increase in manipulation and forgery” came along with it. Galloway, “Writing History in ­England,” in The Cambridge History of Medieval En­glish Lit­er­a­ture, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 258. 21. Michael Staunton’s recent account of Howden’s use of documents is a refreshing excep­ tion. Staunton, Historians of Angevin ­England, 56–62. Staunton’s impor­tant book was published ­a fter the majority of this book was written, so I have not been able to engage with its findings in the detail I would other­wise have liked to have done. 22. For a critique of the “mining” of Roger of Howden “first for facts and then for docu­ ments,” see John Gillingham, “The Travels of Roger of Howden and His Views of the Irish, Scots and Welsh,” in The En­glish in the Twelfth ­Century: Imperialism, Nationalism and Po­liti­cal Values, ed. Gillingham (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 71. 23. Girolamo Arnaldi suggested as long ago as 1966 that texts such as the Annales Ianuenses, which seamlessly combine “narrative” and “rec­ord,” require a new set of critical apparatus to take account of their hybrid form. Arnaldi posits a “diplomatica delle cronache medievali” (diplo­ matic of medieval chronicles) which, he suggested, would notably reduce “la distanza che . . . ​sep­ ara di solito la categoria delle ‘fonti narrative’ da quella delle ‘fonti documentarie’ ” (the distance that . . . ​usually separates the category of “narrative sources” from that of “documentary sources.”) Arnaldi, “Il notaio-­cronista e le cronache cittadine in Italia,” in La storia del diritto nel quadro delle scienze storiche [Atti del primo congresso internazionale della società italiana di storia del diritto] (Florence: Olschki, 1966), 297. More recently, Jean-­Philippe Genȇt has suggested that when dealing with texts combining narrative and document, “plutôt d’axer l’enquête sur le texte historique fini et ‘édité’ . . . ​l ’enquête devait porter sur les composantes élémentaires du texte his­ torique” (rather than centering the inquiry on the finished and published historical text . . . ​the

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inquiry should be brought to bear on the constituent ele­ments of the historical text). Genêt, “Histoire et documentation dans la tradition anglaise,” in Le forme della propaganda politica nel due e nel trecento, ed. Paolo Cammarosano (Rome: École française de Rome, 1994), 228. 24. Arthur Giry offered the classic diplomatic perspective when he stressed the need to as­ sess the “degré de confiance que mérite l’ensemble de l’œuvre et son auteur” (“the degree of trust that the work as a ­whole, and its author, merits”) in order to assess the value of charters inserted into chronicles. Giry, Manuel de diplomatique, 2nd ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1925), 34. 25. Clanchy, Memory, 1. 26. For the term “literate mentality,” see Clanchy, Memory, 187–98. 27. Clanchy, 1. 28. Roger of Howden, Gesta regis Henrici secundi Benedicti abbatis: The Chronicle of the Reigns of Henry II and Richard I, A.D. 1169–1192, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols., Rolls Series 49 (London: Longman, 1867), 1:80, 91. 29. See Corner, “Gesta Regis,” 126–44; John Gillingham, “Writing the Biography of Roger of Howden, King’s Clerk and Chronicler,” in Writing Medieval Biography, 750–1250: Essays in Honour of Professor Frank Barlow, ed. David Bates, Julia Crick, and Sarah Hamilton (Wood­ bridge: Boydell, 2006), 207–20; Gillingham, “Travels,” 69–91; Gillingham, “Roger of How­ den on Crusade,” in Richard Coeur de Lion: Kingship, Chivalry and War in the Twelfth ­Century, ed. John Gillingham (London: Hambledon, 1994), 141–53. 30. John Gillingham, for example, deduces that Howden was an eyewitness to a meeting at Reading in which Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem delivered a letter to Henry II along with the keys to Jerusalem, ­because Howden reproduced the patriarch’s speech along with his letter. Gill­ ingham, “Roger of Howden on Crusade,” 145–46. 31. For which see Chapter 2; Clanchy, Memory, 176; and Beryl Smalley, Historians of the ­Middle Ages (New York: Scribner, 1975), 114–19. 32. Diceto, Opera, 1:lxx–­i, n.2; W. H. Hale, ed. The Domesday of St. Pauls of the Year MCCXXII (London: Camden Society, 1868); Clanchy, Memory, 160. 33. Charles Duggan, Twelfth-­Century Decretal Collections and Their Importance in En­glish History, University of London Historical Studies (London: Athlone, 1963), 22. En­g lish canonists ­were precocious in this re­spect compared with ­those in continental Eu­rope, and this precocity cannot be unrelated to the growing importance of rec­ord keeping more generally in En­g lish ad­ ministrative practice. 34. “Fui in cancellaria ejus dictator . . . ​sedente eo ad cognitionem causarum, epistolarum et instrumentorum quae offerebantur lector.” William FitzStephen, Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris, vol. 3 of Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. James Craigie Robertson, Rolls Series 67 (London: Longman, 1877), 1. 35. “D’oster et de remettre le travail en suffri / Mes cel premier romanz m’unt escrivein em­ blé / Anceis que je l’oüsse parfet et amendé . . . ​Ne le plus ne le mains n’erés në ajusté.” (“I labored patiently to revise my account by inserting some ­things and removing ­others. The first [version of my] poem was . . . ​stolen from me by copyists before I had completely finished improving it. I had no time to . . . ​erase or add anything.” Guernes, Vie, 1:40–42, lines 150–55; Guernes, A Life of Becket, 26, translation modified. 36. Jean-­Philippe Genêt and Bernard Guenée both associate documentary historiography especially with medieval ­England. According to Genêt, “Le document occupe chez les historiens médiévaux anglais une place considérable” (documents hold an impor­tant place among medi­ eval En­g lish historians). According to Guenée, “En Angleterre, récit et documents sont liés par



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une très forte tradition” (in [medieval] E ­ ngland, narrative and documents are linked by a very strong tradition). Genêt, “Cartulaires, registres et histoire: L’exemple anglais,” in Le métier d’ historien au moyen âge: Études sur l’ historiographie médiévale, ed. Bernard Guenée (Paris: Uni­ versité de Paris I Panthéon Sorbonne, 1977), 111; Guenée, “Documents insérés et documents abrégés dans la chronique du Religieux de Saint Denis,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 152 (1994), 378. Bede used the correspondence of Gregory the ­Great (and ­others) in his Historia ecclesiastica (Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the En­glish ­People), ed. and trans. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992): see, for example, 1.28–32, 2.4, 2.10–11, 2.18; for Bede’s use of Gregory’s letters, see Paul Meyvaert, “The Registrum of Gregory the G ­ reat and Bede,” Revue Bénédictine 80 (1970): 162–66. Eadmer made extensive use of Anselm’s correspondence in his Historia novorum, for which see Gransden, Historical Writing I, 139–40. For William of Malmes­ bury’s use of charters, see Julia Barrow, “William of Malmesbury’s Use of Charters,” in Narrative and History in the Early Medieval West, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler and Ross Balzaretti (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 67–85. For Matthew Paris’s use of imperial and papal documents, see Hans-­ Eberhard Hilpert, Kaiser-­und Papstbriefe in den Chronica majora des Matthaeus Paris (Stutt­ gart: Klett-­Cotta, 1981); and, more generally, Galloway, “Writing History in E ­ ngland,” 258, 69. 37. For France, see, for example, Guenée, “Documents insérés et documents abrégés”; for some specific examples of imperial chroniclers using documents, see the studies of medieval Bohe­ mian documentary historiography by Maria Bláhová and Ivan Hlaváček: Hlaváček, “Diploma­ tisches Material in den narrativen Quellen des böhmischen Mittelalters,” in Palaeographica diplomatica et archivistica: Studi in onore G. Battelli (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1979); Bláhová, “Korrespondenz als Quelle der mittelalterlichen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung,” in Kommunikationspraxis und Korrespondenzwesen im Mittelalter und in der Re­nais­sance, ed. Heinz-­ Dieter Heimann and Ivan Hlaváček (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998). 38. For William of Tyre’s use of letters issued by the imperial chancery in Constantinople, see Christian Gastgeber, “Schreiben der byzantinischen Kaiserkanzlei in der Kreuzzugsge­ schichte des Wilhelm von Tyrus,” Jahrbuch der österreichischen Byzantinistik 63 (2013): 91–106. 39. See especially Girolamo, “Il notaio-­cronista,” 293–309; Frank Schweppenstette, “City Chronicles,” in Transforming the Medieval World: Uses of Pragmatic Literacy in the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Franz-­Josef Arlinghaus et al. (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 127–49; and Marino Zabbia, “Écri­ ture historique et culture documentaire: La chronique de Falcone Beneventano (première moitié du XIIe siecle),” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 159 (2001): 369–88. 40. See Barrow, “William of Malmesbury’s Use of Charters,” for just one example of a very widespread monastic practice. 41. For use of documents in high-­medieval episcopal gesta, see Michel Sot, Gesta episcoporum, gesta abbatum, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 37 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), 29. 42. Clanchy himself stresses that “the shift from memory to written rec­ord was not an ex­ clusively En­g lish phenomenon; it was at the least western Eu­ro­pean.” Clanchy, Memory, 19. For a recent study of the high-­medieval “literate revolution” in France, see Bertrand, Écritures ordinaires; for an attempt at a pan-­European perspective, see Eltjo Buringh, Medieval Manuscript Production in the Latin West: Explorations with a Global Database (Leiden: Brill, 2010), esp. 157–60. 43. See Chapter 4. 44. “Perhaps the latest of the stimuli which led to the emergence of the Eu­ro­pean state,” thought Joseph R. Strayer, “was the rapid growth in number of educated men during the twelfth

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c­ entury. It is difficult to create permanent, impersonal institutions without written rec­ords and official documents.” Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1970), 24. By the late twelfth c­ entury in E ­ ngland, Strayer argued, “all branches of En­g lish government w ­ ere keeping careful rec­ords . . . ​[and the] abundance of written rec­ords solidified rapidly growing institutions. . . . ​Pre­ce­dents ­were easy to find, so that governmental ac­ tion was consistent and predictable” (42). 45. Clanchy, Memory. 46. Clanchy, 7–10. 47. Aleida Assmann, “Texts, Traces, Trash: The Changing Media of Cultural Memory,” Repre­sen­ta­tions 56 (1996): 125. Assmann is one of the pioneers of cultural memory studies; her al­ lusion is to Shakespeare’s fifty-­fi fth sonnet. 48. Assmann, 125. 49. Jan Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory: Ten Studies, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 121. 50. Aleida Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning, Media and Cultural Memory/Medien und kulturelle Erinnerung (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 101. 51. According to Jeffrey Olick, mnemonic products “include stories, rituals, books, stat­ ues, pre­sen­ta­tions, speeches, images, pictures, rec­ords, historical studies, surveys, e­tc.” Mne­ monic practices, on the other hand, include “recall, repre­ sen­ ta­ tion, commemoration, cele­bration . . . ​and many ­others.” Olick, “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mne­ monic Practices and Products,” in Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008), 158. 52. Olick, “Collective Memory,” 158. 53. Timothy Reuter, “Modern Mentalities and Medieval Polities,” in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15. 54. Clanchy, Memory, 223. 55. Armando Petrucci, Public Lettering: Script, Power and Culture (Chicago: Chicago Uni­ versity Press, 1993). Petrucci’s notion of “graphic culture” is also fundamental to Roger Chartier’s Inscription and Erasure, which aimed “at understanding how certain works laid hold of the ‘graphic culture’ of the time, or at any rate of certain of its ele­ments, in such a way as to make the written itself the subject of writing.” For Chartier, “graphic culture” encompasses “the ­whole range of written objects and practices in any given society.” Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Lit­er­a­ture and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eigh­teenth C ­ entury, trans. Arthur Gold­ hammer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), viii. 56. Certeau, Writing of History, 66. 57. Certeau, 72. 58. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 138. 59. As Paul Ricoeur puts it, “History is intrinsically historio-­graphy—or to put it in a delib­ erately provocative way, a literary artifact.” Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984), 1:162. For history as a “sociocultural tautology,” see Certeau, Writing of History, 65. 60. “Haec disciplina ad grammaticam pertinet, quia quidquid dignum memoria est, litteris mandatur” (This discipline has to do with Grammar, b­ ecause what­ever is worthy of remembrance is committed to writing), Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum: Libri XX, ed. W. M.



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Lindsay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), 1.41.2 (hereafter Etymologiae); The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67. 61. According to Isidore, written t­ hings (littera, or grammata in Greek) came firmly ­under the sway of grammar; they gave grammar its name: “Grammatica autem a litteris nomen accepit. γράμματα enim Graeci litteras vocant” (Grammar takes its name from letters, for the Greeks call letters grammata). Isidore, Etymologiae, 1.5.1; Etymologies, trans. Barney, 42. In aligning history with grammar, Isidore is following Augustine, who suggests that history’s writtenness means that it (and what­ever ­else is committed to writing) pertains to grammar by necessity. Augustine, De ordine, ed. W. M. Green, CCSL 29 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1970), 2.12.38–44. For history-­writing and grammar in Antiquity and the M ­ iddle Ages, see Matthew S. Kempshall, Rhe­toric and the Writing of History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 122–33. 62. Henri de Lubac, Medieval Exegesis: The Four Senses of Scripture, trans. Mark Sebanc, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998–), 2:41; ff. Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the ­Middle Ages, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1983), 41. 63. Hugh of Saint-­Victor, Hugonis de Sancto Victore Didascalicon de studio legendi, ed. Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1939), 6.3. For Hugh’s alignment of historia with littera, see Janet Coleman, Ancient and Medieval Memories: Studies in the Reconstruction of the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 281–85.

chapter 1 1. “Mandavimus quod . . . ​diligenter scrutari faceretis . . . ​cronica vestra, registra et alia se­ creta vestra singula, tam novissima quam antiqua, cujuscumque formae dataeve fuerint.” Joseph Stevenson, ed., Documents Illustrative of the History of Scotland, 1286–1306, 2 vols. (Edinburgh: HM Trea­sury, 1870), 1:222. 2. Clanchy, Memory, 152–53; cf. Edward L. G. Stones, ed., Anglo-­Scottish Relations, 1174– 1328: Some Selected Documents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 2–3. 3. Bernard Guenée, who has studied Edward’s historical survey in the greatest depth, em­ phasizes the lack of a centralized historiographical (rather than archival) proj­ect in E ­ ngland in this period. Had Philip IV (of France) demanded a similar survey, Guenée suggests, all he needed to do would be to send his agents to Saint-­Denis, where they would have found every­thing they needed in the Grandes chroniques de France. See Bernard Guenée, “L’enquête historique ordonnée par Édouard Ier, roi d’Angleterre, en 1291,” Comptes-­rendus des séances de l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-­lettres 194 (1975), 576. 4. Clanchy, Memory, 153. 5. For the notions of documentary authenticity and auctoritas in this period, see Giovanna Nicolaj, “Originale, authenticum, publicum: una sciarada per il documento diplomatico,” in Charters, Cartularies, and Archives: The Preservation and Transmission of Documents in the Medieval West, ed. Adam J. Kosto and Anders Winroth (Toronto: PIMS, 2002), 8–21. 6. “Mittimus vobis . . . ​transcripta quarundam litterarum quae in thesauraria nostra resi­ dent, tenorem qui sequitur continentes. . . . ​Unde vobis mandamus quod eadem faciatis in croni­ cis vestris ad perpetuam rei gestae memoriam annotari.” (We are sending you transcripts of certain letters which lie in our trea­sury, whose contents include the following. . . . ​Therefore we order that you have them noted in your chronicles for the perpetual remembrance of the m ­ atter.) Diceto, Opera, 1:286–87, n.3.

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7. Or, to be more precise, the letter containing the transcripts of the letters announcing Edward’s claim to Scotland. This distinction is marked in Edward’s letter, with the letter to St. Paul’s being written in Latin and the original letters announcing Edward’s claim being writ­ ten in French. Diceto, Opera, 1:286–87, n.3. 8. Diceto, Opera, 1:396–97. It is in­ter­est­ing to note that ­there are no markings of any kind in the manuscript of the Ymagines that preserves Edward I’s letter at the place where Diceto quotes the Treaty of Falaise. London, Lambeth Palace, MS. 8, fols. 89v–90. 9. Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1978), 121. 10. For which see especially Dennis H. Green, The Beginnings of Medieval Romance: Fact and Fiction, 1150–1220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 11. Robert M. Stein, Real­ity Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025– 1180 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), 10. 12. Nancy F. Partner, “The New Cornificius: Medieval History and the Artifice of Words,” in Classical Rhe­toric and Medieval Historiography, ed. Ernst Breisach (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 196. 13. Foundational in this re­spect is Jeanette M. A. Beer, Narrative Conventions of Truth in the ­Middle Ages (Geneva: Droz, 1981). But see also Partner, “New Cornificius,” 5–60; Roger D. Ray, “Rhetorical Scepticism and Verismilar Narrative in John of Salisbury’s Historia pontificalis,” in Classical Rhe­toric and Medieval Histoiograhy, ed. Ernst Breisach, 61–103; and, more generally, Ruth Morse, Truth and Convention in the ­Middle Ages: Rhe­toric, Repre­sen­ta­tion, and Real­ity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The mechanics of the suspension of “historical” verisimilitude for fictional purposes is the focus of Monika Otter, Inventiones: Fiction and Referentiality in Twelfth-­Century En­glish Historical Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro­ lina Press, 1996). Both Otter and Laura Ashe go beyond narrative texts’ explicit truth claims by invoking Bakhtin’s notion of the chronotope (the simultaneous narrative control of space and time), which enabled readers to distinguish between historicity and fictionality. Otter, Inventiones, 9–12; Laura Ashe, Fiction and History in ­England, 1066–1200 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2007). 14. See, for example, Beer, Narrative Conventions, 23–34; Morse, Truth and Convention, 144–5; Peter Damian-­Grint, The New Historians of the Twelfth-­Century Re­nais­sance: Inventing Vernacular Authority (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1999), 75–76; and Anthony Lodge, “Lit­er­a­ture and History in the Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme,” French Studies 94 (1990): 266–68. The medieval preference for eyewitness history has its roots in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville: according to Isidore, history took its name from the Greek verb historein—to see or to know—­because “among the ancients no one would write history ­unless he had been pre­sent and had seen what was to be written down.” Isidore of Seville, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, trans. Stephen A. Barney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 67. 15. Diana Greenway, for example, argues that Ralph de Diceto “endeavored to make his work as au­then­tic as pos­si­ble by incorporating lengthy quotations from con­temporary letters.” Greenway, “Historical Writing at St. Paul’s,” in St Paul’s: The Cathedral Church of London, 604– 2004, ed. Derek Keene, Arthur Burns, and Andrew Saint (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 152. And Julia Barrow has noted how William of Malmesbury deployed charters ­earlier in the twelfth ­century in order to “support the [historical narrative] by authenticating what is being said.” Barrow, “William of Malmesbury’s Use of Charters,” 68. This “authenticat­ ing” function is also posited in non-­Anglophone scholarship on (non-­English) historiographical



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documents: Maria Bláhová, for example, has surveyed the “vari­ous ways” that history-­writers in medieval Bohemia used documents “zum Nachweis der Authentizität und Zuverlässigkeit ihrer Informationen” (as proof of the authenticity and reliability of their information). Bláhová, “Kor­ respondenz als Quelle der mittelalterlichen Zeitgeschichtsschreibung,” 180. 16. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 139. 17. Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” Comparative Criticism 3 (1981): 8. Original emphasis. 18. For the connections between rhe­toric and history-­writing, see Kempshall, Rhe­toric. 19. See especially A. J. Minnis and A. B. Scott, eds., Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100–­c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 113–64; and Paivi Mehtonen, Old Concepts and New Poetics: Historia, Argumentum and Fa­bula in the Twelfth-­and Early Thirteenth-­Century Latin Poetics of Fiction (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1996). 20. H ­ ere I am relying on Kempshall, Rhe­toric, 187–89. 21. According to Cicero, extrinsic testimony comprised t­ hose proofs that “rest upon no intrinsic force of their own, but external authority.” Cicero, De oratore, ed. and trans. Harris Rackham, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 2:173. 22. Kempshall, Rhe­toric, 182. 23. Kempshall, 182. 24. See Cicero, De oratore, 2:173. On the perils of making t­ hings up in narratives when “ta­ bulae” testified to something dif­fer­ent, cf. [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, ed. and trans. Harry Caplan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 1:16. 25. Kempshall, Rhe­toric, 219. See also Kempshall, 219–29, for further examples of history-­ writers using documents explic­itly to assert the truth of what they w ­ ere writing. 26. As Hayden White once argued, “Historical documents are not less opaque than the texts studied by the literary critic.” White, “The Historical Text as a Literary Artifact,” in Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, ed. White (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 89. 27. For “l’irrésistable ascension” of “litterae” at the expense of “carta” and “scriptum” in the documentary terminology used in the twelfth ­century, see Olivier Guyotjeannin, “Le vocabu­ laire de la diplomatique en latin médiéval (noms de l’acte, mise par écrit, tradition critique, conser­ vation),” in Vocabulaire du livre et de l’ écriture au Moyen Âge, ed. Olga Weijers, Études sur le vocabulaire intellectuel du Moyen Âge (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 124. 28. “Memores documenti illius eloquentissimi, qui ait ‘Vindictam mandasse sat est, plus no­ minis horror / Quam tuus ensis eget . . .’ ” Howden, Gesta, 1:199. 29. Robert Henryson, The Poems of Robert Henryson, ed. Robert L. Kindrick (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1997), line 1769. Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. Isaac Jag­ gard (London, 1620), 2.10 (fols. 80v–81r), Early En­glish Books Online, http://­gateway​.­proquest​.­com​ /­openurl​?­ctx​_­ver​=­Z39​.­88​-­2003&res​_­id​= ­xri:eebo&rft ​_­id​= ­xri:eebo:image:6999:81. For ­these ref­ erences, see the Oxford En­glish Dictionary, s.v. “document,” http://­w ww​.­oed​.­com​/­view​/­entry​ /­56328. 30. At Chronica, 4:40, Howden quotes Alan de Lille, Anticlaudianus, ed. R. Bossuat (Paris: Vrin, 1955), 7:124–26. 31. See, for example, Howden’s use of Ovid’s Heroides and Amores in his Chronica (Howden, Chronica, 3:91), and his use of Ex ponto (Howden, 4:143). The Roman compiler Valerius Maximus also uses the word documentum to refer to the vari­ous deeds and sayings that he had collected

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together in his Facta et dicta memorabilia—­which was a classic in the canon of medieval rhetori­ cal training. See Kempshall, Rhe­toric, 36–37, n.8, with references. 32. Diceto, Opera, 1:223. 33. Diceto, 1:394. Cf. Diceto, 1:309. 34. The specifically elucidatory functions of documents are clearer still in another of Dice­ to’s introductory formulae. “Quid ibi sit actum . . . ​sequentia declarabunt” (the following ­w ill make clear what happened t­ here), Diceto says, when introducing a letter that the suffragans of Canterbury sent to Pope Lucius III. Diceto, Opera, 2:222–23. 35. Diceto used the words he did in his chronicles, he said, “ad victorias principum declaran­ das, ad pacem omnium jugiter recolendam, et semper provehendam in melius” (in order to shine light on the victories of princes, in order to recall every­one to peace, and in order to improve every­one for the better). Diceto, Opera, 1:267. On the connections between moral-­didactic history-­ writing and demonstrative rhe­toric, which Diceto seems to be making ­here, see Kempshall, Rhe­ toric, 138–71. 36. Gervase of Canterbury, The Historical Works of Gervase of Canterbury, ed. William Stubbs, 2 vols, Rolls Series 73 (London: Longman, 1879–80), 2:4. 37. Dominick LaCapra, History and Criticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 17. 38. Roman rhetoricians did something similar when they used the word tabulae (tablets) to refer to written proofs; modern translations of the classical manuals tend to call ­these tablets documents. 39. Guyotjeannin, “Vocabulaire de la diplomatique,” 124. 40. Howden, Gesta, 1:147, 69. 41. Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 1983), 42. 42. For a concise delineation of this critical field, see Pierre Chastang, “Cartulaires, cartu­ larisation et scripturalité médiévale: La structuration d’un nouveau champ de recherche,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 49 (2006): 21–31. 43. As Sylvie Lefèvre puts it, “Un des caractères majeurs de la lettre est d’être un texte ad­ ressé” (one of the letter’s principal characteristics is that it is a text that is addressed). Sylvie Lefèvre, “La lettre et ses adresses,” in Medieval Letters: Between Fiction and Document, ed. Chris­ tian Høgel and Elisabetta Bartoli (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 335. 44. Arnulf of Lisieux, The Letters of Arnulf of Lisieux, ed. Frank Barlow, Camden Society 3rd Series 61 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1939), xliii. Attilio Bartoli Langeli made a simi­ lar point more recently: “La documentazione di tutte le cancellarie, maggiori e minori, laiche ed ecclesiastiche, si realizzò principalmente nella forma della lettera. . . . ​[Tutti] tipi documentari del medievo cancelleresco . . . ​aderivano al modello epistolare’ (Documentation produced by all chanceries—­major and minor, ecclesiastical and lay—­manifested itself principally in the form of the letter . . . ​a ll of medieval bureaucracy’s documentary types derive from the epistolary form). Attilio Bartoli Langeli, “Cancellierato e produzione epistolare,” in Le forme della propaganda politica nel Due e nel Trecento, ed. Cammarosano, 252. The difficulty that the ubiquity of episto­ lary form caused in distinguishing between the letters and charters of Gilbert Foliot is dis­ cussed in The Letters and Charters of Gilbert Foliot, ed. Adrian Morey and Christopher N. L. Brooke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 1. See Christopher R. Cheney, En­glish Bishops’ Chanceries, 1100–1250 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1950), 57–59, for the dominance of the epistolary form in episcopal administration. Cf. Julia Barrow, “From the Lease to the Certificate: The Evolution of Episcopal Acts in E ­ ngland and Wales,” in Die



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Diplomatik der Bischofsurkunde vor 1250, ed. Christoph Haidacher and Werner Köfler (Inns­ bruck: Tiroler Landesarchiv, 1993), 537–38, which dates the increasing dominance of epistolary forms to the 1150s. 45. See, e.g., James C. Holt, “The Assizes of Henry II: The Texts,” in The Study of Medieval Rec­ords in Honour of Kathleen Major, ed. Donald A. Bullough and R. L. Storey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 85–106; and David Corner, “The Texts of Henry II’s Assizes,” in Law-­ Making and Law-­Makers in British History: Papers Presented to the Edinburgh ­Legal History Conference, 1977, ed. Alan Harding (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980), 7–20. 46. For a breakdown of the status of the senders and recipients of letters in ­these texts, see Henry Bainton, “History and the Written Word in the Angevin Empire” (PhD diss., University of York, 2010), 243–46. 47. The close relationship between charters and history-­writing is now well established. Ac­ cording to Marjorie Chibnall, for example, “History and charters [­were] at times composed by the same men and in much the same language.” Chibnall, “Charter and Chronicle: The Use of Archive Sources by Norman Historians,” in Church and Government in the M ­ iddle Ages, ed. Christopher Brooke et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 1. 48. For John’s address to his friend Peter de la Celle, see John of Salisbury, The Historia pontificalis of John of Salisbury, ed. Marjorie Chibnall (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 4. 49. H. Porter Abbott, “Narrativity,” in Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009), 313. Abbott ­here is summarizing Hayden White’s argument. Accord­ ing to White, “We can comprehend the appeal of historical discourse by recognizing the extent to which it makes the real desirable, makes the real into an object of desire, and does so by its imposition, upon events that are represented as real, of the formal coherency that stories possess.” White, “The Value of Narrativity in the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Real­ity,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 24. 50. See, e.g., Boncompagno da Signa, “Liber qui dicitur Palma,” in Medieval Diplomatic and the Ars Dictandi, ed. Steven  M. Wight (Pavia: Università degli studi di Pavia, 1999), chap­ ters 17–19; and Anon., Aurea Gemma in Medieval Diplomatic and the Ars Dictandi, chapter 1.6. 51. For the epistolary origins of the newspaper, see Charles Bazerman, “Letters and the So­ cial Grounding of Differentiated Genres,” in Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. David Barton and Nigel Hall (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), 23–24. 52. Lars Boje Mortensen, “Comparing and Connecting: The Rise of Fast Historiography in Latin and Vernacular (Twelfth to Thirteenth ­Century),” Medieval Worlds 1 (2015): 25–39. 53. See, e.g., Howden, Gesta, 1:128–30; Howden, Chronica, 4:58–59; and Diceto, Opera, 1:409–10. 54. “Quae litterarum apicibus adnotantur, posteritati profecto signatur.” Howden, Gesta, 2:215. 55. “Litteris instantibus”—­i.e., “by t­ hese very graphemes” or “by this very letter”: the ambi­ guity between technology and form h ­ ere is deliberate. Howden, Gesta, 2:215. 56. “Eliensis episcopi ad notitiam omnium litteris instantibus volumus in posterum con­ signari, ut in hoc exemplari semper inveniat et humilitas quod prosperet et superbis quod formi­ det.” Howden, Gesta, 2:219. 57. “Piscator quidam, qui statim deputans scortum propius acessit; et qui quasi nudus de mari descenderat calefieri cupiens, cucurrit ad monstrum, et manu sinistra collum complectens, dextra partes inferiores rimatur. Cumque tunicam subito sublevasset, et nimis inverecunde ad partes verecundas manum extendisset audacter, femoralis sensit et virum in femina . . . ​agnovit.” Howden, Gesta, 2:219.

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58. Roy K. Gibson and A. D. Morrison, “What Is a Letter?,” in Ancient Letters, ed. Ruth Morello and A. D. Morrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ix–­x. 59. Although Howden says nothing about his purposes, his friend William of Newburgh explic­itly says he committed his history of recent events to writing [conscribo] for the “knowledge and instruction of posterity”—­and countless other history-­writers said more or less the same ­thing. William of Newburgh, Historia anglorum, in Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, 4 vols., Rolls Series 82 (London: Longman, 1884–86), 1:3. 60. According to the rhetorical manuals, the question of “what sort of person” (qualis est) a defendant was—­which embraced the defendant’s character (animus, attributa personis), their habitus, and their emotional state (affectio)—­was central to forensic rhe­toric. See Kempshall, Rhe­ toric, 175–77. 61. Letters are generally addressed to p­ eople who are not in their authors’ presence. Accord­ ing to Isidore of Seville, letters ­were addressed to absent parties by definition: it was “appropri­ ate,” Isidore said, that the Greeks had called letters epistolae, ­because stola are “­things sent away” (and translated missa in Latin). (Isidore, Etymologies, 6.8.13, translation modified). For authorial absence and epistolarity in Angevin history-­w riting, see Henry Bainton, “Epistolary Docu­ ments in High-­Medieval History-­Writing,” Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­ tures 4 (2017): 9–38. 62. Diceto uses t­ hese words to introduce a letter announcing Frederick Barbarossa’s abju­ ration of Alexander III’s authority. By contrast, in Howden’s Gesta only 17 of 75 documents are not introduced, and in the Chronica, 57 of 169. 63. Diceto, Opera, 2:56–57. 64. Diceto makes it clear that this paratactic sequence is over and that he is moving on to a dif­fer­ent subject (a truce between Philip Augustus and Henry II) in the subsequent entry, by be­ ginning it with a date (“on the Octave of St Martin”). Diceto, Opera, 2:59. 65. Hans Eberhard Mayer and Hannes Möhring have shown that the letters between Bar­ barossa and Saladin w ­ ere forgeries of En­g lish origin. Hans Eberhard Mayer, “Der Brief Kaiser Friedrichs  I. an Saladin vom Jahre 1188,” Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 14 (1958): 488–94; Hannes Möhring, Saladin und der Dritte Kreuzzug: Aiyubidische Strategie und Diplomatie im Vergleich vornehmlich der arabischen mit den lateinischen Quellen (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1980), 98–125. I am grateful to Helen Birkett for generously sharing her forthcoming ar­ ticle on medieval news with me, where ­these letters are discussed along with the work of Mayer and Möhring. 66. Diceto, 2:48–49. 67. Diceto, 2:49. 68. Diceto, 2:125–42. 69. Diceto, 2:126–29. 70. “Hubertus Cantuariensis archiepiscopus legatus creatus est.” Diceto, Opera, 1:284. 71. “Philippus rex Francorum tres litteras scripsit archiepiscopo Rothomagensi.” Diceto, Opera, 1:284. 72. Diceto, Opera, 1:284. 73. Diceto served Foliot while the latter was bishop of London and had studied with Arnulf of Lisieux in Paris. Diceto, Opera, 1:xxxi–­x xxii. All three ­were prominent figures at Henry II’s court, “in the shadow” of which Howden wrote (as Nicholas Vincent puts it). Vincent, “Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment U ­ nder John and His Contemporaries,” in En­glish Government in the Thirteenth C ­ entury, ed. Adrian Jobson (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004), 28.



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74. Otter, Inventiones, 3. 75. Leah Shopkow, History and Community: Norman Historical Writing in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 1997), 23. 76. Karine Ugé, Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders (York: York Medieval Press, 2005), 13. For other studies of the intersection between history-­writing and cartularies, see, e.g., Patrick J. Geary, “Entre gestion et gesta: Aux origines des cartulaires,” in Les cartulaires: Actes de la t­ able ronde organisée par l’École nationale des chartes et le G.D.R. 121 du C.N.R.S, ed. Olivier Guyotjeannin, Laurent Morelle, and Michel Parisse (Paris: École des chartes, 1993), esp. 13–26; Dominique Iogna-­Prat, “La confection des cartulaires et l’historiographie à Cluny (xie–­x iie siècles),” in Les cartulaires, ed. Guyotjeannin et al., 27–44; Trevor Foulds, “Medieval Cartularies,” Archives 18, no.  77 (1987): esp. 11–15; and Georges Declercq, “Originals and Cartularies: The Organ­ization of Archival Memory,” in Charters and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Society, ed. Karl Heidecker (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006), 147. 77. Julian Haseldine, “The Creation of a Literary Memorial: The Letter Collection of Peter of Celle,” Sacris Erudiri 37 (1997): 336. Reginald Lane Poole, for example, suggested that the letters that John of Salisbury wrote in Archbishop Theobald’s name ­were collected “perhaps to furnish a kind of formulary, compiled for use in the court of Canterbury,” wherein the letters “might be preserved ­either as models of composition or e­ lse as pre­ce­dents to govern decisions in similar cases.” Poole, Studies in Chronology and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 254. For a dis­ cussion of model letter-­collecting in the M ­ iddle Ages, see Martin Camargo, Ars dictaminis, ars dictandi, Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 17 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1991), 35–37. 78. Haseldine, “Creation of a Literary Memorial,” 336. 79. “Joannis itaque opus primo perlegatur, per quod iter aperietur ad caetera quae sequun­ tur” (John’s work should be read first through which the path is cleared for the other ­things that follow). Alan of Tewkesbury, Vita sancti Thomae, Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris, auctoribus Johanne de Sarisberiensi et Alano Abbate Tewkesberiensi, in MTB, vol. 2, 299–361, 301. 80. For the growth in importance of such compilations of written evidence in the canoniza­ tion pro­cess in this period, see André Vauchez, Sainthood in the ­Later ­Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 38–39. 81. Gerald’s Invectiones are edited in two parts: Gerald of Wales, Invectionum libellus, ed. John S. Brewer, vol. 1, Giraldi Cambrensis opera omnia, ed. John S. Brewer, James F. Dimock, and George F. Warner (London: Longman, 1861), 123–96; De invectionibus lib. IV, ed. John S. Brewer, vol. 3, Giraldi Cambrensis opera omnia (London: Longman, 1863), 3–100. 82. “Exemplaria epistolarum . . . ​quibus beati G(ileberti) sanctitas et magnificentia operum eius merito commendata est et probata, in unam seriem congessimus.” Raymonde Foreville and Gillian Kier, eds. and trans., The Book of St. Gilbert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 198–99; my emphasis. 83. As D. H. Green explains, “Although t­ here is no hard and fast distinction, [the ordo naturalis] is commonly regarded as the hallmark of the historian, and the [ordo artificialis] as the characteristic of fictional writing.” Green, Beginnings, 96. 84. Among con­temporary history-­writers, Gervase of Canterbury and William of Tyre made this point explic­itly. Gervase worried about chroniclers who calculated their chronology wrongly and had thereby introduced “in ecclesiam Dei multam mendaciorum confusionem” (a ­g reat confusion of lies into the Church of God); Gervase goes on to enumerate the other “occasio[nes] mentiendi” (grounds for lying) that result from incorrect chronology. Gervase, Historical Works, 1:88. William of Tyre claimed his history of the Holy Land was true ­because

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“rerum autem incontaminatam prosequi gestarum seriem” (I have followed the uncorrupted order of events”). William of Tyre, Chronicon, ed. R. B. C. Huygens et al., 2 vols., CCCM 63– 63A (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), 1: prol. 15. Self-­consciously following what the rhetoricians called the ordo naturalis was a good way of rejecting the ordo artificialis favored by “liars” such as Virgil, together with the fiction that ordo implied. (Bernard Silvestris, for example, had called Virgil the “­father of lies” for disregarding chronology in the Aeneid [Minnis and Scott, Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, 45]; see also Conrad of Hirsau’s preference for Dares’s strictly chronological account of the fall of Troy over Virgil’s [Minnis and Scott, 151]; and the classical examples compiled in Heinrich Lausberg, Handbook of Literary Rhe­toric: A Foundation for Literary Study, ed. David E. Orton and R. Dean Anderson [Leiden: Brill, 1998], para. 317, and paras. 443–52). 85. “Ex his, quae illi sparsim memoraverant, eligentes ac velut e rationabilibus campis docto­ rum flosculos decerpentes historica narratione in unum corpus redigere . . . ​temptavimus.” Eusebius Caesariensis secundum translationem quam fecit Rufinus, ed. Eduard Schwartz and Theodor Mommsen, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1903–8), 1:9. For the medieval reception of Eusebius/Rufinus’s no­ tion of historiographical collecting, see Bernard Guenée, “Lo storico e la compilazione nel XIII secolo,” in Aspetti della letteratura latina nel secolo XIII: Atti del primo Convegno internazionale di studi dell’Associazione per il Medioevo e l’Umanesimo latini, ed. Claudio Leonardi and Giovanni Orlandi (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1986), 58–63. 86. William Stubbs, ed., Epistolae Cantuarienses, vol. 2, Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I, Rolls Series 38 (London: Longman, 1865), 1. 87. “Exemplaria epistolarum . . . ​quibus beati G(ileberti) sanctitas et magnificentia operum eius merito commendata est et probata, in unam seriem congessimus” (We have collected together into one single sequence copies of letters . . . ​by which the sanctity of blessed Gilbert, and the great­ ness of his works, are rightfully commended and proved). Foreville and Kier, Book of St. Gilbert, 198–99. 88. Herbert of Bosham, Vita sancti Thomae archiepiscopi et martyris, ed. James Cragie Robert­ son, in MTB, vol. 3, 155–534, 396 (hereafter Bosham, Historia). 89. Stubbs, Epistolae Cantuarienses, 1. 90. Stubbs, 1. 91. “Quoniam egregie dicta vel acta veterum studiis ad posteritatis tam instructionem quam imitationem literis annotari solent et perpetuari, ea quibus in curia Giraldus dictis aemulorum aut scriptis ad talionem provocatus laudem obtinuit, explicare curavimus.” Cambrensis, Invectionum libri sex, 11. 92. “The meaning of real ­human lives,” White goes so far as to argue, “is the meaning of the plots, quasiplots, paraplots, or failed plots by which the events that ­those lives comprise are en­ dowed with the aspect of stories having a discernible beginning, ­middle, and end.” White, “Liter­ ary Artifact,” 83. 93. Haseldine, “Creation of a Literary Memorial,” 336. 94. Monastic chronicles that recounted the history of a par­tic­u ­lar ­house from its founda­ tion w ­ ere more discrete in their scope than Howden’s and Diceto’s chronicles, though they ­were more expansive than saints’ lives. 95. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-­Century Eu­ rope (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5. Perhaps unwittingly, White h ­ ere echoes medieval distinctions between histories (historiae) and chronicles, genres that had been precisely defined by such authorities as Isidore of Seville and Cassiodorus. According to Gervase



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of Canterbury, for example, t­ hose who write histories should “strive for the truth, and to soothe [their] hearers or readers with sweet and elegant speech; and to teach truly the actions, manners, and life of him whom he describes. . . . ​The chronicler, on the other hand, calculates the years of the Lord’s incarnation and the months and days of the years, and briefly explains the deeds of kings and princes that took place in them” (proprium est historici veritati intendere, audientes vel legentes dulci sermoni et eleganti demulcere, actus, mores vitamque ipsius quam describit ve­ raciter edocere. . . . ​Cronicus autem annos incarnationis Domini annorumque menses computat et kalendas, actus etiam regum et principum quae in ipsis eveniunt breviter edocet). Gervase, Historical Works, 1:87. For the Isidorian and Cassiodorian basis of Gervase’s distinction, see Bernard Guenée, “Histoires, annales, chroniques: Essai sur les genres historiques au Moyen Âge,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 28 (1973): 1006–7. 96. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Repre­sen­ta­ tion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 5. Paul Ricoeur makes a similar, if more epistemologically inflected, point: “A story is made out of events to the extent that plot makes events into a story. The plot, therefore, places us at the crossing point of temporality and narrativ­ ity: to be historical, an event must be more than a singular occurrence, a unique happening. It receives its definition from its contribution to the development of a plot.” Ricoeur, “Narrative Time,” Critical Inquiry 7 (1980): 171. 97. White, “Literary Artifact,” 93. 98. The four “modes of emplotment” that White adopts from Frye are romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. White, Metahistory, 7–11. 99. White, Content of the Form, 176. 100. For Claude Lévi-­ Strauss, with whose work White engages but disagrees, the variousness—­and value-­laden nature—of the chronologies that history-­writers have always used was evidence that myth is at work when chroniclers are selecting events to arrange in chronologi­ cal order. See Lévi-­Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1962), 256–69. 101. See note 88 above. 102. White, Content of the Form, 6. 103. White, 9. 104. White, 9. 105. Cf. Diceto’s report of the third Lateran Council, where, before transcribing two canons, he writes, “Plurima memoriae plurimum commendanda statuta sunt ibi, de quibus saltem insera­ mus paucissima” (Many ­things ­were ordered to be committed to memory ­there, of which we in­ sert just a very few). Diceto, Opera, 1:430. Cf. Gervase, Historical Works, 1:502: “Nec te moveat, lector bone . . . ​quod tot epistolas inserui” (Do not let it disturb you, good reader . . . ​that I have inserted so many letters); and Gerald of Wales, De principis instructione, ed. George F. Warner, vol. 8, Giraldi Cambrensis opera omnia (London: Longman, 1891), 267: “Quas litteras una cum epis­ tola Soldani responsoria . . . ​hic inserere curavi” (I have thought to insert [Frederick Barbarossa’s letter to Saladin], together with Saladin’s letter in reply), and, for a passive construction, Gerald, 236: “Litteras, quas in Angliam tunc destinavit, hic insertas lector invenit” (The reader finds the letter that [Clement III] then sent to ­England inserted ­here). 106. Guyotjeannin, “Vocabulaire de la diplomatique,” 126–27, translation mine. The author of the Liber Eliensis uses the verb inserere synonymously with scribere to refer to the “inclita gesta” of the Eliensis “queve disperse vel confuse Anglico stilo inserta sunt” (which w ­ ere inscribed by the pen in En­g lish in a variety of dif­fer­ent places or in a disor­ga­nized manner). Ernest  O. Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, Camden Society Third Series (London: 1962), 1; Janet Fairweather, trans.,

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Liber Eliensis: A History of the Isle of Ely from the Seventh to the Twelfth ­Century (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 1, translation modified. 107. “Si . . . ​causas regnorum . . . ​[et] rebelliones illicitas filiorum . . . ​insurgentium in par­ entes intersertas annalibus diligenter revolveris, profecto repperies . . . ​ordine mortalitatis tur­ bato fati munus implesse” (If you carefully survey the . . . ​unlawful rebellions of insurgent sons against their f­ athers inscribed in the annals . . . ​you w ­ ill soon find [­those] sons d­ ying before their ­fathers). Diceto, Opera, 2:20. 108. “Et suis annalibus inserendam computarentur.” Diceto, Opera, 2:115. 109. Ricoeur divides (modern) historical documents into two categories: “voluntary wit­ nesses,” and witnesses “in spite of themselves.” “Voluntary witnesses” are what p­ eople wrote down specifically with posterity in mind. As written testimonies, t­ hese documents are “detached from the authors who ‘gave birth’ to them.” Their subsequent deposit in an archive means that they are “handed over to the care of ­those who are competent to question them and hence to de­ fend them, by giving them aid and assistance.” Witnesses “in spite of themselves,” on the other hand, are “the target of indiscretion and the historian’s appetite.” According to Ricoeur, modern historians largely use documents as “witnesses in spite of themselves”: they use documents to tes­ tify to stories that the documents themselves do not tell. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 169–71. 110. For libelli de lite and their origins in the investiture controversy, see Karl J. Leyser, “The Polemics of the Papal Revolution,” in Trends in Medieval Po­liti­cal Thought, ed. Beryl Smalley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 138–60. 111. Nineteen letters in the Ymagines; three in the Gesta; twenty-­eight in the Chronica. “Archetypes α and β [of Becket’s correspondence] w ­ ere specially constructed libelli de lite, prob­ ably made during the last months of Becket’s life, and depend on regularly-­kept archives, divided into papal and non-­papal letters, together with separate files and dossiers relating to current busi­ ness and special concerns.” Thomas Becket, The Correspondence of Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury 1162–1170, ed. and trans. Anne Duggan, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 1:lxxix–­lxxx. For an analy­sis of the already-­compiled collections of Becket’s correspondence that Howden and Diceto used, see Anne Duggan, “The Manuscript Transmission of Letter Collec­ tions Relating to the Becket Dispute and Their Use as Con­temporary Sources” (PhD diss., Uni­ versity of London, 1971), 274–334. 112. Three letters in Diceto’s Ymagines; six in Howden’s Chronica. 113. Which accounts for three letters in Diceto’s Ymagines. Walter de Coutances was a fre­ quent correspondent of Ralph Diceto (sending him nine letters preserved in the Ymagines). For Coutances and the Les Andelys case, see Peter  A. Poggioli, “From Politician to Prelate: The ­Career of Walter of Coutances, Archbishop of Rouen, 1184–1207” (PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 1984), 124–29. 114. Seventeen letters in the Chronica (Geoffrey’s ­career is not covered by the chronologi­ cal scope of the Gesta). For Howden’s account of Geoffrey’s c­ areer, see Marie Lovatt, ed. En­glish Episcopal Acta, 27. York, 1189–1212 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), cxxxii–­cxxxiii; and Claudia Rother, “Geoffrey, Archbishop of York: A Prism of Twelfth-­Century Historical Writ­ ing” (MA diss., University of York, 2008), 29–41. 115. Seven letters in the Gesta; twelve in the Chronica. Archibald A.M. Duncan suggests that Howden had access to a ready-­made dossier of letters about the dispute, as he had with the Becket materials—­a lthough if that w ­ ere the case, one might have expected Howden to have reproduced the letters in chronological order. Duncan, “Roger of Howden and Scotland, 1187–1201,” in



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Church, Chronicle and Learning in Medieval and Early Re­nais­sance Scotland, ed. Barbara  E. Crawford (Edinburgh: Mercat, 1999), 141. 116. Howden, Gesta, 1:l. Cf. Doris Stenton, “Roger of Howden and Benedict,” EHR 68, no. 269 (1953): 574; and David Corner, “Howden [Hoveden], Roger of (d. 1201/2),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition (hereafter ODNB) (Oxford: Oxford Univer­ sity Press, 2004), http://­doi​.­org ​/­10​.­1093​/­ref:odnb​/­13880. Howden, Gesta, 1:250; Chronica, 2:208. 117. The Chronica was written from 1192 and was itself revised between the very end of the twelfth c­ entury and 1201, when Howden died. Corner, “Earliest Surviving Manuscripts,” 297–310. 118. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1:45. Ricoeur h ­ ere is contrasting the work of “the histo­ rian” to the work of chroniclers. 119. John Gillingham has argued that Howden was an escort for the papal legate Alexius who had been sent to ­settle the case in 1180 and that “this would explain in the most eco­nom­ical fashion how he got the pope’s letters.” Gillingham, “Travels,” 80. 120. White, Metahistory, 7. Hayden White revisited the question of the difference between chronicle and story in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, taking on board Ricoeur’s insistence that “the chronicle of events out of which the historian makes his story is not an inno­ cent repre­sen­ta­tion of raw facts given by the documentary rec­ord and presenting itself, as it ­were, spontaneously to the eye of the historian, who then “explains” the events or identifies the story embedded within the sparse chronological account.” White, Content of the Form, 176. 121. Compare the text of the letter in the Chronica with the narrative in the Gesta. “Cum litteras, quas Hugo episcopus redarguerat falsitatis, eidem episcopo dedissemus, et eas in quibus pro­cessus rei continetur, acceptaque a domino rege Scottorum licentia recedere cum festinatione vellemus” (Howden, Chronica, 2:271). “Cumque rex huic adquisierat consilio, praefatus Hugo litteras quas Johannes episcopus contra eum a summo pontifice adquisierat, redarguit falsitatis, et appellavit ad audientiam domini papae” (Howden, Gesta, 1:290). 122. “Volebat . . . ​quod instrumenta praedicta in aliquo loco reponerentur, ita quod nun­ quam sibi contra voluntatem regiam eis uti liceret.” Howden, Chronica, 2:271. This solution is noteworthy for its diametric opposition to canon law: “In ecclesiasticis causis regia uoluntas sac­ erdotibus non est preferenda” (In ecclesiastical affairs the royal w ­ ill is to be subordinate to priests). Gratian, Decretum, D. 10 c. 3 (rubric) in The Treatise on Laws (Decretum DD. 1–20) with The Ordinary Gloss, trans. Augustine Thompson  O.  P. and James Gordley (Washington, DC: Catholic University of Amer­i­ca Press, 1993), 34. 123. Intriguingly, Howden remains the only witness to ­these documents. See Robert Somerville, ed. Scotia Pontificia: Papal Letters to Scotland Before the Pontificate Of Innocent III (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 10. 124. According to Stenton, the Gesta and Chronica “stand out among the rest as objective narratives, supplemented and illustrated by official rec­ords and letters.” Stenton, “Roger of How­ den and Benedict,” 574. Cf. Gillingham, “Travels,” 73. 125. Intriguingly, Cum litteras—­a long with all but one of the letters about St. Andrews included in the Chronica but not the Gesta—is only pre­sent in the oldest manuscript of the Chronica’s tradition and not in l­ ater revisions. The oldest manuscript for this part of the Chronica is Oxford, Bodleian MS Laud 582, which Corner identified as Howden’s autograph copy. Corner, “Earliest Surviving Manuscripts,” 305–10. Comperto nobis is exceptional in being attested in all manuscripts of the Chronica, but it alone comes from the first part of the Chronica (up to 1181), whose textual history is far more stable than the second part (1181–1201).

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126. Howden was close to, and may have written for, both Roger de Pont l’Évêque (archbishop of York, 1154–1181) and Hugh du Puiset (bishop of Durham, 1153–1195), whom Alexander III ap­ pointed as legates in Scotland to resolve the case. As En­glish churchmen wielding legatine author­ ity in Scotland, the dispute imperiled Scotland’s ecclesiastical in­de­pen­dence. According to Alexander III, indeed, the dispute threatened the freedom of the kingdom itself: he warned King William that if Hugh would not renounce his claim to St. Andrews, “Sicut laboravimus ut reg­ num tuum libertatem haberet, sic dabimus studium ut in pristinam subjectionem revertatur” (Just as we have worked for your kingdom to have its freedom, so we w ­ ill take pains that it revert to its former subjection). Howden, Gesta, 1:263; Chronica 2:212; see also Archibald A. M. Duncan, Scotland: The Making of the Kingdom (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1975), 272. 127. I am grateful to Penn Press’s anonymous reader for this neat characterization of the St. Andrews dispute. 128. “Why did Gerald feel the need to falsify Laudabiliter, since En­glish rule was a firm fait accompli by the time he began writing the Expugnatio in 1188?” asks Anne Duggan. The answer lies, Duggan argues, in Gerald’s “desire to justify the event on grounds other than the realpolitik which had brought it about. He wanted to fit it into his construction of a prophetic chain of events in which ­England’s natu­ral right to rule the ­whole of the British Isles was manifested.” In other words, Gerald altered the text of Laudabiliter ­because he wanted its text to fit the role he had emplotted for it in the story of Henry’s conquest of Ireland. Duggan, “Power of Documents,” 265–66. 129. Duggan, 268. 130. Duggan, 269. 131. See Nicholas Vincent’s assessment of the charters included in the ­Battle Abbey Chronicle: “­Battle Abbey and its chronicler w ­ ere duplicitous in their claim that B ­ attle was exempt [from episcopal authority], conjuring up a world of make-­believe from royal and episcopal charters, which w ­ ere forged and reworked and thereafter incorporated within a narrative account, the ­Battle Chronicle, itself composed to lend credence to monastic fantasy.” Nicholas Vincent, “King Henry II and the Monks of ­Battle: The ­Battle Chronicle Unmasked,” in Belief and Culture in the ­Middle Ages: Studies Presented to Henry Mayr-­Harting, ed. Richard Gameson and Henrietta Leyser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 285. 132. Olick, “Collective Memory,” 158.

chapter 2 1. Neil Hathaway, “Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling,” Viator 20 (1989): 44. 2. For an overview of imitatio in the M ­ iddle Ages, see Jan Ziolkowski, “The Highest Form of Compliment: Imitatio in Medieval Latin Culture,” in Poetry and Philosophy in the M ­ iddle Ages: A Festchrift for Peter Dronke, ed. John Marenbon (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 293–307. For the view that “la rhétorique est un art d’imitation, d’adaptation et de réécriture,” see Douglas Kelly, “La rhétorique de la citation dans le roman médiéval,” Romance Languages Annual 10 (1999): 70. For the affinity between rewriting and reading in this period, see Eric H. Reiter, “The Reader as Author of the User-­Produced Manuscript: Reading and Rewriting Popu­lar Latin Theology in the Late ­Middle Ages,” Viator 27 (1999): 152. 3. Richard Southern described how the Glossa ordinaria developed over three generations: it was a pro­cess of “absorbing the learning of the past and providing the basis of new elaborations



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for the ­f uture.” Southern, Scholastic Humanism and the Unification of Eu­rope, Volume II: The Heroic Age (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 34–35. 4. Such classical and patristic quotations would frequently have been extracted from a florilegium—­i.e., a compilation of quotations—­rather than from an “original” work. 5. Marek Thue Kretschmer, Rewriting Roman History in the ­Middle Ages: The “Historia Romana” and the Manuscript Bamberg, Hist. 3, Mittellateinische Studien und Texte (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 2–3. 6. “Abbreviatio chronicorum de diversis . . . ​codicibus diligenter excerpta.” Diceto, Opera, 3–287, with Diceto’s description of the Abbreviationes chronicorum at 3. 7. Gervase, Historical Works, 2:3–105. 8. Gervase, 2:3. This text is known t­ oday as the Gesta regum. 9. Howden, Chronica, 1:lxxxii. Howden also compiled material from the Chronicle of Melrose Abbey. 10. See Chapter 1. 11. For the textual relationship between Howden’s Gesta and his Chronica, see Corner, “Gesta Regis,” 126–44. 12. Bernard Cerquiglini, Éloge de la variante: Étude critique de la philologie (Paris: Seuil, 1989), 111. 13. “Hic mihi non placet Rogerius Houedenus, uir alioqui laudandus, qui scrinia Simeonis, suppresso eius nomine, strenue compilauit, et aliena pro suis gloriae avidulus, supposuit” (­Here I ­don’t like Roger of Howden—in other re­spects a praiseworthy man—­who, ­eager for glory, thor­ oughly pilfered [or: vigorously compiled; the ambiguity is deliberate] Simeon’s book-­boxes, but suppressed Simeon’s name, and substituted another’s [words] for his own). John Leland, Kykneion asma: Cygnea Cantio, auctore Iohanne Lelande antiquario (London: n.p., 1545), 146, Early En­g lish Books Online, http://­g ateway​.­proquest​.­com​/­openurl​?­ctx ​_­ver​=­Z39​.­88​-­2003&res ​_­id​ =­xri:eebo&rft ​_­id​= ­xri:eebo:image:4305:45. 14. Gervase, Historical Works, 1:89. Gervase went on to rework the histories of John of Worcester, Roger of Howden, and many ­others. For Gervase’s comment as the starting point in a tradition of the historian-­compiler’s disavowal of auctoritas, see Guenée, “Lo storico e la compi­ lazione nel XIII secolo,” 57–76. 15. Marek Thue Kretschmer makes the case for “historiographical rewriting as a field of re­ search, which deserves greater attention in the ­future,” in Kretschmer, “Historiographical Re­ writing,” Filologia mediolatina 15 (2008): 283–303. 16. For a critique of the supposedly unimaginative nature of historiographical rewriting, which has ­shaped so many modern editorial decisions about history-­writing, see Steven Vander­ putten, “Universal Historiography as Pro­cess? Shaping Monastic Memories in the Eleventh-­ Century Chronicle of Saint-­Vaast,” in Univeral Chronicles in the High ­Middle Ages, ed. Henry Bainton and Michele Campopiano (York: York Medieval Press, 2017). 17. For something like manifesto, see Stephen G. Nichols, “Philology in a Manuscript Cul­ ture,” Speculum 65 (1990): 1–10. 18. Nichols, for example, argues that “the apparently straightforward act of copying manu­ scripts is not ­free from mimetic intervention. . . . ​In the act of copying a text, the scribe supplants the original poet, often changing words or narrative order, suppressing or shortening some sections, while interpolating new material in ­others.” Nichols, “Philology in a Manuscript Culture,” 8. 19. Gian Biagio Conte, The Rhe­toric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, trans. Charles Segal (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 23.

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20. White, Metahistory, 7; cf. White, Content of the Form, 176, where White revisits the question of the difference between chronicle and story in the light of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative. 21. Kretschmer, Rewriting Roman History, 3. 22. See, most notably, Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative (Bloomington: Indi­ ana University Press, 1984). 23. Meir Sternberg, “Proteus in Quotation Land: Mimesis and the Forms of Reported Dis­ course,” Poetics ­Today 3 (1982): 109. And as Sternberg suggests, misquotation is not so much a “potential danger” of direct discourse as a “prevalent fact.” It is only the omniscient, “quasi-­divine” teller who can “authoritatively replicate any speech-­event he pleases”; on the other hand, “ordi­ nary mortals in life and art cannot with any show of probability . . . ​report even external acts of expression at which they failed to be physically pre­sent.” Sternberg, 141. 24. Sternberg, “Proteus in Quotation Land,” 108. 25. This ambiguity, suggests Sternberg, “is only contingently resolvable.” Sternberg, “Proteus in Quotation Land,” 109. 26. Cf. Dominique Maingueneau, Initiation aux méthodes de l’analyse du discours: Problèmes et perspectives (Paris: Hachette, 1976), 124. Maingueneau posits the “sécurité illusoire” in­ volved in the verification of quotations “comme si le découpage du fragment cité et sa mise en contexte lui laissaient son intégrité profonde, comme si l’étaient les “mêmes” énoncés dans les deux discours différents” (as if the excision of the cited fragment, and its deployment in a [dif­fer­ ent] context left its essential integrity [intact], as if they w ­ ere the “same” utterances in the two dif­f er­ent discourses). 27. FitzStephen wrote his life of Becket before Alan of Tewkesbury had published Becket’s letters, so FitzStephen had to provide his readers with the letters’ texts if he wanted them to read them. As Duggan explains, the letters that FitzStephen quotes and ­those in the short letter col­ lection that follows the Vita in the manuscript w ­ ere “certainly derived from the archives of the Bishop of London.” This marked out FitzStephen’s Vita from other con­temporary lives of Becket, which used correspondence collated at Canterbury. Duggan, Textual History, 196. 28. For a description and history of this manuscript, see Duggan, Textual History, 158–59. 29. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 287, fols. 7r–­v, 18r–­v, 22r–­v, 26r–­v. Fol. 65* (as it is numbered in the MS, in distinction to fol. 65) is also a loose leaf, and it continues the text of fol. 65 (which is part of the letter collection). The symbols resemble [Ø]. 30. E.g., “Ibi in publico omnium aspectu sacerdos ille Vitalis acta narrat episcopo; suas of­ fert literas. Quorum tenor hic erat: Decano etiam offert suas. que hoc continebant [Ø]. Et utreque litere in publico lecte sunt [Ø]. Ex tunc episcopus communi consilio excommunicatum se gessit et regi acta significat. Rex ei rescribit in hunc modum.” MS Douce 287, fol. 21v. The let­ ters referred to are Excessus vestros, Vestram non debet, and Audivi gravamen, printed in the edi­ tion on pages 90, 91, and 91–92, respectively; they are transcribed in the manuscript on the (loose) fols. numbered 22r, 22v, and 18r. Cheney thought that this was a sign that “the scribe [had] . . . ​failed to observe that he was intended to insert certain documents into the life; instead he slavishly copied words such as ‘in hunc modum’ and carried straight on, returning ­later to copy the documents.” Mary Cheney, “William FitzStephen and His Life of Archbishop Thomas,” in Church and Government in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Christopher N. L. Brooke et al. (Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 1976), 148. 31. Cheney, 149. The wider textual history has since been explored by Duggan, Textual History, 190–7.



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32. Cheney, “William FitzStephen,” 148. 33. As well as quoting seven letters in D, FitzStephen also refers to a number of letters tran­ scribed in a letter collection that accompanies the Vita in the manuscript. FitzStephen refers his reader to the letters in this collection via their incipits, suggesting that his narrative depended on this separate letter collection to tell its full story. (The letter Desiderio desideravi, for example, is introduced thus: “Circa primum elapsum exsilii sui annum, cum jam deferbuisse deberet regis excandescentia, scripsit ei bonus archiepiscopus exhortatorias literas illas: Desidero desideravi, ­etc.” FitzStephen, Vita, 81.) The relationship of de­pen­dency between the narrative and the letter collection was distinctly reciprocal, however. For just as the Vita refers the reader to the letter collection for the texts of some of the letters, the letter collection reproduces only the protocols of four of the seven letters that are included in the Vita, implicitly referring the reader back to the Vita for their texts. Slightly paradoxically, therefore, while the loose letters are physically separa­ ble from the narrative that makes use of them, the letter collection appended to the narrative in D is not. The letter collection in D and the narrative of the Vita are bound to and mutually de­ pendent on one another for the complete text of the material they reproduce. 34. Stefan Morawski, “The Basic Functions of Quotation,” in Sign, Language, Culture, ed. A. J. Griemas et al. (The Hague: Mouton, 1970), 691. 35. For Becket’s letters as a stimulant for devotion to his cult, see the comments of Alan of Tewkesbury in the preface to his letter collection: “In quibus [sc. epistolis] sedulus lector et devo­ tus viri Dei imaginem inveniet plenius depictam. Insuper operum ejus vestigia si libet perscru­ tari, ibi inveniet digito Dei fabricatam armorum copiam. . . . ​Per epistolas ipsius martyris iter recenseat” (In his letters the devoted and industrious reader w ­ ill find depicted more clearly the image of the man of God. Moreover, if it pleases the reader to scrutinize the footprints of his works, s/he ­will find ­there an abundance of weapons forged by the fin­ger of God. . . . ​Th rough the letters s/he w ­ ill review the path of the martyr himself). Tewkesbury, Vita Sancti Thomae, 300–1. 36. Howden, Chronica, 3:184. 37. Howden, 3:185. 38. “Invenerunt eum dormientem [in quadam parva villa], et ceperunt.” Howden, 3:185. 39. “In nostra nunc habeatur potestate.” Howden, 3:195. 40. “De domino nostro rege aliter accidisse, quam ejus regno et universis suis fidelibus ex­ pediret.” Howden, 3:196. 41. “Loqui compellimur, quod nollemus.” Howden, 3:196. 42. “Imperatoris Alemannorum litterarum transcriptum vobis ducimus transmittendum, quas de domini nostri regis Angliae captione ad regem Francorum destinavit, praesenti pagina nostra involutum.” Howden, 3:196. 43. Self-­censorship is a feature of many late twelfth-­century chronicles. A conspiracy of si­ lence, for example, surrounded what had gone on between Eleanor of Aquitaine and her ­uncle (Raymond of Poitiers) in the Holy Land in 1148. “Melius tacenda sunt quae in illa peregrinatione contigerunt” (It is better that the ­things that happened on that pilgrimage be unspoken), says Gervase of Canterbury. Gervase, Historical Works, 1:149. Richard of Devizes also alludes to this scandal in one of his many marginal comments: “Multi nouerunt quod utinam nemo nostrum nosset. Hec ipsa regina tempore prioris mariti fuit Ierosolimis. Nemo plus inde loquatur. Ego bene noui. Silete!” (Many know what I would that none of us knew. This same queen, during the time of her first husband, was at Jerusalem. Let no one say any more about it; I too know it well, Keep ­silent!). The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, ed. and trans. John T. Appleby (London: Nel­ son, 1963), 25–26. Intriguingly, Diceto also uses a marginal comment to make a veiled reference to

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another scandal, the plot to poison Geoffrey Plantagenet: “In voluminis nostri serie / Non est lo­ cus ejus memorie, / Involutus in tanto crimine / Vix est ut sit subscriptus in margine. / Glosa volatili, vel glosa volatilis.” Diceto, Opera, 2:148. 44. Or, as John Gillingham forcefully puts it, the atmosphere of the “propaganda war” launched against Richard I by Philip Augustus. Gillingham, Richard I (New Haven: Yale Uni­ versity Press, 1999), 223. 45. Coutances mentions the “rumoribus variis ventilatis” (vari­ous rumors that had circu­ lated) about Richard’s whereabouts. Howden, Chronica, 3:196. Howden’s con­temporary, Ger­ vase of Canterbury, describes the “mira rerum commutatio, sed et famae confusio” (the extraordinary development of events, and the confusion of rumor) following Richard’s capture. Gervase, Historical Works, 1:514; cf. The Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, 105–8. The contradis­ tinction between rumor and writing is also evident in Ansbert’s Historia de expeditione Frederici Imperatoris, which dealt with Richard’s captivity. “Dum vero in captivitate in Austria adhuc detineretur, fama velox vicina regna et regnorum principes penetravit, et auditam hu­ miliationem et captionem tanti viri mirati, certitudinem hujus facti a duce Austriae literis suis inquirentes, ipsi scripserunt” (While therefore [Richard] was being detained in captivity in Austria, swift rumor reached kingdoms and the princes of kingdoms; and having marveled at the humiliation and capture they heard of so ­g reat a man, they wrote to [the Duke of Austria], seeking certainty of this fact from him in writing [lit. by his letters]). Ansbert then inserts the text of a letter from Philip Augustus to Duke Leopold asking that Richard be kept in captivity, in order (he says) that the real reason for Richard’s incarceration—­his alleged murder of Conrad of Montferrat—­“probabilius esse credatur” (should be believed to be more plausible). [Ansbert], Historia de expeditione Friderici Imperatoris, ed. Josef Debrovsky (Prague: Cajetanum de Mayregg, 1827), 119, emphasis mine. 46. “Inimicus imperii nostri, et turbator regni tui . . . ​animo tuo uberrimam importare laeti­ tiam.” Howden, Chronica, 3:195–96. 47. “Vobis non est opus lacrymis, sed virtute: quoniam fortunae aggressibus non est plancti­ bus occurrendum, sed, dissimulato dolore, probitatis experientiae intendendum.” Howden, 3:195. 48. Bosham ushers his readers t­oward Alan of Tewkesbury’s liber epistolaris, which “a multis personis et a multis ecclesiis jam habetur” (many p­ eople and many churches already have [Bosham, Historia, 396]), should they want to read “de exsilii nostri laboriosa historia perplu­ rima” (an abundance of t­ hings about the grueling history of our exile [Bosham, 396]). Bosham makes reference to the corpus of letters compiled by Tewkesbury five times, at Bosham, 315, 395– 96, 415, 440, 463. 49. “Totius turbationis et dissensionis prima et summa causa, velut totius mali radix.” Bosham, 411. 50. “Ab omni qui historicum libellum hunc transcribere voluerit, et scriptura illa semper in fine transcribatur.” Bosham, 341. Bosham’s Rolls Series editor pointedly ignored this injunction; Bosham, 159, n.1. 51. “Pro multis dico qui, de alieno et veteri suum quasi novum cudentes, persaepe, quae magis necessaria tanquam superflua resecant, aut ipsa superflua tanquam plus necessaria reti­ nent.” Bosham, 533. 52. “Persaepe etiam in originali inventa juxta sensum suum interpretando et mutilando corrumpentes.” Bosham, 533. 53. “Nec in ipsis auctoris verbis auctoris mentem sequentes, sed ipsa ad propriam suam trahentes.” Bosham, 533.



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54. “Tu . . . ​quisquis es, si librum historicum . . . ​nosti condere, conde tuum, non facias de meo veteri et a me elaborato tuum illaborate novum. . . . ​Si potes, me ipsum conveni ut meum corrigam; sin autem, meo intacto, tuum novum compone.” Bosham, 534. 55. “Oro, opto, et sicut audeo, ipsius etiam martyris nomine inhibeo, ne quis lectorum hanc martyris historiam . . . ​unquam tempore aut mutilet aut excurtet.” Bosham, 532. The most nota­ ble historiographical analogue for Bosham’s demand is that of Gregory of Tours, who exhorts his successors “never [to] permit ­these books [of Histories] to be destroyed, or to be rewritten (rescribi), or to be reproduced in part only with sections omitted.” Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1974), 603 (10.31). For Gregory’s pro­ hibition and for the “mauvaise conscience chez quelques hagiographes” who rewrote ­earlier saints’ lives, see Monique Goullet, Ecriture et réécriture hagiographiques: Essai sur les réécritures de Vies de saints dans l’Occident latin médiéval (xiie–­x iiie s.) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 47–49. 56. “Non (inquam) mutilet, nisi forte aliquid excipiat quod dignum judicet publice in ecclesia legi, praesertim in festivo martyris natalitio die. . . . ​Sed hoc oro, nec mutilet.” (Do not, I say, mutilate it, ­unless perhaps someone might excerpt something they consider worthy to be read in church publicly, particularly on the feast day of the martyr’s birth, . . . ​But this ­thing I beg: do not mutilate it.) Bosham, Historia, 533. 57. See note 48. 58. As Mary Carruthers glosses Socrates’s worries about writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, “the trou­ble with written composition is that it becomes detached from its author, and goes off on its own, so to speak, falling into ignorant as well as learned hands.” Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 35. Clanchy suggests that “­those who objected in the ­Middle Ages to the literate preference for the artificial memory of written rec­ord, instead of the living memory voiced by wise men of age and experience” shared the misgivings of Socrates, albeit unwittingly. Clanchy, Memory, 296. 59. J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, ix. 60. Jan Assmann, “Form as a Mnemonic Device: Cultural Texts and Cultural Memory,” in Performing the Gospel: Orality, Memory, and Mark, ed. Richard A. Horsley, Jonathan A. Draper, and John Miles Foley (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006), 75. 61. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney, “Introduction: Cultural Memory and its Dynamics,” in Mediation, Remediation, and the Dynamics of Cultural Memory, ed. Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 5, citing Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 45. 62. Erll and Rigney, 5. 63. “La parola latina monumentum va ricollegata alla radice indoeuropea men, che esprime una delle funzioni fondamentali della mente (mens), la memoria (memini). Il verbo monere sig­ nifica ‘far ricordare’ ” (The Latin word monumentum is to be connected to the Indo-­European root men, which expresses one of the fundamental functions of the mind [mens,] the memory [memini]. The verb monere signifies “to have [something] remembered). Jacques Le Goff, “Docu­ mento/monumento,” in Enciclopedia Einaudi, ed. Ruggerio Romano (Turin: Einaudi, 1978), 38. As Brigitte Bedos-­Rezak has shown, the word munimentum also evinces “the semantic kinship and ultimate fusion between monimentum/monumentum [monument or memorial] and munimentum/munitio [ammunition, fortification].” Bedos-­Rezak, “Medieval Identity: A Sign and a Con­ cept,” American Historical Review 105, no. 5 (2000): 1527, n.98. 64. “Nec te moveat, rogo, lector bone, prudentia tua, quod tam prolixa narratione, contra propositum meum vel promissum, electionem Ricardi, vel persecutionem Baldewini, recitavi, vel

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quod narrationi meae tot epistolas inserui” (I ask that it should not upset you, good reader—­your prudence—­that I have recounted [Archbishop] Richard’s election and [his successor] Baldwin’s persecution with such a lengthy narrative [contrary to my promise and indeed my design], or ­because I have inserted so many letters into my narrative). Gervase, Historical Works, 1:502. Ac­ cording to Cicero, the prudentia that Gervase invokes combined memory, intelligence, and fore­ sight, and it gave knowledge of what was good and what was bad. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 81–82, citing Cicero, De inventione, 2.53.160. 65. “Ipsis inspectis et in arca memoriae reconditis.” Gervase, Historical Works, 1:502. For the rich imagery of the arca in medieval memorial culture, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, 51–55. 66. Carruthers, 19–21. 67. Carruthers, 22. 68. Gervase suggests in his prologue that the overall purpose of his Chronica was to teach posterity to seek the good and eschew the bad through example. Gervase, Historical Works, 1:86–87. 69. “Justa enim, ut arbitror, intentione utrumque factum est; videlicet ut futurorum sciat ne­ cessitas temporum quod cui morbo opponat, et quibus objectionibus justum et exemplare adhi­ beat responsum” (I consider that both ­these ­things ­were done with a just intention. For, the need of ­f uture times should know which remedy it should apply to what affliction, and the appropriate and exemplary response it should employ to meet which obstacles). Gervase, 1:502. 70. “Epistolas autem, quod cronicorum non esse solet, plures inserui, ut, ipsis inspectis et in arca memoriae reconditis, narratio brevietur et subtilius utiliusque intelligatur.” Gervase, 1:502. Gervase presumably thought that it was “unusual” to insert letters in chronicles ­because he thought that chronicles should be brief texts (as opposed to “histories,” which he thought could be length­ ier). See Chapter 1, note 95. 71. “Haec autem omnia munimenta reservantur in ecclesia Cantuariensi ad extinguendam temporis futuri malitiam, si qua super hoc poterit exoriri” (All t­ hese muniments are kept in the church at Canterbury in order that they can extinguish any evil of a f­uture time about this ­matter, should it arise). Gervase, Historical Works, 1:502. 72. J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, 118. 73. J. Assmann, 121. 74. “De controversiis inter regnum et sacerdotium,” “De dissensione quae fuit inter regem Henricem secundum et tres filios suos.” For Diceto’s key to ­these symbols, see Diceto, Opera, 1:3–4. 75. Richard H. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, “Statim invenire: Schools, Preachers and New Attitudes to the Page,” in Re­nais­sance and Renewal in the Twelfth ­Century, ed. Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 76. “Ea [signa] namque sunt ad memoria facilius excitandam non parum accomoda” (­These symbols are of no l­ ittle use in more easily jogging the memory). Diceto, Opera, 1:3. 77. See Beryl Smalley, The Becket Conflict and the Schools: A Study of Intellectuals in Politics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1973), 232–33. 78. It is unclear w ­ hether or not Diceto met Hugh when he studied in Paris. Grover A. Zinn Jr. thought that Hugh would have been dead by the time that Diceto got to Paris to study, but Julian Harrison has recently challenged this position. Zinn, “The Influence of Hugh of St.  Victor’s Chronicon on the Abbreviationes Chronicorum by Ralph of Diceto,” Speculum 52, no. 1 (1977): 59–60; and Julian Harrison, “The En­g lish Reception of Hugh of Saint-­Victor’s Chronicle,” Electronic British Library Journal (2002): 28.



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79. Diceto, Opera, 1:31, although he does not quote the part of the preface that deals with the manuscript page. But Diceto clearly knew the parts of Hugh’s Chronicon that he did not quote: he used the Chronicon in his account of pre-­Incarnation chronology, and he copied the Chronicon’s lists of secular rulers. For Diceto’s use of Hugh’s Chronicon, see Zinn, “Influence of Chronicon,” 38–61; Harrison, “En­glish Reception,” 27; and Diceto, Opera, 2:213–22, 241–42, 267–70, 275–76. 80. “Multum ergo valet ad memoriam confirmandam ut, cum libros legimus, non solum numerum et ordinem versuum vel sententiarum, sed etiam ipsum colorem et formam simul et situm positionemque litterarum per imaginationem memoriae imprimere studeamus, ubi illud et ubi illud scriptum vidimus, qua parte, quo loco (suppremo, medio, vel imo) constitutum aspexi­ mus, quo colore tractum litterae vel faciem membranae ornatem intuiti sumus” (It is a ­g reat value for fixing a memory-­image that when we read books, we strive to impress on our memory through the power of forming our ­mental images not only the number and order of verses or ideas, but at the same time the color, shape, position, and placement of the letters, where we have seen this or that written, in what part, in what location [at the top, the m ­ iddle, or the bottom] we saw it posi­ tioned, in what color we observed the trace of the letter or the ornamented surface of the parch­ ment). William M. Green, “Hugo of St. Victor: De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,” Speculum 18 (1943): 490, lines 20–25; translated by Carruthers, Book of Memory, 342. 81. For the connection between Diceto’s signa and the Victorine art of “pigeon-­holing” knowledge, see Smalley, Historians of the M ­ iddle Ages, 119. 82. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 101. 83. “Dispositio ordinis illustratio est cognitionis. Dispone et distingue singula locis suis . . . ​ ut scias quid ibi et quid ibi collocatum sit. Confusio ignorantiae et oblivionis mater est, discretio autem intelligentiam illuminat et memoriam confirmat.” Green, “De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,” 488, lines 10–12; translated by Carruthers, Book of Memory, 339. 84. “Omnia suis locis servanda disponit, quatinus ipsa locorum distinctio rerum particionem, sicut divisam suscipit, ita custodiat impermixtam . . . ​manus prompta sine impediment sequitur quocumque eam nutus volentis porrexerit, et omne, quod vel accepturus poposcerit vel promiserit daturus, velociter sine mora in apertum discretum et inconfusum producit.” Green, “De Tribus Maximis Circumstantiis Gestorum,” 488–89, lines 15–20; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 339. 85. This is how Stubbs explains the marginal symbols. Diceto, Opera, 2:xxviii. 86. Diceto had in fact himself sometimes rewritten and remediated his own chronicles in this way. For example, at some point he excerpted the sections of his chronicle he had marked as regnum-­sacerdotium controversiae and redeployed them as a short summary of the Becket dispute that he called the Series causae. He sent that summary to Becket’s friends, the monks at Sens. (For this text and its precise relationship to the Ymagines, see Anne Duggan and Charles Duggan, “Ralph Diceto, Henry II and Becket, with an Appendix on Decretal Letters,” in Authority and Power: Studies in Medieval Law and Government in Honour of Walter Ullmann, ed. Brian Tier­ ney and Peter Linehan [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], esp. 67–70.) He did something similar when he made a “chronicle” about the archbishops of Canterbury, which he had crafted entirely from entries marked up in and extracted from his Abbreviationes and Ymagines chronicorum. He sent that to Hubert Walter, then archbishop of Canterbury. Diceto, Opera, 2:xxviii, lxi–­l xviii. For t­ hese compilations, see Chapter 3. 87. Carruthers, Book of Memory, 130. Carruthers also makes the point that (at least in the ­fourteenth c­ entury) “the practice of quoting, marking, and numbering a text for citation seems to have been the special prerogative of the most learned members of the university.”

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88. Rouse and Rouse, “Statim Invenire,” 210. 89. I am grateful to Andrew Galloway for his input regarding this point. Pers. comm. 90. Indeed, Stubbs suggested that Diceto’s account of the Young King’s rebellion might originally have been composed as a stand-­a lone work that he incorporated into his Ymagines at a ­later date. Diceto, Opera, 2:xv. 91. For marked-up scripta, see Diceto, Opera, 1:110, 113, 118, 120, 129, 153, 237 (three entries), 284 (ten entries), 369, 2:23. 92. The Epistolae Cantuarienses ­were effectively a documentary companion piece to Gervase’s Chronica and were compiled with the same aim of defending Christ Church against the archbishops of Canterbury. ­There is evidence that the textual histories of the Epistolae and Gervase’s Chronica are closely related. In one of the principal manuscripts of Gervase’s Chronica (London, British Library MS Cotton Vespasian B. 19, the basis of Stubbs’s edition of the Chronica), the letters that form part of the Chronica “are full of m ­ istakes and corrections, the latter a result of collation with the copies of the letters then existing at Canterbury, and all or nearly all re­ duced to something like the order [of the Epistolae].” Gervase, Historical Works, 1:l–li. 93. For mnemonic marks relating to Walter de Coutances, Chapter 3, note 78. 94. Diceto places the first of the “persecutiones ecclesiae” in Nero’s reign. Diceto, Opera, 1:59. 95. See, e.g., the letter William of Sens wrote to Pope Alexander III shortly a­ fter Becket’s death: “Illud siquidem est, quod inter omnia quae leguntur seu referuntur sceleratorum sclera longe primum obtinet locum. Quod omnem Neronis nequitatem, Juliani perfidiam, sacrilegam etiam Judae proditionem excedit.” Howden, Chronica, 2:24. (For of all the crimes we have ever read or heard of, this easily takes first place—­exceeding all the wickedness of Nero, the perfidy of Julian, and even the sacrilegious treachery of Judas.) Trans. W. L. Warren, Henry II (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), 113. Walter de Châtillon, who had written his Alexandreis for William of Sens, described Henry II as “rex qui perdit presulem in proditione/re vera neronior est ipso Nerone” (the king that killed the bishop cruelly / Out-­Neroed Nero in his treachery). Châtillon, “De Aduentu Antechristi,” lines 66–68, quoted in and translated by A. G. Rigg, A History of Anglo-­ Latin Lit­er­a­ture, 1066–1422 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 78. 96. Diceto implies that he has seen historiographical evidence of this rule in practice: “If you carefully survey the . . . ​unlawful rebellions of insurgent sons against their ­fathers inscribed in the annals . . . ​you ­will soon find [­those] sons ­dying before their ­fathers” (Si . . . ​rebelliones illicitas filiorum . . . ​insurgentium in parentes intersertas annalibus diligenter revolveris, profecto repper­ ies . . . ​ordine mortalitatis turbato fati munus implesse [­etc.]). Diceto, Opera, 2:20. 97. According to Hugh, to “gather” or “collect” (colligere) material is to “reduce to a brief and compendious outline [summa] t­ hings which have been written or discussed at some length. . . . ​ ­Every exposition has some princi­ple upon which the entire truth of the m ­ atter and the force of its thought rest, and to this princi­ple every­thing e­ lse is traced back. To look for and consider this princi­ple is to ‘gather’ [colligere].” St. Victor, The Didascalion of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, trans. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 93. 98. J. Assmann, Religion and Cultural Memory, 121. 99. A. Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 100. 100. A. Assmann, 101. 101. A. Assmann, 101. 102. A. Assmann, 104. 103. The Liber Eliensis—an early twelfth-­century history of Ely Abbey, which combined narrative and the texts of charters, gives the following justification for reproducing one of



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King Edgar’s charters: “in view of the fact that leave used not to be given for the royal charter to be shown to every­one (nec omnibus . . . ​ostendi) and it ­ought not to be hidden away from every­one (nec ab omnibus . . . ​abscondi), it has been needful that ­t here should be made public, through this pre­sent work, information about the charter which it has not been pos­si­ble to obtain by means of the charter itself.” Blake, ed., Liber Eliensis, 81; trans. Fairweather, 105, my emphasis 104. A. Assmann, “Canon and Archive,” 104. 105. A. Assmann, 104–5. 106. The introduction of inspeximus charters into En­g lish chancery practice has been ex­ plored most recently by Nicholas Vincent, “The Charters of King Henry II: The Introduction of the Royal Inspeximus Revisited,” in Dating Undated Medieval Charters, ed. Michael Gervers (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2000), 97–122; and Vincent, “King Henry II and the Monks of B ­ attle,” 264–86. 107. The common formulas (for examples of which see Christopher  R. Cheney, En­glish Bishops’ Chanceries, 1100–1250 [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1950], 93) usually in­ volve a combination of “inspeximus,” “vidimus,” “audivimus,” “contrectavimus,” which are varia­ tions on an allusion to 1 John 1:1: “Quod audivimus, quod vidimus oculis nostris, quod perspeximus, et manus nostre contrectaverunt.” Christopher R. Cheney, ed., En­glish Episcopal Acta II. Canterbury 1162–1190, 2nd ed. (Oxford: British Acad­emy, 1991), xxx, n.105. 108. For examples of variations on this formula, see Cheney, En­glish Bishops’ Chanceries, 94. 109. “Ut posterius est videatur pre­ce­dentium exigere testimonium.” Eleanor Searle, ed. and trans., The Chronicle of B ­ attle Abbey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 310. Translation adapted. 110. Searle, 312. 111. ‘ “Hec, inquit Rex, “renouatione indigeret.” Abbate ad hoc respondente, “Et nos ut eam si placet auctoritate regia renovando confirmetis supplicamus” (“This could do with renewing,” said the king. To this the abbot replied, “And we pray that, if it please you, you w ­ ill renew it and confirm it by your royal authority”). Searle, Chronicle of ­Battle Abbey, 310–11. 112. Sternberg, “Proteus,” 109. 113. This is a characteristic of confirmation charters more generally. See Giry, Manuel de diplomatique, 18: “Loin d’avoir pour objet de conserver les actes anciens . . . ​les confirmations ten­ daient à en annuler la valeur en créant des titres nouveaux.” For the first example of a royal exem­ plification in the reign of John, see Vincent, “Charters of King Henry II,” 116. In cases like this where the framing context of the original and the quoting text are diametrically opposed, it is tempting, as Sternberg suggests, “to view quoting as a type of speech-­act.” Sternberg, “Proteus,” 146–47. 114. “In omnium vero calce scriptum illud funestum, chirographi instar confectum, postpo­ nitur quod primo inter tantum regem et tantum archipraesulem, ut mundus vidit et invidit, tam magna et cara dissolvit foedera, archipraesulis primo exsilii et demum martyrii causa.” Bosham, Historia, 158–59, my emphasis.

chapter 3 1. “Pur remember des ancesurs / les feiz e les diz e les murs. . . . ​Deit l’um les livres e les gestes / e les estoires lire a festes.” Wace, “Le Roman de Rou,” prologue, ed. and trans. Henry Bainton, in

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Vernacular Literary Theory of the French of ­England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120–­c. 1450, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Delbert Russell (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2016), 32, lines 1–6. 2. “Si escripture ne fust feite / e puis par clers litte e retraite, / mult fussent choses ublïees / ki de viez tens sunt trespassees.” Wace, Roman de Rou, trans. Bainton, lines 7–10. 3. Damian-­Grint, New Historians, 240–45. 4. “Par les bons clers ki escristrent, / E les gestes as livres mistrent, / Savum nus del viez tans parler, / E de oevers plusurs cunter” (We know how to talk of ancient times, and can recount many deeds, ­because of the good clerks who wrote, and set deeds down in books). Wace, Roman de Rou, trans. Bainton, lines 103–6. 5. Searle, Chronicle of B ­ attle Abbey, 159, and n. 50 to Chapter 5, below. 6. Lambert of Ardres, Lamberti Ardensis historia comitum Ghisnensium, ed. Joseph Heller, MGH Scriptores 24 (Hannover, 1879); Lambert, The History of the Counts of Guines and Lords of Ardres, trans. Leah Shopkow (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 7. “Senes et decrepitos, eo quod veterum eventuras et fa­bulas et historias ei narrarent . . . ​ven­ erabatur et secum detinebat” (He valued aged and el­derly men; and he would keep them with him so that they could tell him the stories and fables and histories of the old days.) Lambert, Historia, 601, translation mine. 8. Lambert, Historia, 601; History, 130. 9. Lambert, Historia, 601; History, 130. 10. “Coram omnibus et nobis hoc ipsum, apposita ad barbam dextera et, ut senes plerumque facere solent, ea digitis insertis appexa et appropexa, aperto in medium ore incipit et dicit.” Lambert, Historia, 601; History, 130. 11. For Lambert’s designation of Walter’s account as a narratio, see Lambert, Historia, 601; History, 130. 12. Lambert, Historia, 617–18, History, 148–49. 13. Lambert, Historia, 631; History, 173–74. 14. Lambert, Historia, 631; History, 174–75. 15. Lars Boje Mortensen, “Stylistic Choice in a Reborn Genre: The National Histories of Widukind of Corvey and Dudo of St. Quentin,” in Dudone di San Quintino, ed. Paolo Gatti and Antonella degl’Innocenti (Trento: Università degli studi di Trento, 1995), 77–102 at 97. 16. “Sensum verborum memini, si verba tenerem” (If I could but keep hold of the words, I would remember their meaning). Lambert, Historia, 631, translation mine. Virgil’s text has “nu­ meros memini, si verba tenerem” (the tune I remember, could I but keep the words). Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, rev. ed., trans. H. Rushton Fairclough and G.  P. Goold, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 1:9.45. 17. C. Stephen Jaeger has also pointed to the “common ground between history/romance and official documents” and underlines that their related social purposes converged in literate education. “Both kinds of text [viz. history/romance and documents] tutor men of the pre­sent and regulate their dealings with one another; the high value of both is a strong commendation of literacy.” Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939–1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvaina Press, 1985), 230. 18. See above, page 17. 19. “Hoc opus in lucem protuli et christianissimo regi humiliter optuli, ut sic demum per manum ipsius regis in publica veniret mon[u]menta” (I brought this work into the light and hum­ bly presented it to the most Christian king, so that it might enter into the “public monuments”



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through the [mediation of the] hand of the king himself). Rigord, Histoire de Philippe Auguste, ed. Élisabeth Carpentier, Georges Pon, and Yves Chauvin (Paris: CNRS, 2006), 118. 20. See, for example, John Baldwin, The Government of Philip Augustus: Foundations of French Royal Power in the M ­ iddle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 396. 21. “Cum in auribus multorum aliquid novi recitatur solent auditores in diversa scindi vota, et hunc quidem applaudere idque quod audit laude dignum predicare, illum . . . ​etiam bene dictis detrahere.” Rigord, Histoire, 116. 22. For the si­mul­ta­neously written and oral qualities of the verb dictare, see Bainton, “Spoken, Written,” in Oxford 21st ­Century Approaches to Lit­er­a­ture: The High ­Middle Ages, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler and Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 23. As Walter de Châtillon had put it, “Moris est usitati, cum in auribus multitudinis / aliquid noui recitatur, solere turbam in diuersa scindi studia et hunc quidem applaudere / et quod audit laude dignum predicare, illum uero, / seu ignorantia ductum seu liuoris eculeo uel doii / fomite peruersum, etiam bene dictis detrahere.” Châtillon, Galteri de Castellione Alexandreis, ed. Marvin M. Colker, Thesaurus Mundi (Padua: Antenor, 1978), lines 1–6. 24. The Alexandreis reads, “Tandem apud me deliberatum est te in lucem esse proferendam ut demum auderes in publica uenire monimenta.” Châtillon, Alexandreis, lines 17–19. For Rig­ ord’s dependence on Châtillon, see Rigord, Histoire, 62. Châtillon, in his turn, had borrowed the phrase about the publica monumenta from Ovid’s Epistulae ex ponto, which reads “Publica non audent intra monimenta venire, / ne suus hoc illis clauserit auctor iter.” Ovid, Epistulae ex ponto, Book 1, ed. Jan Felix Gaertner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.1.5–6. ([­These booklets] dare not enter a public library—­that route/their author has closed to them, they fear). Ovid, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters, trans. Peter Green (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 2005), 109, original emphasis. 25. The differing assumptions of historical and literary studies about the role of the written word in medieval society are apparent from the opposed ways that historians and literary scholars have dealt with Rigord’s phrase “ut veniret in publica monumenta”: while such historians as Baldwin associate Rigord’s publica monumenta principally with the public rec­ords, Châtillon’s public monumenta have been associated with the creative anxiety that trou­bles many an author. One recent translation suggests that Châtillon hoped his work would “come to public notice” (Walter de Châtillon, The Alexandreis, ed. R. Telfryn Pritchard [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986], 33); another posits that he hoped his work would “take its place among literary pub­ lications” (Walter of Châtillon, The Alexandreis: A Twelfth-­Century Epic, trans. David Townsend [Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2007], 29). 26. Gabrielle M. Spiegel, Romancing the Past: The Rise of Vernacular Prose Historiography in Thirteenth-­Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 230. “When col­ lectives remember,” Jan Assmann says, “they thereby secure a unifying, ‘connective’ semantics that ‘holds them inwardly together.’ . . . ​W herever p­ eople join together in larger groups they generate a connective semantics, thereby producing forms of memory that are designed to stabilize a com­ mon identity and a point of view that span several generations. The si­mul­ta­neously collective and ‘connective,’ bonding nature of memory is expressed with par­tic­u ­lar clarity in the English-­ language words re-­membering and re-­collecting, which evoke the idea of putting members back together . . . ​and re-­collecting t­ hings that have been dispersed.” Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance and the Po­liti­cal Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11. 27. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization, 38.

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28. Reuter, “Assembly Politics in Western Eu­rope from the Eighth C ­ entury to the Twelfth,” in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Nelson, 193–216 (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni­ versity Press, 2006). For the importance of assembly politics to the governance of Normandy ­under Henry II, see Daniel Power, “Henry, Duke of the Normans (1149/50–1189),” in Henry II: New Interpretations, ed. Christopher Harper-­Bill (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007), 118–23. The role of assembly politics in the negotiations for the release of Richard I is the theme of John Gilling­ ham, “The Kidnapped King: Richard I in Germany, 1192–1194,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London 30 (2008): 5–34. 29. Reuter, “Assembly Politics,” 193. For the “episodic” nature of vernacular po­liti­cal lan­ guage that is a corollary to this, see Jan Rüdiger, Did Charlemagne Know Carolingian Kingship Theory? (Stockholm: Sällskapet Runica et Mediævalia, 2011), 31–32. 30. Reuter has in his sights Jürgen Habermas, according to whom “feudal” governors “repre­ sented their lordship not for but ‘before’ the ­people;” unlike the publicness of bourgeois po­liti­cal debate, Habermas claimed, “this publicness [or publicity] of repre­sen­ta­tion was not constituted as a social realm, that is, as a public sphere.” Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cam­ bridge: Polity, 1989), 7–8. 31. Reuter, “Assembly Politics,” 207. 32. Reuter, 203. 33. “Universis Anglie fere maioribus apud Westmustier convocatis, xiiio kalendas Junii, prae­ sente rege filio, lectae sunt litterae continentes haec verba.” Diceto, Opera, 1:399–400. 34. Diceto, 1:400–1. For acts of reading, see Chapter 4. 35. “Venit ad me filius meus rex Henricus apud Burum, et die Martis proxima ante Ramos Palmarum, cum archiepiscopo Rotomagensi, et Bajocensi et Abricensi et Redonensi episcopis, et cum comitibus et baronibus et fidelibus meis quamplurimis.” Diceto, Opera, 1:400. Burum (or Bures or Bura) “more usually [refers] to Bur-­le-­Roi, in the Bessin, than Bures in the Pays de Caux. Bur-­le-­Roi was a favorite residence of Henry II . . . ​in the parish of Noron, on the confines of the Bois-­du-­Vernay.” Robert W. Eyton, Court, House­hold and Itinerary of King Henry II (Dorches­ ter: Taylor, 1878), 189. 36. “Cum multa lacrimarum effusione et singultibus multis prostravit se ante pedes meos, misericordiam postulans cum humilitate, et veniam de iis quae commiserat erga me . . . ​ut paterna pietate ei condonarem. Rogavit eitam . . . ​quatinus homagium ejus et ligantium acciperem, sicut dominus et pater.” Diceto, Opera, 1:400. 37. “Ego autem, motus pietate et intelligens eum ex corde loqui et . . . ​iram ei remisi et indig­ nationem meam, et penitus eum in gratiam paternam admisi.” Diceto, 400. Henry’s language in the letter was apparently formulaic; in Roger of Howden’s account of Prince Richard’s submission to Henry in Poitou in September 1174, one can also find prostration, the begging of p­ ardon (venia), and being moved by paternal tenderness (paterna pietate commotus). Howden, Gesta, 1:76. 38. “Igitur ipsa die praestita sunt sacramenta sicut supra scriptum est.” Diceto, Opera, 1:401. 39. When the written word was deployed in the course of po­liti­cal assemblies, Reuter sug­ gested that it would often be accompanied by a “staging” and “ritual” that would have had a “primary significance” for participants. Reuter, “Assembly Politics,” 207. 40. The dual aspect on both the past and the ­f uture that we can detect in this scriptum is fundamental to public acts of remembrance, which, as Ann Rigney argues “are as much about shaping the f­ uture as about recollecting the past.” Rigney, “Reconciliation and Remembering: (How) Does it Work?” Memory Studies 5 (2012): 251.



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41. Most recently, Laura Ashe has suggested that the Estoire was “designed for delivery at the royal court in 1174–5.” Ashe, Fiction and History in ­England, 82. Karen Broadhurst, however, has trenchantly argued against this idea. Broadhurst, “Henry II of E ­ ngland and Eleanor of Aqui­ taine: Patrons of Lit­er­a­ture in French?” Viator 27 (1996): 60. I explain my preference for calling Fantosme’s text the Estoire rather than the Chronicle (by which it is usually referred) in note 15 to the Introduction. 42. See Jean Blacker, “Oez veraie estoire: History as Mediation in Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle,” in The Formation of Culture in Medieval Britain: Celtic, Latin, and Norman Influences on En­glish ­Music, Lit­er­a­ture, History, and Art, ed. Françoise Le Saux (Lampeter: Mellen, 1995), 25–37; and Matthew Strickland, “Arms and the Men: Loyalty and Lordship in Jordan Fan­ tosme’s Chronicle,” in Medieval Knighthood, IV: Papers from the Fifth Strawberry Hill Conference, 1990, ed. Christopher Harper-­Bill and Ruth Harvey (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1992), 187–220. 43. For Fantosme’s references to the Chansons de geste, see n. 30 to Chapter 5, below. 44. Fantosme, Estoire, line 2065. 45. Rigney, “Reconciliation and Remembering,” 251–52. 46. As Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham have argued in re­spect to high-­medieval books, the “tendency to align written culture with privacy and individualism belies the way in which, ­either verbally rehearsed or silently perused, books forged links between scattered indi­ viduals and groups of ­people.” Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham, “Introduction: Script, Print and History,” in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700, ed. Julia Crick and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18. 47. Howden, Chronica, 2:36–37. 48. “Nec precepistis nec voluistis ut occideretur, et quando pervenit ad vos, plurimum dolu­ istis.” Howden, 2:36. 49. “Ut in memoria Romanae ecclesiae firmiter habeatur, sigillum vestrum precepistis ap­ poni.” Howden, 2:37. 50. “Rex . . . ​locutus est cum [legatis] primo Savigneii, postea Abrincis, tercio Cadomi, ubi causa illa finita est, sicut littere publice testantur, que inde facte sunt, et a multis personis que illuc convenerant, retinentur.” Robert de Torigni, Chronique de Robert de Torigni, abbé de Mont-­ Saint-­Michel, ed. Léopold Delisle, 2 vols. (Rouen: Brumet, 1872–73), 2:32–33. Torigni seems to suggest that the legates’ letter was distributed to an audience at Caen rather than at Avranches when Henry made his expurgation. 51. Howden, Chronica, 2:35–36. 52. Howden, 2:36–37. 53. Howden, 2:37–39. Delisle, Torigni’s nineteenth-­century editor, suggested that this was the letter Torigni states was distributed at Caen. Torigni, Chronique, 2:33, n.1. 54. John Hudson, Land, Law, and Lordship in Anglo-­Norman ­England (Oxford: Claren­ don Press, 1994), 4, my emphasis. 55. Reuter, “Assembly Politics,” 203: “The characteristic form of public po­liti­cal action was . . . ​that of opaque ritualised behaviour symbolising closure and reaffirming an order which should at if at all pos­si­ble be seen not to have been threatened.” Reuter emphasizes in par­tic­u ­lar the ending of rebellions through ritual action at public assemblies. 56. Reuter, “Assembly Politics,” 203. 57. John Gillingham, “Royal Newsletters, Forgeries and En­g lish Historians: Some Links Between Court and History in the Reign of Richard I,” in La Cour Plantagenêt (1154–1204), ed. Martin Aurell (Poitiers: Université de Poitiers, 2000), 171–86.

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58. According to Franz Bäuml, “quasi-­literates” did not know how to read or write them­ selves, but they ­were functionally dependent on the written word (and the literacy of ­others) to execute their social functions. Bäuml, “Va­ri­e­ties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Il­ literacy,” Speculum 55, no. 2 (1980): 246–47. 59. The letter is reproduced in full in Howden, Chronica, 2:102–4. Diceto gives an abbrevi­ ated form of the letter at his Opera, 1:418. Howden also reproduced the letter in his e­ arlier chronicle, the Gesta, but ­here Howden used the letter’s narrative without giving any indication that a letter had been its source. Howden, Gesta, 1:128–30. For relations between the Byzantine Empire and Henry II, see A. A. Vasiliev, “Manuel Comnenus and Henry Plantagenet,” Byzantinische Zeitschrift 29 (1929–30): 233–44. 60. “Gratum autem habuimus, quod quosdam nobilitatis tuae principes accidit interesse no­ biscum, qui narrabunt de omnibus quam acciderant tuae nobilitati seriem” (We ­were grateful that some of your nobility’s princes happened to be with us, who ­will tell you the story of every­ thing that happened). Howden, Chronica, 2:104. 61. As Atillio Bartoli Langeli has suggested, “dominante nella lettera formalizzata è la log­ ica politica” ([a] po­liti­cal logic dominates the formalized letter), and that logic is as evident in a letter’s protocol as in its narratio: “La preponderanza cancelleresca orientò il genere epistolare a rappresentare rapporti tra poteri. Si pensi solo al lavorìo che meritò la salutatio, indicatore im­ mediato del rapporto—­paritiaro or gerarchico—­tra emittente e destinatario” (Chancery tenden­ cies orientated the epistolary genre ­toward representing the relations between the power­f ul. One only has to think of the intense ­labor merited by [a letter’s] salutatio—an immediate indicator of the relationship, equal or hierarchical, between sender and receiver). Langeli, “Cancellierato e produzione epistolare,” 251–61 at 53. 62. As Stubbs explained, “Manuel’s second wife, Mary of Antioch, was the d­ aughter of Raymond of Poitiers, ­uncle of Queen Eleanor; her ­children and Eleanor’s would thus be second cousins.” Howden, Chronica, 2:104, n.1. 63. Diceto, Opera, 2:125. Henry VI had presumably encountered Walter de Coutances in the course of the negotiations that the latter had undertaken to secure Richard’s release from the emperor’s captivity. Walter also stood surety as a hostage for some of Richard’s ransom ­a fter Richard was released, which presumably meant that he would have received the emperor’s hospitality. 64. Coutances and Diceto would have known each other well: the former was the justiciar of Richard’s ransom, which was collected at St. Paul’s, where Diceto was dean. The proximity between Diceto and Coutances may lie b­ ehind the latter’s preaching at St. Paul’s on Ascension Thursday of 1194. Diceto, Opera, 2:115. For Coutances’s role in the collection of Richard’s ran­ som, see Poggioli, “From Politician to Prelate,” 109–10; for the sermon at St. Paul’s, see Poggioli, 115; for his friendship with Diceto, see Poggioli, 2–4. 65. Coutances sent many letters to Diceto, principally to complain about the difficulties caused by Richard’s quarrels with Philip Augustus, which resulted in the archbishop’s estate of Les Andelys becoming a bargaining chip between the two kings. For t­ hese letters, see Diceto, Opera, 2:153–62; for the Les Andelys affair, see Poggioli, “From Politician to Prelate,” 124–29. 66. For Diceto as Coutances’s “karissimus et specialis amicus,” see, e.g., Diceto, Opera, 2:157. 67. Henry VI calls Walter his “beloved friend” in a protocol that sends him “love”: “Henricus . . . ​imperator . . . ​dilecto amico suo Waltero . . . ​salutem et dilectionem.” Diceto, Opera, 2:125. 68. Diceto, 2:127.



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69. For the reciprocity of medieval friendship, see, for example, Gerd Althoff, ­Family, Friends and Followers: Po­liti­cal and Social Bonds in Medieval Eu­rope, trans. Christopher Caroll (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 66. 70. For a letter from Hubert Walter to Diceto as dean of St.  Paul’s, see Diceto, Opera, 2:164–65. 71. This opusculum exists in a single manuscript, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 76, and is summarized by Stubbs in Diceto, Opera, 2:lxi–­l xviii. Stubbs suggested that the Corpus manuscript was a pre­sen­ta­tion copy made at the scriptorium at St. Paul’s for Hubert Walter (Di­ ceto, Opera, 1:xcix). Malcolm Parkes identifies the hand in this manuscript with one of the scribes of Diceto’s own working copy of his historical works (London, Lambeth Palace, MS 8), and notes that “the quality of the handwriting and the size of the book would support the suggestion that it was produced for pre­sen­ta­tion to Hubert Walter a­ fter his translation to the see in 1193,” although Parkes notes that the letter granting Hubert Walter the papal legation (printed in Diceto, Opera, 2:125–27) is in a dif­fer­ent hand. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes: A Closer Look at Scribes (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 135. 72. Diceto, Opera, 2:178–278. Richard Sharpe and James Willoughby suggest that the man­ uscript of this work—­London, British Library, Additional MS 40007—­may have been “the original copy presented to William de Longchamp, the chancellor whose b­ rother Robert was ab­ bot of St. Mary’s” Abbey in York, which owned the manuscript in the ­Middle Ages. Richard Sharpe and James Willoughby, eds., Medieval Libraries of ­Great Britain (website), University of Oxford, http://­mlgb3​.­bodleian​.­ox​.­ac​.­u k​/­mlgb​/­book​/­6325​/­​?­search​_­term​=­40007. 73. For the letters, see Diceto, Opera, 2:178; for the good wishes, see Diceto, 2:180. 74. For the comparison to Alcuin, see Diceto, Opera, 2:178; for his defense of Longchamp’s secular offices, see Diceto, 2:179–80. 75. Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes, 136. 76. The Ymagines, however, does not appear on the list of books that Walter de Coutances gave to the chapter of Rouen at his death (that said, neither does John de Hauville’s Architrenius, which is explic­itly dedicated to him). If the Lambeth manuscript was destined for Coutances, it never reached him, since it appears in the list of books in the St. Paul’s trea­sury that dates from 1295. For Coutances’s booklist, see Théodose Bonnin, ed., Cartulaire de Louviers: Documents historiques originaux du Xe au XVIIIe siècle, 5 vols. (Évreux: Hérissey, 1870–83), 1:156–57; for the inventory of St. Paul’s, see Neil R. Ker, Books, Collectors and Libraries: Studies in the Medieval Heritage, ed. Andrew G. Watson (London: Hambledon, 1985), 234. 77. For Coutances’s role in Longchamp’s downfall, see Poggioli, “From Politician to Prel­ ate,” 67–72; for his subsequent excommunication by Longchamp, see Poggioli, 87. 78. For the crosses, see London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8, folios 61r–­v. ­These crosses are almost identical to ­those that Ralph deployed in his survey of the churches owned by St. Paul’s, a fragment of which survives in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson B. 372, fols. 3–4. The crosses in the Lambeth manuscript are not quite as large as the visual mnemonics proper that Diceto uses, and they do not appear in the list of mnemonics that he provides. But they are nevertheless prominent, and given that Diceto was interested in ways of remember­ ing ­t hings, the use of ­t hese symbols is highly significant. Stubbs suggested, quite plausibly, that Diceto’s marginal symbols w ­ ere designed to make it easy to excerpt notices to make new his­ torical compilations on specific subjects, such as that about the archbishops of Canterbury made for Hubert Walter or that about Anjou, which he may have made for Arnulf of Lisieux (for which see Diceto, Opera, 2:xxviii–­x xix). So it may be that the manuscripts had been

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marked up for a compilation to be dedicated to Coutances but which does not survive or was never ultimately made. 79. “Cui per Dei gratiam et providebit et proderit semper in posterum per tempora longa.” The full text of the note reads, “Si quis fuerit inter canonicos Rothomagenses fidus antiquitatum interpres et assertor praecipuus . . . ​recolligat secum quod . . . ​Walterus Rothomagensis archiepis­ copus ab Anglorum rege Ricardo receperit in excambium Andelii commodissimum, et intel­ leget archiepiscopi praedicti sollicitudinem et industriam post labores quamplurimos et expensas multiplices ecclesiae suae providisse viriliter et profuisse quam plurimum. Cui per Dei gratiam et providebit et proderit semper in posterum per tempora longa” (If t­ here should be some faithful interpreter [and outstanding upholder] of past t­hings among the canons of Rouen . . . ​might he recall to himself that . . . ​Walter, archbishop of Rouen, received from Rich­ ard, king of the En­g lish, a most commodious ­thing in exchange for Les Andelys. And he should acknowledge that [through] the solicitude and ­labor of the aforesaid archbishop [­a fter many ef­ forts and multiple expenses], he courageously provided for his church and benefitted it greatly. By the grace of God, may he always both provide for and be helpful t­ oward it for a long time in the ­f uture). Diceto, Opera, 2:157; London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8, fol. 136v. This note also occurs in London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius E. 3, folio 152r, which does not, however, have the crosses by entries relating to Walter de Coutances. For the details of the ex­ change that Coutances secured from Richard I for Rouen’s manor of Les Andeleys, see Diceto, Opera, 2:154–56, and for the Les Andelys dispute more generally, see Poggioli, “From Politician to Prelate,” 117–29, and esp. 128. 80. Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, ed. James F. Dimock, vol. 6, Giraldi Cambrensis opera omnia (London: Longman, 1868), 3, n.1. 81. Hubert Walter commissioned his nephew Joseph of Exeter to write a history of the cru­ sade in verse on the same occasion. Gerald of Wales, De rebus a se gestis, ed. John S. Brewer, vol. 1, Giraldi Cambrensis opera omnia (London: Longman, 1861), 79. 82. For Roger of Howden’s relations with Hugh du Puiset, see Corner, “Gesta Regis,” 134– 44. John Gillingham has since suggested that Howden was more closely attached to the circle of Roger de Pont l’Évêque (Archbishop of York, 1154–81) and entered Puiset’s ser­vice only ­a fter his archiepiscopal patron died. Gillingham, “Travels,” 73–75. 83. For this text, see Paul Gerhard Schmidt, “Eine metrische Paraphrase der “Historia regum Britannie” für den Durhamer Bischof Hugo de Puiset,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 11 (1976): 201–23. 84. See Bertrand, Écritures ordinaires, 293–352, and esp. 293–305, for the “communauté graphique” (graphic community) within which ­these hommes d’ écriture lived their social lives. 85. Certeau, Writing of History, 65. 86. Mortensen, “Comparing and Connecting,” 25–39. 87. According to Mortensen, Malmesbury and his pre­de­ces­sors wrote in learned Latin prose with a “strong intertextual grounding,” which required of them “an active ­mental library of au­ thoritative . . . ​texts, a sophisticated linguistic sensibility, and a lot of time.” Mortensen, “Compar­ ing and Connecting,” 31. 88. Mortensen, 34. For romance ele­ments in Roger of Howden’s Latin prose, see Bainton, “History and the Written Word,” 221–25. 89. Mortensen, “Comparing and Connecting,” 32. 90. It is worth noting ­here that Diceto produced his compilations for Hubert Walter and William de Longchamp before he had finished writing the Ymagines as we have it t­ oday: he



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produced the collection for Longchamp in 1195 and the collection for Hubert Walter in 1193–95. For t­ hese dates, see Parkes, Their Hands Before Our Eyes, 135. 91. For Gervase of Canterbury’s use of Roger of Howden’s Gesta, see Gervase, Historical Works, 1:xxi. 92. For the date of the Gesta, see Corner, “Gesta Regis,” 126–44. 93. For William of Newburgh’s use of Howden, see John Gillingham, “Two Yorkshire Historians Compared: Roger of Howden and William of Newburgh.” Haskins Society Journal 12 (2003): 15–38. 94. For the textual history of the Chronica, see Corner, “Earliest Surviving Manuscripts,” 297–310. 95. Diceto, Opera, 2:xv. 96. Beriah Botfield, ed., Cata­logi veteres librorum ecclesiae cathedralis Dunelm, Surtees So­ ciety 7 (London: Nichols, 1838), 26. 97. For the Weberian “routinization of charisma” ­under Henry II, see Clanchy, Memory, 68, 89. Cf. John Hudson, “L’écrit, les archives et le droit en Angleterre (IXe–­X IIe siècle),” Revue historique 308, no. 1 (2006): esp. 21–22.

chapter 4 1. “A good example of history as written by a retired civil servant is the Chronica of Roger of Howden”; Ralph de Diceto was a “supply civil servant and diplomat.” Smalley, Historians of the ­Middle Ages, 113, 151; cf. Robert Bartlett, ­England U ­ nder the Norman and Angevin Kings, 1075– 1225 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 631. 2. Diceto himself recounts that he “served” (ministrauit) the archbishop of Canterbury at Richard’s coronation “tam in oleo sancto quam in crismate” (both with holy oil and chrism). Diceto, Opera, 2:69. As Dean of St. Paul’s, Diceto would also have been instrumental in arrang­ ing Richard I’s adventus at St. Paul’s shortly a­ fter he had arrived back in E ­ ngland following his release from captivity. Diceto, 2:114. 3. Vincent, “Why 1199?” 28. 4. See, e.g., Gillingham, “Royal Newsletters,” 182: “Howden . . . ​was undoubtedly writing from within the government”; Holt, “Assizes of Henry II,” 89: “Howden’s version of the assizes must stand as the genuine attempts of a person involved in government to rec­ord its actions.” 5. Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth ­Century: Power, Lordship and the Origins of Eu­ro­pean Government (Prince­ton: Prince­ton University Press, 2009), viii, ix. 6. Bisson, 3, 4. 7. Bisson cites the example of offices, which “however real in theory, w ­ ere animated by lords.” Bisson, 4. 8. In his classic account of medieval state-­formation, for example, J.  R. Strayer identified “the rapid growth in number of educated [i.e., literate] men during twelfth c­ entury” as one of the key “stimuli which led to the emergence of the Eu­ro­pean state.” Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, 24. 9. According to Smalley, Howden “copied documents as evidence and illustrated the details of administration from his inside knowledge.” Smalley, Historians of the ­Middle Ages, 114. And according to John Gillingham, Howden “was undoubtedly able to use his position as a royal clerk to get his hands on copies of government rec­ords such as the charter recording Audemar of La

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Marche’s sale of his county to Henry II . . . ​a document that he reproduced verbatim.” Gilling­ ham, “Events and Opinions: Norman and En­g lish Views of Aquitaine, c. 1152–­c. 1204,” in The World of Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lit­er­a­ture and Society in Southern France Between the Eleventh and Thirteenth Centuries, ed. Marcus Bull and Catherine Léglu (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2005), 71. Similarly, if a role ­were to be conjectured for Howden as an escort for the papal legate Alexius to and from Scotland during the election dispute at St. Andrews, this “would explain in the most eco­nom­ical fashion how Roger got the pope’s letters.” Gillingham, “Travels,” 80. Alternately, “an­ other way of explaining their presence ­there would be that Roger himself had been involved in procuring them,” that is, he himself had been sent to the curia and had brought them back: ac­ cording to Gillingham, Howden’s “experience in the business of Galloway” (in 1174), combined with his “allegiance to both king of E ­ ngland and archbishop of York,” made him the “obvious choice” to go to the curia on Roger of York’s behalf. Gillingham, “Writing the Biography,” 215. 10. Howden, Gesta, 1:323. Howden was justice of the forest on the northern cir­cuit in 1185, 1187, and 1189. For his part, Diceto includes the letters from Henry II and Archbishop Baldwin summoning him nominatim to the election of the new bishop of London in 1189. Diceto, Opera, 2:62. (Letters directed to the bishop of London, its dean and chapter, or Diceto himself, represent more than a quarter of the scripta Diceto includes in the Ymagines.) 11. For “literacy events,” see Shirley Brice Heath, Ways with Words: Language, Life and Work in Communities and Classrooms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. 200 and 386. For Heath, literacy events encompass not just a use of writing (­whether writing or read­ ing) but also the talk and social activity that revolves around that writing. Heath’s work was a seminal contribution to the so-­called New Literacy Studies, for which see also David Barton and Uta Papen, “Introduction,” in The Anthropology of Writing: Understanding Textually Mediated Worlds, ed. David Barton and Uta Papen (London: Continuum, 2010), 11–13, where the ideas of “reading acts” and “writing acts,” which are impor­tant to the thinking b­ ehind this chapter, are also fleshed out. 12. John of Salisbury, The Letters of John of Salisbury, vol. 1: The Early Letters, ed. H.  E. Butler and W. J. Millor, rev. Christopher N. L. Brooke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 201 (let­ ter 122). In this letter, Archbishop Theobald attempts to persuade Henry to accept Alexander. 13. W. L. Warren, Henry II (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973), 445; Letters of John of Salisbury 1:190 (letter 116). 14. “Rex vehementer commotus . . . ​Iratus est quod ejus sine jussu et licentia et sententia fe­ cisset” (The king was greatly agitated . . . ​He was angered that [the bishop] had done this without his order and permission and judgment). FitzStephen, Vita, 27. 15. “Facit [sic] rex breves scribi, ut domus ejus Cenomanni diruantur.” FitzStephen, 27. 16. “Signatos breves rex in manu tenens, et ostendens publice, ait astantibus: ‘Equidem Cenomannenses audient de episcopo suo rumorem.’ ” FitzStephen, 27. The precise meaning of the bishop’s “rumor” is unclear. 17. “Omnis clerus qui aderat . . . ​doluit, cancellarius supra omnes.” FitzStephen, 28. 18. “Praecepit cursoribus regis, bajulis litterarum illarum, ut non festinarent.” FitzStephen, 28. 19. FitzStephen, 28. 20. FitzStephen, 28. Intriguingly, Becket’s friend John of Salisbury had impressed upon Becket the occasional need to play “honest tricks” in encounters with secular power. In the Entheticus maior, the serio-­ludic court satire that John wrote “as a sort of parting gift to Becket” be­ fore he left for court, John argues that “Ille dolus bonus est, qui proficit utilitati, / quo procurantur gaudia, vita, salus” (that trick is good by which one profits in a useful manner, when through it



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rejoicing, life, and salvation are procured). John of Salisbury, John of Salisbury’s Entheticus Maior and Minor, ed. and trans. Jan van Laarhoven, 3 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1:198–99, lines 1441– 42. Quoted in Karen Bollermann and Cary  J. Nederman, “John of Salisbury and Thomas Becket,” in A Companion to John of Salisbury, ed. Christophe Grellard and Frédérique Lachaud (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 68, which makes the argument that John conceived the Entheticus as an ad­ vice manual for guiding Becket in his c­ areer at court (Bollermann and Nederman, 66). 21. For the “re­nais­sance of royal anger in the twelfth ­century and the reappearance of de­ monstrative anger in the repertoire of royal be­hav­iors,” of which this and other episodes in the Becket conflict seem so typical, see Gerd Althoff, “Ira regis: Prolegomena to a History of Royal Anger,” in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the ­Middle Ages, ed. Barbara Rosenwein (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 59–74, esp. 74. 22. For the systematization of royal messengers in the reign of John, see Mary C. Hill, The King’s Messengers, 1199–1377: A Contribution to the History of the Royal House­hold (London: Ar­ nold, 1961). 23. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, trans. Günter Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 978. 24. Weber, 1149. 25. Weber, 1149. 26. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, 24. 27. Strayer, 24. 28. “Conuenitque eum . . . ​de negociis rei publice, ac si sine nutu suo quicquid fieri non lic­ eret.” Devizes, Chronicle of Richard of Devizes, 11, my translation. 29. “In fine uerborum claua profertur uerba determinans, sacra regis reuerenda nimis reci­ tanda monstratur . . . ​Iussum est ad regis mandatum summum fieri silentium.” Devizes, 11–12. 30. “Epistola . . . ​plus metuenda foret, si nondum lecta fuisset.” Devizes, 12, translation mine. 31. Devizes, 12. 32. Howden, Gesta, 2:109. 33. For Puiset as Roger of Howden’s in­for­mant, see Corner, “Gesta Regis,” 126–44; and Gill­ ingham, “Travels,” 73–75. 34. Bisson, Crisis, 389–91. 35. Weber, 1149. 36. Before his elevation to the chancellorship, Longchamp had taught Roman law in the schools and had written a handbook on Roman procedure, Practica legum et decretorum, which was edited in E. Caillemer, Le droit civil dans les provinces anglo-­normandes (Caen: Le Blanc-­ Hardel, 1883), 50–72. Hubert Walter is another example of a literate strongman from this pe­ riod. Inventor of the tripartite chirograph and administrative innovator, he also proved his military abilities, both as a crusader and when he successfully besieged Marlborough ­Castle when it was occupied by John. For this incident, see Christopher R. Cheney, Hubert Walter: Lord of Canterbury and Lord of ­England (London: Nelson, 1968), 92; for Hubert Walter’s ad­ ministrative achievements, see Clanchy, Memory, 70–75. For the overlaps between secular and ecclesiastical power in this period more generally, see John D. Cotts, “Monks and Mediocrities in the Shadow of Thomas Becket: Peter of Blois on Episcopal Duty,” Haskins Society Journal 10 (2001): 143–61. 37. Béatrice Fraenkel, “Writing Acts: When Writing Is D ­ oing,” in The Anthropology of Writing, ed. David Barton and Uta Papen (London: Continuum, 2010), 36.

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38. That is, the utterance remains “at the same time an enunciation and an action.” For this neat definition of a performative, see Fraenkel, “Writing Acts,” 34. 39. Fraenkel, 36. 40. “Non faciam. Non enim diutius praestolabor vos. . . . ​Vocate mihi notarium, qui quos nominavero judices scribat in medio nostrum.” Gervase, Historical Works, 1:469. 41. See, for example, Edward Grim, Vita S. Thomae Cantuariensis archiepiscopis et martyris, in vol. 2, MTB, 363–460, 382; William of Canterbury, Vita et passio S. Thomae, vol. 1, MTB, 18; Bosham, Historia, 279; FitzStephen, Vita, 46–47; Diceto, Opera, 1:312; Gervase, Historical Works, 1:178; Howden, Chronica, 1:222. 42. For lex scripta and its contrast with the verbum regis, see Patrick Wormald, “Lex scripta and Verbum regis: Legislation and Germanic Kingship, from Euric to Cnut,” in Early Medieval Kingship, ed. P. H. Sawyer and Ian Wood (Leeds: University of Leeds, 1977), 105–38. 43. Warren, Henry II, 274; for an attempted reconstruction of the chronology of the Coun­ cil of Clarendon, see Frank Barlow, Thomas Becket (London: Phoenix, 1986), 99. 44. As Grim’s Henry puts it to Becket, “Dignum est ut in publica audientia haec fatearis; universis siquidem notum est in quantis mihi contrarius exstiteris, publicis regni legibus contra­ dicens” (It is fitting that you should acknowledge t­hese [constitutions] in a public hearing, ­because it is known by every­one how much you came out opposed to me, contradicting the public laws of the kingdom). Grim, Vita, 379. This point is also made by Reuter, “Velle sibi fieri in forma hac: Symbolic Acts in the Becket Dispute,” in Medieval Polities and Modern Mentalities, ed. Janet Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 184. 45. “In episcoporum et procerum regni conspectu.” Bosham, Historia, 277. 46. For chirographs, see Clanchy, Memory, 80–90. 47. “Scriptum tamen dictas consuetudines continens recipit. . . . ​A lteram vero scripti par­ tem suscepit Eboracensis archiepiscopus: rex vero ipse tertiam, in regum archivis reponendam” ([Becket] however received the scriptum containing the so-­called customs. . . . ​The archbishop of York received another part, the king a third, to be kept in the kings’ storage-­boxes). Bosham, Historia, 288. 48. John Gillingham has painstakingly reconstructed Howden’s work escorting secular and ecclesiastical dignitaries for Henry II while they ­were on official business in ­England. One won­ders what kind of work that ­really entailed: in modern police states, official escorts often give off a hint of menace. 49. “In mense Septembris, missi sunt ex parte regis per singulos comitatus Angliae justitiae errantes, et secundum subscriptorum formam capitulorum pro­cesserunt in justitiis exsequen­ dis.” Howden, Chronica, 3:262. According to Bisson, Howden’s inclusion of “injunctive material” is evidence for his focusing “in a new way on the lord-­k ing’s purposes and commands”; Howden was sufficiently close to royal power to learn “on the job . . . ​what was happening” to royal power and its nature. Bisson, Crisis, 386. 50. “Omnia debita et vadia Judaeorum imbrevientur. . . . ​Item provideantur sex vel septem loca in quibus facient praestita sua, et provideantur duo legales Christiani et duo legales Judaei, et duo legales scriptores, et coram illis, et clerico Willelmi de Sanctae Mariae Ecclesia, et Willelmi de Chimilli fiant praestita, et cartae praestitorum fiant in modum cirograffi . . . ​clerici autem praedictorum Willelmi et Willelmi habeant rotulum de transcriptis omnium cartarum, et sicut cartae mutabuntur, mutetur et rotulus.” Howden, Chronica, 3:266. 51. “Et super singula carucarum wannagia ponebant ex praecepto regis primo duos solidos et postea tres solidos: et haec omnia in scriptum redigebantur; et habebat inde clericus rotulum



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unum, et miles rotulum alterum, vicecomes rotulum tertium, senescallus baronum rotulum quartum de terra domini sui. . . . ​Et per praedictos rotulos respondebat vicecomes inde ad scac­ carium coram episcopis, abbatibus et baronibus ad hoc assignatis.” Howden, 4:46. 52. “Et super singula carucarum wannagia ponebant ex praecepto regis primo duos solidos et postea tres solidos: et haec omnia in scriptum redigebantur; et habebat inde clericus rotulum unum, et miles rotulum alterum, vicecomes rotulum tertium, senescallus baronum rotulum quartum de terra domini sui. . . . ​Et per praedictos rotulos respondebat vicecomes inde ad scac­ carium coram episcopis, abbatibus et baronibus ad hoc assignatis.” Howden, 4:46. 53. “The Exchequer is a t­ able is a chessboard is a prop in a theatricalized po­liti­cal ritual . . . ​ [it] was not a place housing a department of government, like the court of which it was a special­ ized extension, it was an occasion.” Peter Haidu, The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the M ­ iddle Ages (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 185–86. 54. The centrality of accountability to genuine government is one of the central themes of Bisson’s Crisis of the Twelfth ­Century. 55. Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario: The Dialogue of the Exchequer/Constitutio Domus Regis: The Establishment of the Royal House­hold, 2nd ed., ed. and trans. Emilie Amt and Stephen D. Church (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 10: “in hoc inter duos principaliter conflic­ tus est et pugna committitur, thesaurarium scilicet et vicecomitem qui assidet ad compotum resi­ dentibus aliis tanquam iudicibus ut videant et iudicent.” Translation and emphasis mine. 56. “Ne quid scriberetur quod oculum eius effugeret.” FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, 27, translation mine. 57. “Qui oculata fide semper prospicit ut rotulus unus alii per singula respondeat.” FitzNi­ gel, Dialogus de Scaccario, 27, translation modified. For oculata fides, its origins in Roman law (and its translation as “the trustworthiness of sight”), see Kempshall, Rhe­toric, 158. 58. “Huic oculi lincei necessarii essent ne erraret.” FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, 27. As Richardson and Sayles note, despite the theatricality of returns to the Exchequer, which in­ volved physically moving symbolic objects over the chequered cloth, the “scaccarium itself, the chequered cloth itself . . . ​does not seem to have been a concession to illiteracy, but the corollary of treating an audit as a judicial pro­cess. If the court and parties ­were to follow such proceedings, ­there must be a continuous ocular demonstration of each step in arriving at a final balance . . . ​ ­whether the accountant was literate or not is beside the point.” Richardson and Sayles, Governance of Mediaeval ­England, 280. 59. For inspeximus charters, see Chapter 2. 60. “Ad castella sua munienda contra regem fratrem suum.” Howden, Gesta, 3:236. 61. “Convocatis coram eo episcopis, comitibus, et baronibus regni, ostendit eis litteras co­ mitis Johannis, et earum tenorem.” Howden, Chronica, 3:236. Cf. Alexander III’s 1181 letter Cum orientalis to all prelates ordering that the encyclical Cor nostrum (exhorting a new crusade) be read publicly in all the churches and that they expound its meaning: “Litteras autem, quas propter hoc generaliter mittimus, universis faciatis ecclesiis publice legi, et exponatis earum tenorem” (May you therefore have the letters that we are sending on this m ­ atter publicly read out to the ­whole church, and expound their contents). Howden, Gesta, 2:259. The distinction between scriptum and tenor is also con­spic­u­ous in the way Becket reports his condemnation of the Constitutions of Clarendon to his suffragans: “Auctoritatem ipsius scripti, ipsumque scriptum, cum pravitatibus quae in eo continentur, in irritum duximus et cassavimus” (We have nullified and quashed the authority of the text itself and the document in which it is written, together with the perversities it contains). Becket, Correspondence of Thomas Becket, 1:308–16.

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62. The same dynamic is also at work elsewhere in Howden’s work, such as in his Gesta’s ac­ count of how Tancred, king of Sicily, betrayed Phillip II’s plotting to Richard I: Tancred proved that Philip II had slandered Richard I by giving him the sealed letters in which Philip claimed Richard had broken his faith with him. Howden, Gesta, 2:159–60. 63. Becket, Correspondence of Thomas Becket, 1:65. According to Duggan, this Master H. may have been Herbert of Bosham. 64. Becket, Correspondence of Thomas Becket, 1:166. Translation mine. 65. Ann Rigney, “Plenitude, Scarcity and the Circulation of Cultural Memory,” Journal of Eu­ro­pean Studies 35 (2005): 16. 66. Rigney, 14. 67. Rigney, 14–15, original emphasis. 68. Howden, Chronica, 2:95. 69. See Pierre Chaplais, En­glish Diplomatic Practice in the ­Middle Ages (London: Hamble­ don, 2003), 53–56, for a full analy­sis of the diplomacy and diplomatic practices involved in this marriage. 70. “Haec est carta Willelmi regis Siciliae, quam fecit Johannae filiae Henrici regis Angliae de dote sua, qua eam dotavit die desponsationis suae.” Howden, Chronica, 2:95. 71. It is in­ter­est­ing that Howden a­ dopted the opposite strategy when he presented the char­ ter in the Gesta. Th ­ ere, he writes that Henry II’s messengers handed the scriptum de dote over to him—­“cujus scripti transcriptum hoc est” (of which scriptum the following is a transcript)—­ before introducing the text of the charter with the words “haec est carta regis Willelmi Siciliae”). Howden, Gesta, 1:169. 72. “Quia vero nostra dignum est celsitudine, ut tam nobile ac insigne conjugium decenti dodario debeat honorari, per hoc scriptum damus et in dodarium concedimus praefatae reginae carissimae uxori nostrae comitatum Montis Sancti Angelo, sicut est inferius annotatum.” Howden, Chronica, 2:96; Gesta, 1:170. 73. Howden, Chronica, 2:97. The picture is found in one manuscript of the Gesta and all manuscripts of the Chronica. 74. It was especially impor­tant that this scriptum should be effective even when the original parties to it ­were not pre­sent: Henry II could not himself be pre­sent in Sicily to witness William’s gift to his d­ aughter, so it was especially impor­tant that the writing act through which that gift was given—­and through which it was recorded—­should be effective even in his absence. For Henry’s absence, see Chaplais, En­glish Diplomatic Practice, 53–56. 75. Alfred Hiatt, The Making of Medieval Forgeries: False Documents in Fifteenth-­Century ­England (Toronto: British Library and Toronto University Press, 2004), 1. 76. For further historiographical invocations of oculata fides, including that of Einhard, see Kempshall, Rhe­toric, 185–86. 77. Dennis H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading: The Primary Reception of German Lit­er­a­ture, 800–1300 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 227. See, e.g., Oeuvres de Robert de Melun, ed. Raymond M. Martin, 4 vols. (Leuven, 1932–1952), 1:171: “Mos enim hic aput antiquos erat, ut nullus rem gestam que historia proprie appellatur scribere presumeret, nisi eam geri vidisset” (It was the custom among the ancients that nobody presumed to write [about] past deeds—­t his is properly called history—­u nless they had seen them being accomplished). Cf. Hugh of St. Victor, De scripturis, PL 175, col. 12A, “Apud veteres nulli licebat scribere res gestas, nisi a se visas” (Among the ancients nobody was allowed to write [about] past deeds ­unless they had seen them themselves). For the importance of eyewitness history in this period, see especially



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Beer, Narrative Conventions, 23–34; and Damian-­Grint, New Historians, 69–84. For the impor­ tance of Bede’s reception of Isidore’s definition of historia to its ­later transmission, see Roger D. Ray, “Bede’s Vera Lex Historiae,” Speculum 55 (1980): 15–17. 78. Isidore, Etymologies, 67. 79. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading, 228, 238. 80. In this re­spect, high-­medieval literate government again distinguishes itself from mod­ ern bureaucracy, which “always tends to exclude the public, to hide its knowledge and action from criticism as well as it can.” Weber, Economy and Society, 992.

chapter 5 1. For the “stuffed Latin” of charters in this period, see David Trotter, “ ‘Stuffed Latin’: Ver­ nacular Evidence in Latin Documents,” in Language and Culture in Medieval E ­ ngland: The French of E ­ ngland c. 1100–­c. 1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne et al. (York: York Medieval Press, 2009), 153–63. 2. As Clanchy notes, “For governmental purposes the language of script did not need to be the same as the language of speech.” Clanchy, Memory, 214, emphasis mine. 3. For a further example of simultaneous translation of a letter from Gerald’s work, see Richard Sharpe, “­Peoples and Languages in Eleventh-­and Twelfth-­Century Britain and Ireland: Reading the Charter Evidence,” in The Real­ity B ­ ehind Charter Diplomatic in Anglo-­Norman Britain, ed. Dauvit Broun (Glasgow: Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies, University of Glasgow, 2011), 108–9. 4. “Rothomagensis quoque varia literarum transcripta, quas a rege reportavit, et quarum testimonio ad regni regimen remissus est et ut nihil de regni negotiis ipso inconsulto tracte­ tur. . . . ​Conventrensi ad proceres cuncta fideliter interpretante, in publica audientia legi fecit.” Gerald of Wales, De vita Galfredi archiepiscopi Eboracensis, ed. J. S. Brewer, vol. 4, Giraldi Cambrensis opera omnia (London: Longman, 1873), 357–431, 399. 5. Pace Clanchy, who suggests that it is primarily “language which forms mentalities, not literacy,” and that “writing is one of the means by which encoded language is communicated; it can never be more than that.” Literate public officials in the Age of the Angevins might take issue with Clanchy’s notion that the “medium was not the message.” See Clanchy, Memory, 9. 6. See Ian Short, “Patrons and Polyglots: French Lit­er­a­ture in Twelfth-­Century ­England,” ANS 14 (1992), esp. 242. Paul Brand has made a strong case for French being the language of the royal law courts from the time of Henry II (i.e., from the beginning of the period of this study), in Brand, “The Languages of the Law in ­Later Medieval ­England,” in Multilingualism in ­Later Medieval Britain, ed. David A. Trotter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000), 66. An older tradition of ­legal scholarship also emphasized the role of French in the administration of the common law. See, for example, Paul Hyams, “The Common Law and the French Connection,” ANS 4 (1982), esp. 91; and Raoul C. van Caenegem, The Birth of the En­glish Common Law, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 23. Even George Woodbine, who was hostile to the possibility that French was a written language of law before the mid-­thirteenth c­ entury, suggests that French might have been spoken in the courts. Woodbine, “The Language of En­glish Law,” Speculum 18 (1943): 425. 7. For clerical and lay administrators’ literacy, see, e.g., Ralph V. Turner, Men Raised from the Dust: Administrative Ser­vice and Upward Mobility in Angevin ­England (Philadelphia: Uni­ versity of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), 9–11, with bibliography.

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8. For William of Longchamp’s inability to understand English—­which Hugh du Nonant made notorious in the letter that he circulated attacking him—­see Ian Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci: Self-­Definition in Anglo-­Norman ­England,” ANS 18 (1996), 159. 9. “Officers of the crown and prelates at the end of the twelfth c­ entury clearly belonged to a social class in which vernacular bilingualism [as well as Latin literacy] was perceived to be the norm.” Short, “Tam Angli quam Franci,” 159. 10. For further reflections on the period’s trilingual literate culture, see Clanchy, Memory, 197–223; and Bainton, “Spoken, Written,” forthcoming. 11. Wace, “Le Roman de Rou” (prologue), 32, lines 131–41. 12. Wace, lines 103–7. 13. The trope of the world in decline is common in high medieval history-­w riting, but it is especially associated with the work of Henry of Huntingdon. His treatise On Contempt for the World, which is appended to his Historia Anglorum, circulated in Normandy in Wace’s day and insists on the fleetingness and fragility of worldly power. Henry of Huntingdon, Historia Anglorum, ed. and trans. Diana Greenway (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 583–619. 14. “Par lungs tens e par lungs eages / E par muement de languages, / Unt perdu lur preme­ reins nuns / Viles plursurs e regiuns” (With the changes in language from bygone eras of long ago, many towns and regions have lost their original names). Wace, “Roman de Rou,” lines 11–14. 15. “Des tresturnees de ces nuns / E des gestes dunt nus parluns / Poi u nient seussum dire / Si l’um nes eust feit escrire.” Wace, “Roman de Rou,” lines 81–84. 16. “Tart truverai tant seit curteis / Ki tant me duinst e mette en mein / Dunt jeo aie un meis un escrivein” (It w ­ ill be a long time before I w ­ ill find someone amenable enough to give me [and to press into my hand] what I need to hire a scribe for one month). Wace, “Roman de Rou,” lines 154–56. 17. “Jeo parouc a la riche gent, / Ki unt les rentes e le argent; / Kar pur eus sunt li livre fait / E bon dit fait e bien retrait.” Wace, “Roman de Rou,” lines 163–66. For the definition of “riche” as “mighty, power­ful,” as well as “rich,” see Anglo-­Norman On-­Line Hub (website), Anglo-­ Norman Dictionary, http://­w ww​.­anglo​-­norman​.­net​/­D​/­riche, definitions 1 and 2. 18. Franz Bäuml defined such ­people as “quasi-­literates,” i.e., “­those illitterati who must and do have access to literacy.” Quasiliterates depend “on the written word for the exercise of their socio-­political function,” even if they cannot read or write themselves. Bäuml, “Va­ri­e­ties and Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy,” 246. 19. For my preference for calling this text an Estoire rather than a Chronicle, see note 15 to the Introduction. 20. Guernes describes how “meint riche umme . . . ​unt cunquis e achaté” (many power­f ul ­people sought out and bought) an early and imperfect version of his Life of Becket. Guernes, Vie, line 158, translation mine. This audience of “riche” ­people was the same audience that Wace had identified as patrons of the book trade and consumers of histories recited at festes. 21. Thomas O’Donnell, “Anglo-­Norman Multiculturalism and Continental Standards in Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence’s Vie de Saint Thomas,” in Conceptualizing Multilingualism in ­England c. 800–­c. 1250, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011), 346. 22. For the dating of Gaimar’s Estoire to 1141–50, see Paul Dalton, “The Date of Geoffrey Gaimar’s ‘Estoire des Engleis,’ the Connections of His Patrons, and the Politics of Stephen’s Reign,” Chaucer Review 42 (2007): 23–47. 23. O’Donnell, “Anglo-­Norman Multiculturalism and Continental Standards,” 346.



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24. Fantosme’s editor, R. C. Johnston, concurs with Legge in dating the text to 1174 or 1175. Fantosme, Estoire, xxiii; M. Dominica Legge, Anglo-­Norman Lit­er­a­ture and Its Background (Ed­ inburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), 75. For the dating of Guernes’s Vie, see Ian Short, “An Early Draft of Guernes’ Vie de saint Thomas Becket,” Medium Ævum 46 (1977): 21; and on revising the conclusions of Walberg, see Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, La vie de Saint Thomas le martyr, ed. E. Walberg, Acta Regiae Societatis Humaniorum Litterarum Lundensis (Lund: Gleerup, 1922), xx–­v. 25. Philip E. Bennett suggests that the Estoire may have been a pro-­Henrician response to Guernes’s life of Henry’s martyred adversary, although Geoff Rector has since convincingly ar­ gued that the Estoire is not as royalist as has often been thought. Bennett, “La Chronique de Jor­ dan Fantosme: Épique et public lettré au XIIe siècle,” Cahiers de civilisation médiévale 40 (1997): 55–56; see Geoff Rector, “ ‘Faites le mien desir’: Studious Persuasion and Baronial Desire in Jor­ dan Fantosme’s Chronicle,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 3 (2008): 37–56. 26. Rhyming couplets of octosyllables w ­ ere the standard form “for a g­ reat variety of poetry” from this period: they “came to be associated with the roman, initially denoting any composition in romanz (French), and subsequently courtly love stories in par­tic­u­lar; but ­were also used for history, legend, and chronicle; for social and moral works; homiletic, prayers, sermons, and apoc­ rypha; for grammars, science, and medicine.” Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne, Thelma Fenster, and Del­ bert Russell, eds., Vernacular Literary Theory from the French of Medieval ­England: Texts and Translations, c. 1120–­c. 1450 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), 416. See also Gérard Gros, “Octo­ syllabe et rime plate: À la recherche d’une forme et d’un genre,” in Approches techniques littéraires et historiques: Deuxième Journée d’ études Anglo-­Normandes, ed. André Crépin and Jean Leclant (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 2012), 99–116. Wace used octosyllabic rhym­ ing couplets in his Brut and his saints’ lives, although a significant part of the Rou uses alexan­ drine laisses. 27. For the chansons de geste and rebellion, see William Calin, The Old French Epic of Revolt: Raoul de Cambrai, Renaud de Montauban, Gormond et Isembard (Geneva: Droz, 1962). How­ ever, as Luke Sunderland has argued in a recent reassessment of Calin’s work, the rebel baron genre embraces many more forms than just that of the chanson de geste. See Sunderland, Rebel Barons: Resisting Royal Power in Medieval Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For Fantosme’s prosody, which included both alexandrines of twelve syllables and lines of decasylla­ bles, see Fantosme, Estoire, xxiii–­x xxiv. 28. Timothy Peters argues that Guernes’s Vie “resembles the chansons de geste to a surprising degree. . . . ​In diction, plot and characterization, the Vie de Saint Thomas has more in common with the Chanson de Roland or Raoul de Cambrai than with the Vie de Saint Alexis.” Peters, “Ele­ ments of the Chanson de Geste in an Old French Life of Becket: Garnier’s Vie de saint Thomas le martyr,” Olifant 18 (1994): 278. Thomas O’Donnell is more mea­sured in his analy­sis of the Vie’s debts to the chansons de geste: “Guernes’s stanzas and tendency t­ owards parataxis certainly derive from the ­earlier genre,” he argues, “but apart from the climactic scene inside the cathedral, his narrative generally prefers a careful reconstruction of his protagonists’ acts and motivations to the immediacy of combat or the drama of divided allegiance.” O’Donnell, “Anglo-­Norman Multi­ culturalism and Continental Standards,” 347 and 347, n.25, for the observation that “Peters’s ar­ gument draws most heavi­ly on the passages describing the martyrdom, and he neglects the substantial passages devoted to letters, documentation, and po­liti­cal analy­sis.” 29. As Bennett has suggested of the Estoire’s opening line, which reads “Oëz verraië estoirë,” “il s’agira d’un texte ‘oralisant,’ porteur de l’index ‘écouter.’ ” Bennett, “La chronique,” 39. For

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other markers of oral per­for­mance, see, e.g. Fantosme, Estoire, lines 1242–44, with its invocation of a listening audience of seignurs: “Or oëz, seignurs, cument de la periere ala/la premiere piere qu’ele unkes lur geta” (Now hear, my lords, how the first stone that it ever hurled for them left the catapult). 30. For Fantosme’s allusion to the chansons de geste, see, e.g., his description of Henry II as “le plus honurable e le plus cunquerant / Que fust en nule terre puis le tens Moysant, / Fors sule­ ment li reis Charle, ki poeste fud grant / Par les dudze cumpaignuns, Olivier e Rodlant” (the most honorable and the most victorious king who ever was anywhere on earth since the time of Moses, save only Charlemagne, whose might was im­mense through the deeds of the twelve peers amongst whom ­were Oliver and Roland). Fantosme, Estoire, lines 111–14. The epic cast of Fan­ tosme’s poem has been explored by Philip Bennett in “L’épique dans l’historiographie Anglo-­ Normande: Gaimar, Wace, Jordan Fantosme,” in Aspects de l’ épopée romane: Mentalités, idéologies, intertextualités, ed. Hans van Dijk and Willem Noomen (Groningen: Forsten, 1995), 321–30; and in “La chronique,” where Bennett emphasizes the Estoire’s combination of lyric and epic forms. For Guernes’s allusions to the Charlemagne cycle, see Peters, “Ele­ments of the Chan­ son de Geste,” 279–80; and “An Ecclesiastical Epic: Garnier de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence’s Vie de Saint Thomas le martyr,” Medievistik 7 (1994): 186–87. 31. For an early but useful review of the evidence, see Iain MacDonald, “The Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme: Manuscripts, Author and Versification,” in Studies in Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewert in Honour of His Seventieth Birthday, ed. E. A. Francis (Oxford: Claren­ don, 1961), 251–54; and Matthew Strickland, “Fantosme, Jordan (fl. 1170–1180), historian,” ODNB, http://­doi​.­org ​/­10​.­1093​/­ref:odnb​/­48310. For new evidence about Fantosme’s ­career, see Geoff Rector, “ ‘Faites le mien desir’: Studious Persuasion and Baronial Desire in Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle,” Journal of Medieval History 34, no. 3 (2008): 311–46. 32. The image of Fantosme (alongside Ivo of Chartres and Johannes Beleth) at the feet of Gilbert of Poitiers is found in a late twelfth-­century copy of Gilbert’s commentary on Boethius’s De trinitate. For a description of the manuscript, see MacDonald, “Chronicle of Jordan Fan­ tosme,” 252. The image is now available at Bibliothèque de Valenciennes, Patrimoine Numérique, “Gilbert de la Porrée enseignant et ses disciples,” https://­patrimoine​-­numerique​.­ville​-­valenciennes​ .­fr​/­ark:​/­29755​/­B​_­596066101​_­MS​_­0197​/­F​_­004​_­V. As Geoff Rector puts it, this image places Jordan “at the center of French scholasticism.” Rector, “Studious Persuasion,” 327. 33. MacDonald, “Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme,” 250. 34. Henry “brokered the deal by which Stephen was recognized as king in return for prom­ ises that he would act as a model ruler of the church, and Henry claimed a directive role in their implementation.” Edmund King, “Blois, Henry de (c. 1096–1171), Bishop of Winchester,” ODNB, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­ref:odnb​/­12968. 35. Rector, “Studious Persuasion,” 328. 36. Rector, 328. 37. John Hudson, “Ilchester, Richard of (d. 1188), Administrator and Bishop of Winchester,” in ODNB, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​/­ref:odnb​/­23515, citing R. C. van Caenegem, En­glish Lawsuits from William I to Richard I (London: Selden Society, 1990), no. 446. 38. Rector suggests that “Jordan’s place in Henry of Blois’ opulent h ­ ouse­hold is evident in the documents witnessing Henry’s death” (Rector, “Studious Persuasion,” 326, n.56), but Fan­ tosme’s name does not actually appear in t­ hose documents. See Cecil Deedes, ed. Registrum Johannis de Pontissara quondam episcopi Wyntoniensis  A.D. MCCLXXXII–­MCCCIV (London: Surrey Rec­ord Society, 1913–24), 628–29. The editors of the Winchester Domesday, to whom Rec­



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tor refers, meanwhile reconstruct Henry of Blois’s h ­ ouse­hold using the Winchester Domesday, which mentions the property over which Fantosme litigated; that text does not, however, men­ tion Fantosme himself. Frank Barlow et al., eds., Winchester in the Early ­Middle Ages: An Edition and Discussion of the Winton Domesday (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 129, numbers 864, 328. I, there­ fore, am slightly more circumspect than Rector is in his account of Henry of Blois’s deathbed donations, but Fantosme and Puiset may well have found themselves in one another’s com­pany at other occasions. A “magister Jordanus,” for example, witnessed a notification addressed to Hugh du Puiset, then archdeacon of Winchester, from Henry of Blois between 1147 and 1153 (M. J. Frank­ lin, ed., En­glish Episcopal Acta VIII: Winchester, 1070–1204 [Oxford: British Acad­emy, 1993], 15–16). That said, as Matthew Strickland notes, it is unlikely that Puiset was ever Fantosme’s pa­ tron ­because Fantosme’s “only two references to the Bishop of Durham openly accuse him of col­ lusion with the Scots.” Strickland, “Arms and the Men,” 218. 39. Poggioli, “From Politician to Prelate,” 19. 40. See page 99. 41. See, for example, Lodge, “Lit­er­a­ture and History in the Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme,” 266–68, which suggests that Jordan derived his knowledge of the war in the north of ­England through executing his own’ “intelligence-­gathering” role. 42. The roles of spy and envoy overlapped closely in this period’s lit­er­a­ture. Fantosme reports in the Estoire, for example, that William the Lion (king of Scotland, d. 1214) “voldrad ultre mer enveier un espie / Pur veeir le cuntienement le pere en Normendie / E puis alant en Flandres al fiz en qui il se fie / Ses briés e ses messages ki haltement il die / Cume li reis sun pere ‘par dit me cuntralie’ ” (wanted to send a spy across the sea to observe the actions of Henry the ­father in Normandy, and, ­a fter that, to Flanders to Henry’s son in whom he puts his trust, bearing letters telling him plainly how the king his f­ ather “frustrates me by his decision”). Fantosme, Estoire, lines 409–13. See Jean-­Claude Vallecalle, Messages et ambassades dans l’ épopée française médiévale: L’ illusion du dialogue (Paris: Champion, 2006), 373–86, for the role of the spy in epic lit­er­a­ture of this period. 43. As Ian Short puts it, Guernes was “clearly a man of considerable learning, entirely at home in the Latinate culture of his time. He had what one might term a scholarly turn of mind, illustrated not only by his commitment to collecting first-­hand oral testimony in support of his thesis, but also by incorporating into his power original documentation such as administrative rec­ords and formal letters.” Guernes, Life of Becket, trans. Short, 16. 44. Guernes, Vie, line 6165. 45. For Guernes’s profile as a “professional writer” and for his lack of secure patronage, see Thomas O’Donnell, “ ‘The Ladies Have Made Me Quite Fat’: Authors and Patrons at Barking Abbey,” in Barking Abbey and Its Texts, ed. Donna A. Bussell and Jennifer N. Brown (Wood­ bridge: Boydell, 2011), 104. 46. O’Donnell, 102. 47. “L’abeesse suer saint Thomas, pur s’onur e pur le barun, / M’at doné palefrei e dras; n’i faillent nis li esperun. / Ne getai pas mes dez sur as, quant jo turnai a sa meisun! / . . . ​E les dames m’unt fet tut gras, chescune d’eles de sun dun” (The abbess ­sister of St Thomas, for the sake of lord Thomas and her honour, has given me a palfrey and clothes; not even the spurs ­were lack­ ing! I made a lucky throw of the dice when I turned into her h ­ ouse! . . . ​A nd the ladies [i.e., of Barking Abbey] have made me quite fat, each of them with her own gift). Guernes, Vie, 2:357, lines 1–3, 7. Translated by O’Donnell, “Anglo-­Norman Multiculturalism and Continental Standards,” 103.

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48. “Oede, li buens priurs de Seinte Terneté / Li covenz des seignurs (Deus lur sache buen gré!) / M’unt fet mult grant sucurs, del lur sovent doné, / Maintenu anz e jurz e entr’els governé” (Odo, the good prior of Holy Trinity [Canterbury], and the monastery’s monks—­may God look favourably upon them!—­have been of ­g reat assistance to me, frequently giving me what was properly theirs and providing me with board and lodging over a number of years). Guernes, Vie, lines 16–19; Life of Becket, trans. Short, 177. 49. As O’Donnell notes, it was Odo who lobbied Henry to appoint Mary Becket abbess of Barking. O’Donnell, “Authors and Patrons,” 107, citing Gervase, Historical Works, 1:242. 50. For literacy events, see Chapter  4. According to the Chronicle of ­Battle Abbey, when Odo asked Henry II to renew the abbey’s charters, Henry replied that he would “not do so except by the judgment of my own court.” So Odo waited for a “place and time when the king would . . . ​ be sitting in the midst of his barons (in medio procerum) . . . ​and in view of all presented his char­ ter (in conspectu omnium proposuit), decayed with age, and requested that it be renewed by royal authority.” Searle, Chronicle of ­Battle Abbey, 310. This incident took place in 1175, about a year ­a fter Guernes had finished writing. 51. O’Donnell, “Anglo-­Norman Multiculturalism and Continental Standards,” 346, n.23. 52. “Jeol vi sur Franceis plusurs feiz chevalchier” (I myself saw him ­ride out against the French on several occasions). Guernes, Vie, line 359; Life of Becket, trans. Short, 32. It is unclear which of Henry’s campaigns Guernes is referring to h ­ ere, b­ ecause while Becket’s role fighting in southern France in 1159 is well attested, t­ here was no major conflict between Henry II and Louis VII in Normandy between Henry’s accession as king and Becket’s election as archbishop, where Guernes says he saw Becket fight the French. 53. See note 29 above. 54. For a power­f ul critique of the romantic but tenacious notion of the “epic séance” among medieval warriors, see Andrew Taylor, “Was Th ­ ere a Song of Roland,” Speculum 76 (2001), 36– 40. As Taylor puts it, in romantic accounts of the epic seance, “the epic material merges with the warrior class it celebrates in the full embodiment of oral tradition” (40). 55. I argued in Chapter 1 that most of the “official documents” that Latin history-­writers quoted in this period ­were in fact letters, partly ­because epistolary and historiographical dis­ course ­were so closely related. 56. For literacy events, see Chapter 4. 57. See, e.g., the three scripta that Diceto quotes in his account of the year 1174. Diceto, Opera, 1:394, 396, 400. 58. See Chapter 1. 59. In this sense, Fantosme’s strategy in the Estoire is not so very dif­fer­ent to Stephen of Rouen’s in his Draco Normannicus, which I have discussed elsewhere. See Henry Bainton, “Epistolary Documents in High-­Medieval History-­Writing,” Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval Eu­ro­pean Lit­e r­a­tures 4 (2017): 26–32; for Stephen’s versified letters, see Stephen of Rouen, Draco Normannicus, in vol. 2, Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen, Henry II, and Richard I, ed. Richard Howlett, Rolls Series 82, 4 vols. (London: Longman, 1884–89), 2:728–31, 2:697–705, and 2:707. 60. This was an absence that Fantosme at points articulates explic­itly (according to Fan­ tosme, the castellan of Alnwick “Plus regrette sun seignur [Henry] que chevalier s’amie” [He thinks more longingly of his absent lord than does a knight of his mistress, line 548]). Laura Ashe argues that the Estoire should be read as “an appeal from a kingdom to its ruler, a ruler who spent many years away from that kingdom.” Ashe, Fiction and History in ­England, 104. Fantosme was



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not the only one for whom Henry’s absence was notable: according to Diceto, that the embassy of Richard of Ilchester (Fantosme’s patron in Winchester) asked that he return to ­England was a ­matter of some mirth to the Normanni: “Wintoniensis electi adventum intelligentes et causam dixerunt: ‘Cum Angli tot emiserint nuntios et istum nunc dirigunt, quid amplius transmisuri sunt ad regem revocandum in Angliam, nisi turrim Lundoniae?’ ” (Hearing the bishop-­elect of Winchester’s arrival and his purpose, they said “when the En­glish have sent so many messengers—­ and now him—­what w ­ ill they be sending to call the king back to ­England next? The Tower of London?”) Diceto, Opera, 1:381–82. 61. Rector, “Studious Persuasion,” 325. 62. Rector, 329. 63. Rector, 322. 64. For the balance of praise and blame in the Estoire, see, e.g., Jean Blacker, “Oez veraie estoire,” 28; Strickland, “Arms and the Men,” 192–94; and Rector, “Studious Persuasion,” 312. Anthony Lodge, on the other hand, characterized the Estoire as a “panegyric” to Henry II (Lodge, “Lit­er­a­ture and History in the Chronicle of Jordan Fantosme,” 262); and for Laura Ashe, the Estoire is “a public address to the king, and yet a public declaration of the most celebratory kind.” Ashe, Fiction and History in E ­ ngland, 82. 65. For this combination, see Bainton, “Spoken, Written.” 66. I (and I think Johnston) take the grammatical subject of this and the following para­ graph (­until “vunt”) to be King Louis (i.e., he who leads—­ki trestuz chaele—­a ll the French), not the Young King. 67. Fantosme, Estoire, lines 240–57. 68. As Philip Bennett suggests, this “allows the inference that what we hear recited are the very words the Young King [or Louis] had authenticated with his signet.” Bennett, “Ganelon’s False Message: A Critical False Perspective,” in Reading Around the Epic: A Festschrift in Honour of Professor Wolfgang van Emden, ed. Marianne Ailes et  al. (London: King’s College, 1998), 164–65. 69. That is, ­these w ­ ere not simply letters of credence, which w ­ ere handed over to the recipi­ ent of a message to vouch for the fidelity of the messenger who delivered the message orally. This was a common practice in the twelfth ­century, and it was especially useful where the content of the message was to be secret; letters of credence w ­ ere generally sealed close, whereas letters in which the substance of the message was contained in the writing (and whose contents w ­ ere not secret) would be sealed patent. For an account of t­ hese practices, see Chaplais, En­glish Diplomatic Practice, esp. 12–28, 45–50. 70. For acts of reading, see Chapter 4. 71. The full text of this passage runs as follows: “ ‘Enveium noz messages od icest mande­ ment, / Ki si facent lur port cum chevalier vaillant.’ / Vunt s’en li message; lur chevals espu­ runenet / Par les granz chemins ferrez, lur rednes abandunent. / Li cheval sunt mult bon qui desuz eus randunent. / Viennent en Normendie, pas lunges ne sujornent / Trovent le viel rei Henri; sagement l’araisunent / De part le rei d’Escoce. Lur lettres puis li dunent. / Frere Willame d’Olepenë parole tut premier / E dit au rei d’Engleterë: “Jo sui un messagier / De par le rei d’Escocë, vus vi­ eng ci nuntier / Il est vostre parent sil devez mult amer” (“Let us despatch this demand by our en­ voys, who ­will bear it like valiant knights.” The envoys depart; they spur their ­horses along the metalled highways, with the reins hanging loose. The h ­ orses galloping u­ nder them are unrivalled. They reach Normandy with no lingering on the way; they find King Henry the Elder; wisely they address him in the name of the king of Scotland. Then they pre­sent their letter to him. B ­ rother

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William de Olepen speaks first and says to the king of E ­ ngland: “I am an envoy from the king of Scotland, and I am ­here to let you know that he is your kinsman and that ­there should be love between you”). Fantosme, Estoire, lines 315–25. 72. In this case, it seems likely that the letters in question ­were letters of credence, unlike the previous example. 73. Precisely whose words w ­ ere being spoken in this passage is deliberately unclear: the mes­ sage is delivered as if from the Young King by the Young King’s messengers, although “ço fud li reis Lowis ki charga la novele.” Fantosme, Estoire, line 247. 74. This was the usual practice: as Chaplais notes, “When delivering their oral message, diplomatic envoys normally reported their master’s words in the third person.” The only example of the first person being used that Chaplais identifies is found in the Vita of Becket by (Fan­ tosme’s con­temporary) William of Canterbury, who rec­ords a messenger—­a lso sent by Louis VII—­addressing Henry II in the same way. Chaplais, En­glish Diplomatic Practice, 49. 75. Johnston’s translation modified. 76. “Ore oiez sun mandement; nel tenez a folage!” (Now hear [King Henry’s] command and d­ on’t take it lightly!). Fantosme, Estoire, lines 365–66, translation mine. 77. Translation modified. 78. R. J. Smith notes that despite the new presence of the Young King’s own ­house­hold in the witness-­lists of his charters ­a fter he was reconciled to his ­father, “his dependence, albeit gilded, continued. It is notable that not only are his charters to monasteries all confirmations, but the more elaborate of them . . . ​occurred when Henry II himself was contemporaneously involved. In­ deed, the primary importance of the Young King’s acta lies in their demonstration of the re­ stricted nature of associate kingship; they illustrate the frustrations that provoked his rebellions and, in some mea­sure, substantiate the Young King’s complaints of the inanity of his own regal title.” R. J. Smith, “Henry II’s Heir: The Acta and Seal of Henry the Young King, 1170–83,” EHR 116, no. 466 (2001): 302. For a valuable comparison of the Young King’s rebellion with ­those of other con­temporary Eu­ro­pean princes, see Björn Weiler, “Kings and Sons: Princely Rebellions and the Structures of Revolt in Western Eu­rope, c. 1170–­c. 1280,” Historical Research 82, no. 215 (2009): esp. 20–24, 36–38. 79. “Statim fecit fieri ei novum sigillum.” Howden, Gesta, 1:43. According to Howden, when the Young King’s chancellor defected back to Henry II, he brought the Young King’s seal back with him. This was something of a coup for Henry II, who ordered it to be “guarded closely” (“Et illud recipiens praecepit bene custodiri”). When Henry II sent his son’s defecting ­house­hold and trea­sure back to him, he kept the seal himself. Howden, 1:43. 80. The charters the Young King issued show the extent of his ambitions: he gave all of Kent, with Dover C ­ astle, to Philip, Count of Flanders; he transferred the county of Mortain from his own ­brother John and gave it to Philip’s ­brother Matthew, the Count of Boulogne; he gave William the Lion all of North­umberland. Th ­ ese and other donations “confirmavit . . . ​sigillo suo quod rex Franciae fecit ei fieri” (he confirmed with the new seal which the king of France had had made for him). Howden, Gesta, 1:45. The relationship between the charter that Howden says the Young King made for William the Lion and the letter that Fantosme reproduces from the Young King to William (i.e., the letter promising him North­umberland in return for his aid) is unclear. 81. If the Young King is in fact the subject of the sentence u­ ntil this point (as Bennett seems to imply—­see note 68 above), this reading is weakened. The point still stands, however, that Louis had a determining influence in the transaction.



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82. As Johnston glosses this line, “Henry’s answer is immediate and he needs no advice to help him make up his mind.” Fantosme, Estoire, 162. 83. “Eramus subditi . . . ​coerciti . . . ​nec in aliquo quidem regebamus, sed coercebamur qui alios coercere debuimus.” Martin Bouquet and Léopold Delisle, eds., Recueil des historiens des Gaules de la France, rev. ed., 24 vols. (Paris: Palmé, 1869–1904), 16:644. The Estoire’s suggestion that the Young King was being coerced by Louis and his evil counsel was the standard line among con­temporary historians to explain (and perhaps excuse) his be­hav­ior. As Fantosme ­later says, “ ‘Par cunseil . . . ​puet l’um un sage mettre en grant folie” (By evil counsel . . . ​a man can be pushed into disastrous folly; lines 678–79). See also Diceto, Opera, 1:355, “abiens in consilio impiorum”; cf. Ps. 1:1. See also Howden, Gesta, 1:41, where Howden claims the Young King rebelled “per con­ silium regis Franciae.” Fantosme, Diceto, and Howden may therefore have been trying to excul­ pate him by charging him only with naïveté. 84. Clanchy, Memory, 103. 85. Clanchy, 221. Note that Clanchy’s point is about language rather than just versification. It is curious that nobody ever suggests that the papal letters reproduced in Latin verse by Stephen of Rouen in his Draco Normannicus w ­ ere not “au­then­tic.” Rouen, Draco, 3.477–576. 86. Bennett, “Ganelon’s False Message,” 164–65. 87. See page 38. 88. Clanchy, Memory, 219. 89. For mnemonic products, see page 7 above; for remediation, see pages 45–46 above. 90. The paradigmatic example of message exchange in the chansons de geste is the traitor Gan­ elon’s delivery of the Franks’ message to Marsile in the Chanson de Roland. This episode “has prob­ ably produced as much controversy as the rest of the poem put together.” Bennett, “Ganelon’s False Message,” 149. For further examples of messages and messengers in the period’s lit­er­a­ture, see the exhaustive studies by Jacques Merceron, Le message et sa fiction: La communication par messager dans la littérature française des XIIe et XIIIe siècles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Vallecalle, Messages et ambassades, esp. 83–104. The theme of the messenger is found even in oral poetry of the modern era, for which see Albert  B. Lord, The Singer of Tales, ed. Stephen Mitchell and Gregory Nagy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. 55–71. 91. In Otinel, a messenger from the Saracen king is harassed by the members of Char­ lemagne’s court (over whom Charlemagne seems unable to keep control) before fighting Roland, converting to Chris­tian­ity, and marrying Charles’s ­daughter. See Otinel: Chanson de geste, ed. François Guessard and Henri Michelant (Paris: Jannet, 1859), 3–4. As is the case for many chansons de geste, the only complete manuscript is in Anglo-­Norman, which is dated to the mid-­thirteenth ­century; see Ruth J. Dean, Anglo-­Norman Lit­er­a­ture: A Guide to Texts and Manuscripts (London: Anglo-­Norman Text Society, 1999), no.  78. Fantosme is also concerned with the immunity of messengers: when the castellan of Carlisle threatens William the Lion’s messengers, one of the latter retorts, “Ço n’est pas avenant. Ne deit l’um messagier sun message portant / Laidir në afoler; dire puet sun talent.” (That is no proper way to talk. An envoy bearning a message must not be insulted or harmed; it is right to speak his mind). Fantosme, Estoire, lines 1376–78. For the immunity of messengers (and further examples of its use as a motif in chansons de geste), see Val­ lecalle, Messages et ambassades, 152–68. 92. The letters are Expectans expactaui, Desiderio desideraui, Que vestro pater, Mirandum et vehementer, Sciatis quod Thomas, and Quam iustis. Duggan, Textual History, 204, 277. 93. For the 1169 decrees, see David  M. Knowles, Anne  J. Duggan, and Christopher  N.  L. Brooke, “Henry II’s Supplement to the Constitutions of Clarendon,” EHR 87, no. 345 (1972): 757–71.

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Given Guernes’s interest in epistolarity, it is noteworthy that the 1169 decrees are themselves con­ cerned with that subject, in that they forbade any monk or clerk to cross the Channel without an official letter granting them permission to do so and declared anyone carry­ing a papal letter impos­ ing an interdict on E ­ ngland to be a traitor. 94. Leena Löfstedt, “La loi canonique, les Plantagenêts et S. Thomas Becket,” Medioevo Romanzo 15 (1990): 3–16; and “La Vie de S. Thomas Becket par Garnier de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence et la traduction en ancien Français du Décret de Gratien,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 98 (1997): 161–78. 95. Löfstedt does this by collating the text of the letters versified in Guernes’s Vie—­whose Latin “originals” make extensive use of Gratian’s Decretum—­with the Old French translation of Gratian’s Decretum that was made in this period. (According to Löfstedt, the translation of Gra­ tian was made by someone in the circle of Becket himself.) Löfstedt shows that Guernes’s use of canon law terminology did not come from the Old French Decretum itself but from other texts, such as the French drafts of Becket’s letters, which had direct knowledge of it. 96. “Ce lettre donne l’impression d’être une traduction médiocre de ce texte français.” Löf­ stedt, “Vie et traduction,” 168. 97. For Guernes’s French, see Thomas O’Donnell, “Anglo-­Norman Multiculturalism and Continental Standards,” 337–56. This translation is O’Donnell’s. 98. Guernes, Vie, line 4393; cf. Guernes, lines 5101–3: “Tut li mielz de la curt se sunt entrafïé / De faire e de furnir cele grant cruelté. / Mais en mun livre n’erent ne escrit ne nomé” (The most prominent members of the court all swore to one another to carry out and complete this brutal act. I w ­ ill, however, neither give nor rec­ord their names in my book). Guernes, Life of Becket, 150. 99. “Mainte feiz en ostai ço que jo ainz escris” (I have frequently deleted material that I had already written). Guernes, Vie, line 6169; Life of Becket, 176. 100. Duggan, Textual History, 203. Guernes notes that Desiderio desideravi, which Becket sent to Henry II to seek reconciliation, ­were sent “senz saluz” (without greetings, Guernes, Vie, line 3041). On the other hand, when the En­glish clergy wrote to Becket, “Amur, subjectiun e saluz li manda” (They offered him love, submission and greetings). Guernes, Vie, line 3185. ­These notes appear immediately before Guernes pre­sents his rendition of the main body of the letters and do not seem to have been drawn from Guernes’s likely source for the text of the letters, Edward Grim’s Vita of Becket, which makes no such comments. 101. “Sermun” h ­ ere clearly means “sermon, homily,” the first definition that the Anglo-­ Norman dictionary gives for the word. But it nevertheless retains the sense of orality that is explicit in other con­temporary uses of the word, where it could mean “discourse, speech,” or “language, speech.” Anglo-­Norman Dictionary, online edition, http://­w ww​.­anglo​-­norman​.­net​/­D​ /­sermun. 102. My translation. Short has “the object of the account that you are about to hear.” Guernes, Life of Becket, 27. 103. For the “conventional romance narrator of the twelfth and thirteenth ­century,” who typically “mediates between his audience and a real or posited pre-­existent text or texts, usually identified as books, and often in Latin,” see, e.g., Sylvie Huot, From Song to Book: The Poetics of Writing in Old French Lyric and Lyrical Narrative Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 84ff. The locus classicus of a romance conteur expounding the sens of Latin texts while treating them en romanz is found in the prologue to the Lais of Marie de France. See Marie de France, Lais, ed. Alfred Ewert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), prol. lines 9–32. 104. See page 56 above.



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105. Translation mine. 106. The immediacy of the textual per­for­mance that Fantosme evokes is underlined by ana­ logues to this opening line in other con­temporary French epics, which, by contrast, evoke the immediacy of song. As Philip Bennett notes, no chanson de geste apart from the Couronnement de Louis “offre en mot autre que chanson après l’appel à l’écoute,” which means that “l’invocation d’une ‘estoire’ dans ce contexte . . . ​choque, parce que l’auditoire fut ‘programmé’ pour attendre le vocable “chanson” après le verbe oïr.” Bennett, “La chronique,” 40. 107. This is the argument of Strickland, “Arms and the Men,” 198–204. 108. For the phenomenon of literate knights in this period, and the argument that they ­were a much more common a phenomenon than usually thought, see Martin Aurell, The Lettered Knight: Knowledge and Aristocratic Behaviour in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, trans. Jean-­Charles Khalifa and Jeremy Price (Budapest: CEU, 2017), esp. 35–98. 109. As Gabrielle Spiegel has argued, in high-­medieval history-­writing ­there was a “perva­ sive . . . ​bias in favour of considering as historically telling not ‘what ­really happened’ but what was done—­res gestae—­and then, perforce, by whom. The importance of events is gauged by the status of t­ hose who participate in them.” Spiegel, Romancing the Past, 215. 110. Again, this seems a fair reflection of diplomatic practice, in which the credibility of the message derived in part from the authority of the messenger. For legati credibiles and probablies viri, see Chaplais, En­glish Diplomatic Practice, 56–59. 111. Fantosme, Estoire, lines 421–36. 112. Thomas of Kent, on whose Alexander romance Fantosme’s text is in some ways mod­ eled, suggested that one learned to do t­ hese t­ hings as part of the same education. According to Kent, Alexander the ­Great knew one of his many adversaries, King Nicholas of Carthage, inti­ mately b­ ecause when they ­were boys they had learned “lettrure e langage” together. Thomas of Kent, The Anglo-­Norman Alexander: The Roman de Toute Chevalerie, ed. Brian Foster and Ian Short, 2 vols. (London: Anglo-­Norman Text Society, 1974–75), line 573. For Fantosme’s depen­ dence on Thomas of Kent, see Gert de Wilde, “Revisiting the Textual Parallels and Date of Thomas of Kent’s Alexander and Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle,” Medium Ævum 83, no. 1 (2014): 76–92. 113. Fantosme notes elsewhere, by way of contrast, that “mielz valt bele parole mustree par raisun / Ke ne fait manace pur demander nul dun; / E ki autrement le fait, si quiert destruction / Sa mort e sun dumage e sa confusiun” (Fair words reasonably put forward are better than threats when making a request, and anyone who does it in any other way brings on himself his own undo­ ing, his death, harm to his interests, and his overthrow). Fantosme, Estoire, lines 306–10. 114. Adam de Senlis (d. 1189) was abbot of Evesham from 1161 and a renowned canon l­ awyer. See D. C. Cox, “Senlis, Adam de [Adam of Evesham] (d. 1189),” ODNB, https://­doi​.­org​/­10​.­1093​ /­ref:odnb​/­94. 115. My translation. 116. My translation. 117. “Litteris igitur episcoporum, litteris etiam prioris et conventus Sanctae Trinitatis, litteris quoque regis in medium recitatis, sub audientia cardinalium in consistorio postulatione facta, facilis et jocundus juxta petitionem ab omnibus datur assensus.” Diceto, Opera, 1:307. 118. Diceto only lists the envoys’ names in the margin. Diceto, 1:307. 119. Howden, Chronica, 2:215. This comment forms the introduction to Howden’s version of “Glanvill,” which appears only in one manuscript of the Chronica. 120. Rector, “Studious Persuasion,” 316.

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121. Wace mentions the patronage that he had received from Henry, including a prebendary in Bayeux. See, most recently, Charity Urbanski, Writing History for the King: Henry II and the Politics of Vernacular Historiography (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), esp. 83–147. 122. Wace, Roman de Rou, lines 147–48. 123. Wace, lines 166–67. 124. For Osney and the “Oxford Manuscript” of Roland, see Taylor, “Was ­There a Song of Roland,” 62; for St. Thomas’s in Oxford, see Eleanor Chance et al., “Churches,” in A History of the County of Oxford: Volume 4, The City of Oxford, ed. Alan Crossley and C. R. Elrington (Lon­ don: Institute of Historical Research, 1979), 369–412. 125. Guernes, Vie, lines 151–55 126. Fantosme, Estoire, line 1242.

Afterword Note to epigraph: Reuter, “Modern Mentalities and Medieval Polities,” 15. 1. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 162. 2. Southern, 154. 3. Gransden, Historical Writing I, 219. 4. Reuter, “Modern Mentalities and Medieval Polities,” 13. The ­g rand narrative on which Reuter trains his sights is that first propounded by the “Manchester” (or “Sir Humphrey”) school of medieval history, whose patriarch was Frederick Thomas Tout. Tout’s approach “saw the his­ tory of our medieval polity as consisting precisely in the development of administrative prac­ tices.” Reuter, 14. For another compelling argument against assuming that literacy increases in proportion to a society’s degree of civilization, see Clanchy, Memory, 7–11. 5. See, for example, Simon Keynes, “Royal Government and the Written Word in Late Anglo-­ Saxon E ­ ngland,” in The Uses of Literacy in Early Mediaeval Eu­rope, ed. Rosamund McKitterick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 226–57. 6. For the Angevin “dismantling” of the Anglo-­Saxon state, see James Campbell, “Observa­ tions on En­g lish Government from the Tenth to the Twelfth ­Century,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 25 (1975): 51–53. Cf. W. L. Warren, “The Myth of Norman Adminis­ trative Efficiency,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 5th ser., 34 (1984): 113–32. 7. For a similar view, see Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, 42. 8. Southern, Medieval Humanism, 149–51. 9. Ashe, Fiction and History in E ­ ngland, 11. 10. Ashe, 10. 11. Ashe, 21. 12. Ashe, 18. 13. Ashe’s approach to En­glish identity builds on the views of Patrick Wormald and James Campbell, who both insist that ­England was a nation-­state before the Conquest and continued to be the same nation-­state afterward. See, e.g., Patrick Wormald, “Engla Lond: The Making of an Allegiance,” in L ­ egal Culture in the Early Medieval West: Law as Text, Image and Experience, ed. Wormald (London: Hambledon, 1999), 370, for an analy­sis of “the survival of E ­ ngland as a uni­ fied state” at 1066: “The Norman Conquest cannot have been the making, even if it was the sav­ ing, of E ­ ngland. ­England, as its name implies, was made already.” See also Campbell’s appraisal of Wormald’s “valuable stress on how the ultimate absorption of the Norman conquerors and the



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triumph of En­g lish and En­g lishness was an indication of the strength of pre-­Conquest national consciousness.” Campbell, “The Late Anglo-­Saxon State: A Maximum View,” Proceedings of the British Acad­emy 87 (1995): 47–48. 14. Reuter, “Modern Mentalities and Medieval Polities,” 7, 8. 15. As Robert M. Stein put it, “For most of medieval Eu­rope, the nation is si­mul­ta­neously too small and too large to be a useful analytic unit.” Stein, Real­ity Fictions, 5. 16. J. Assmann, “Form as a Mnemonic Device,” 75. 17. For Walter the Cornishman, see, e.g., Johannes de Hauvilla’s encominum in his Architrenius, trans. Winthrop Wetherbee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1.136, 5.473–75. 18. Olick, “Collective Memory,” 158. 19. Certeau, Writing of History, 65, and see above, page 71. 20. For “public monumentality,” see page 59 above.

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Index

Abelard, Historia calamitatum, 19 accountability, 82, 85, 159n54 Alan de Lille, 16 Alan of Tewkesbury, 24, 25, 41 Alexander III (pope), 77, 103, 109, 122n12, 132n62, 138n126, 146n95 archive, archives, 11, 44, 52–53, 59–60, 73, 83, 104, 114; contrasted to “canon,” 52 Arnold of Guînes, 57–58 Arnulf of Lisieux, 23 assemblies, public 56, 60–68, 73, 93, 150n39, 151n55 “assembly literacy.” See literacy Assmann, Aleida, 6–7, 52–53 Assmann, Jan, 44–45, 48, 52, 60, 116 Avranches, Compromise of, 66–69, 151. See also Roger of Howden Baldwin, Archbishop of Canterbury, 22, 46, 81, 143–44n64, 156n10 Bale, John, 2, 51 Barking Abbey, 96, 112 Barthes, Roland, 13 ­Battle Abbey, 57, 138n131 ­Battle Abbey Chronicle, 34, 53–55, 55, 96, 166n50 Bede, 5 Bisson, Thomas, 75–76, 80 Bodleian Library, MS Douce 287. See William FitzStephen, Vita Sancti Thomae Book of St. Gilbert, 24–25, 27 Bosham, Herbert of. See Herbert of Bosham bureaucracy, 73, 78, 82 Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 76, 153n71 capitula Judaeorum, 84, 90 Carruthers, Mary, 47, 50 cartularies, 23–24

cartulary-­chronicles, 23–24 Celestine III, pope, 22 Certeau, Michel de, 8; “circle of writing,” 71, 116 chansons de geste, 65, 95, 104, 164n90 Charlemagne, 57, 70, 95, 164n30, 169n91 charters, 62; history-­writers’ use of, 16–19, 117; Joanna Plantagenet’s dowry, 87–88; and narrative, 24, 54, 67, 72; public recitation of, 58. See also inspeximus charters chivalry, 65. See also literate chivalry chronological order, 24–29, 34, 51, 133–34n84 Cicero, 14 “civil servant” historians, 74 Clanchy, Michael, 4, 6, 7, 11, 104 Claudian (late-­antique poet), 16 compilation, 35, 36, 70, 123 Constitutions of Clarendon, 86, 105, 107. See also Herbert of Bosham Council of Clarendon (1164), 61, 82 court, royal 66, 73, 75, 132n73 cultural memory, 6, 18, 44–45, 48, 52–56, 60, 87, 116 Diceto, Ralph de. See Ralph de Diceto didactic discourse, 17, 20–21, 25–26, 51, 130n35 documentary dossiers, 30 documentary rec­ord, 27, 30, 137n120 documents, 1–9; 12–17, 20, 52, 58, 89, 90, 104, 114–17; designation as scripta, 18. See also scripta documentum (Latin substantive), 16–20, 25, 32, 59 Eadmer, 5 Edward I, 11–12, 44 emplotment, 27–30, 43, 135n98, 138n128 Epistolae Cantuarienses, 25, 51, 146n96 Eusebius of Caesarea, 25, 51, 134n85

194 I n d ex exchequer, the, 84, 85, 89, 92, 96, 159n53 eyewitness testimony, 13, 89–90, 96, 128n14 Falaise, Treaty of (1174), 11, 12, 44 Jordan Fantosme’s Estoire (or Chronicle): 2, 64, 65; biography of author, 95, 96; eloquence, see public speaking; and the epic, 95, 98, 104, 108; its literate audience, 98, 103, 110; as a literate per­for­mance, 111; oralizing tropes, 65, 95, 106; reproduction of letter “en romanz,” 94, 97, 99, 101, 102, 104, 105; self-­conscious writtenness, 107; and Thomas of Kent’s Alexander, 171; its title, 122n15; vernacularity of, 104, 107 festivals, festes, 56, 60, 67 fiction, 3, 12, 13, 15, 26, 27 fictionality, 15, 28, 128n13 finding aids, manuscript, 48, 50 forgery, 32, 33, 34, 123 Frederick Barbarossa, 22 French: 7, 8, 86, 91–97, 105; documentary uses of, 103; as an epistolary language, 98, 101, 103–6, 111; as a language of history-­ writing, 93, 105–7; as a language of memory, 110; as a language of written memory, 103–4, 111; as the sociolect of the ruling elite, 7, 111 Geffrei Gaimar, 94, 95, 105, 113 Geoffrey of Monmouth, 70 Gerald of Wales, 2, 25, 91; Invectiones, 24, 133n81; Itinerarium Kambriae, 70; Laudabiliter (papal bull), 33, 34, 44 Gervase of Canterbury, 2, 17, 18, 19, 26, 28, 29, 36, 51–54, 59, 72, 81, 141, 142, 146n92; Gesta regum, 17; and historiographical genres, 134–35n84; reproduction of Christ Church, Canterbury’s munimenta, 46–48; visual theory of memory, 46, 47, 48, 52 Gilbert Foliot, 23 Gilbert of Sempringham, 24, 25, 27 government, 6, 7, 61, 69, 71, 74–76, 80, 83–85, 89, 90, 114–16 grammar, 9, 127n61 Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence, Vie de Saint Thomas, 2, 5, 94, 96, 97, 106, 107, 109, 110, 112; documents in, 105; and epic, 95, 108, 164; literate audience, 110, 111; vernacular written sources, 105; vernacularity, 94, 95, 105, 107 Guînes, 57

Herbert of Bosham, Historia of Thomas Becket, 25, 48, 89; reproduction of Constitutions of Clarendon, 41–45 Henry II, 2, 16, 22, 33, 42, 48, 51, 52, 54, 55, 57, 61, 63–69, 75, 77–83, 87, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 111 Henry VI, emperor, 40–41, 43, 45, 55, 66, 69, 152n63 Henry of Blois, 95, 96, 164, 165 Henry of Huntingdon, 36, 93, 113 Henry the Young King, 2, 61–64, 72, 94, 98–111, 168n78 hommes d’ écriture, 70, 71, 75, 76, 83, 95, 99, 110, 111, 116 Howden (manor of, East Riding of Yorkshire), 80 Howden, Roger of. See Roger of Howden Hubert Walter, 22, 23, 69, 70, 86, 145n86, 153nn70–71, 154n81, 154–55n90, 157n36 Hugh de Nonant, 20, 21, 24, 30, 92 Hugh du Puiset, 40, 41, 66, 70, 79, 80, 81, 83, 91, 96, 116, 138n126, 164–65n38 Hugh of Dunkeld, episcopal candidate, 30, 32 Hugh of St. Victor, 9, 47; Chronicon, 50; influence on Ralph de Diceto, 48, 50, 52 inserere (Latin verb), 29 inspeximus charters, 53–55, 57, 85 ira regis, 78 Isidore of Seville, 9, 89 Jerusalem, capture of, 22 John “The Scot,” Bishop of St. Andrews, 30–34 John Lackland (Count John of Anjou and Mortain, f­ uture King John), 86, 91, 121n8, 168n80 John of Salisbury, 19, 95, 133n77, 156–57n20; Life of Thomas Becket, 24 Kempshall, Matthew, 14 Lambert of Ardres, 57–60, 66, 72 Latin, 7, 8, 72, 86, 91, 92, 93–97, 107; as a historiographical language, 104–6, 109–11; as a language of rec­ord, 104, 107 Leland, John, 36 letters, 64, 77–79, 86, 9; as autonomous units of historical narrative, 21, 26, 28; history-­ writers’ use of, 5, 12–32, 34, 35, 40–47, 51, 63–72, 98, 99, 117. See also Gervase of

I n d ex Canterbury; Jordan Fantosme’s Estoire; Ralph de Diceto; Roger of Howden; Thomas Becket letter collections, 5, 23–27, 30, 35, 51 libelli de lite, 30 literacy, 4–6, 76, 76, 78; “assembly literacy,” 63, 65, 73; “quasi-­literacy,” 152n58 literacy events, 76, 78, 83, 84, 86–87, 89, 90, 91, 97, 103, 108, 115, 116; acts of reading, 63, 81, 86, 91, 101; writing acts, 81–82, 86, 103, 108, 110, 117 literate administrators, 69, 75 literate chivalry, 108 literate lords, literate lordship, 6, 30, 76, 79, 80, 83, 89–92, 94, 96, 97, 103, 110, 111, 112 “literate mentality,” 4, 71 literate networks, 57, 65, 68, 74, 117 literate per­for­mance, 56, 57, 60, 62, 65, 68, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87, 90, 97, 101, 109, 111 literate power, 57, 74, 81, 90, 117 literate sociability, 69, 74 Löfstedt, Leena, 105 London, British Library, Additional MS 40007, 153n72 London, British Library, Cotton MS Claudius E. 3, 154n79 London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 8, 153–54nn71–79 lordship, 6, 75, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83, 115 Louis VII, king of France, 16, 62, 77, 100, 101, 103, 109, 169n83 Mary Becket, 96, 112 Matthew Paris, 5 memory: and language, 94; and literate per­for­mance, 56, 57, 66; and quotation, 7, 46; and reconciliation, 65; medieval theory of, 47, 53; public remembrance, 60; visual nature of, 47, 48. See also cultural memory messengers, 77, 78, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 109, 169nn90–91 Michelet, Jules, 9 multilingualism, 91, 92, 117 narrative, 12–15, 19–48, 51, 66, 67, 70–74, 104, 105 narrator, in romances, 106 nationalism, 115 New Philology, 36

195

newsletters, 19, 20, 68, 72 Norman Conquest, 113 ordo naturalis. See chronological order Osney Abbey, 111 Otinel (chanson de geste), 104, 169n91 Ovid, 16, 117 Peter of Blois, 23, 24 Philip Augustus, 17, 22, 23, 40, 132n64, 142nn44–45, 152n65 Philip IV (Philip the Fair), 127 Philip, Count of Flanders, 17, 168n80 Plantagenet, Geoffrey, 30, 91, 141–42n43 po­liti­cal community, 64 public speaking, 108, 109 “publica monumenta,” 59, 117 Quintilian, 14 quotation, 37, 38; as “reframing,” 38–44, 50, 51, 53; separability of quoted discourse, 40 Ralph de Diceto: Abbreviationes chronicorum, 2, 35, 48; as administrator, 4, 83, 156; Becket’s request for pallium, 109; codification of charters at St. Paul’s, 5; his dedication of histories to literate friends, 69–70, 153–54nn71–79; didacticism of, 17, 51–52; “fast historiography,” 72; friendship with Walter de Coutances, 69, 152nn64– 66; Henry the Young King’s rebellion, 63, 72; historiographical compilations, 72; historiographical rewriting, 46–51; influence of Hugh de Saint-­Victor, 9, 12, 144n78, 145nn79–80; and letter-­collectors, 23–27; Life of St. Anselm, 17; literate social networks of, 29–30, 75, 95; Manuel Comnenus’s letter to Henry II, 68–69; metahistorical awareness, 46; scripta, introductions to, 21; scripta, use of, 18, 21–23, 29, 30, 68; Richard I’s coronation, 75; and the visibility of writing, 83; his visual mnemonics, 46–54, 153; and William de Longchamp, 69–70; Ymagines historiarum, 2, 12, 18, 19, 23, 63, 70, 72, 128, 153n76, 154–55n90, 156n10 Ralph of Coggeshall, 2 Ranulf de Glanville, 110 Recitation of documents. See literate per­for­mances reconciliation, 63–65, 67

196 I n d ex Rector, Geoff, 96, 98, 99, 103, 110–11 Reuter, Timothy, 7, 61, 63, 66, 67, 114, 115 rewriting, historiographical, 35–38, 44, 46, 48, 51, 85, 105, 139n5 rhe­toric, 13, 14, 25, 28, 35, 46; classical rhe­toric, 13, 14; documents as, 12; extrinsic testimony, 14, 34; forensic (judicial) rhe­toric, 13, 21, 34, 132n60; rhetorical narratio, 21 Richard I, 22, 23, 29, 30, 40, 55, 66, 69, 70, 75, 79, 81, 83, 84, 91, 142nn44–45, 160n62 Richard de Lucy, 96, 98 Richard FitzNigel, Dialogus de Scaccario, 85, 123n19 Richard of Devizes, 79–81, 141n43 Richard of Ilchester, 95, 98, 105, 166–67n60 Ricoeur, Paul, 9, 13, 29, 31 Rigney, Ann, 87 Rigord de Saint-­Denis, 14, 117, 159, 60 Roger de Pont l’Évêque (archbishop of York), 116, 138, 154 Roger of Howden, 1, 9, 26, 27, 29, 45, 46, 51, 61, 62, 66, 80; as administrator, 4, 5, 6, 76; capitula Judaeorum, 84; capture of Adam of St. Edmunds, 86; carucage of 1198, 84; Chronica, 2, 30, 36, 40, 72, 84, 87; as a compiler, 36; use of Compromise of Avranches; 66–69, 151; as a “court” historian, 132; documentary vocabulary, 15, 16, 18; “fast historiography,” 72; General Eyre of 1194, 84; Gesta regis Henrici secundi (Gesta), 2, 30, 31, 36, 61, 72, 87, 122; Henry the Young King’s Seal, 103; use of Hugh de Nonant’s letter, 20, 21; Hugh du Puiset, relationship with, 70; Latinity, 154; and letter collecting, 23, 26–27, 30; literate social networks, 29, 95; Manuel Comnenus’s letter to Henry II, 68; and the marriage of Henry II’s ­daughter, 87, 160; use of Ovid, 16; and Richard I’s capture, 40–43, 45, 55, 66; his royal ser­vice, 75, 124, 137, 155, 156, 158; use of scripta, 26, 30, 41, 121; types of scripta reproduced, 18, 19; use of Simeon of Durham, 36; and St. Andrews, 30–36, 44; reproduction of William of Apulia’s seal, 88–89 Roland, 57 Roland cycle, 29, 105, 111

scripta: alternative term for “documents,” 18; autentica scripta, 18, 59; circulation of, 66, 70, 71, 74; dossiers of, 30; historiographical emplotment of, 29, 37; as historical events, 76; historiographical compilation of, 35–36; history-­writers’ introductions to, 21; and language, 94, 95, 97, 104–6; as po­liti­cal tools, 90; and public per­for­mance, 57–58, 61, 79, 80; and quotation, 40–48; 51–55; sociability of, 62, 68, 85, 115–17; about St. Andrews, 30–34; as truth-­claims, 26, 34; types reproduced in Angevin history-­writing, 19; visibility of, 60, 89. See also charters; letters self-­censorship, 141–42n41 Simeon of Durham, 36 Southern, Richard, 113 St. Andrews. See Roger of Howden state, the, 3, 6, 76, 78, 113–16 Stephen of Rouen, 105, 166n59 Sternberg, Meir, 38 stories, storytelling, 21, 22, 23, 25, 26, 33, 43, 37, 43, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 61, 65, 68, 107, 116, 117 Strayer, J. R., 78

Saladin, 22 scholastic method of reading, 51

Wace, 56–61, 66, 72, 91–95, 105, 106, 111, 117 Walter de Châtillon, 59, 146n95

Thomas Becket, 95, 109, 111; conflict with Henry II, 42, 48, 51–52, 61, 66–67, 77–78, 82; cult of, 39, 43, 44; Expectans expectaui (letter), 105, 107, 169n92; his letters as proof of sanctity, 43; his letters in history-­ writing, 24, 25, 27, 30, 38, 39, 45, 54, 105, 106, 107, 136n111, 140n33; and “literacy events,” 78, 82; Lives of, 2, 77. See also Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence; Herbert of Bosham; William FitzStephen Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, 77 Thucydides, 9 Torigni, Robert de, 67 truth, historiographical, 13, 14, 15, 23, 25, 34 Urban III, pope, 22 Verneuil, 29 vicarious recollection, 87–90, 117 Victor IV, antipope, 77 Virgil, 58 visibility of writing, 83–86, 89

I n d ex Walter de Coutances: Cornish heritage of, 116; letter about captivity of Richard I, 40, 41, 43, 45, 54, 66; as a “literate lord,” 91–92, 96, 112; Ralph de Diecto’s use of his letters, 22, 30, 51, 153n73; relationship with emperor Henry VI, 152n63. See also Ralph de Diceto Walter de l’Écluse (Flemmish nobleman), 58, 59 Weber, Max, 78, 80 White, Hayden, 12, 26, 28, 31, 37; definition of chronicles, 27; “plot” and “story,” 28, 31

197

William de Longchamp, 20, 21, 30, 69, 70, 79, 80, 83, 91, 92, 110, 112, 116, 153, 154, 155, 157, 162n8 William d’Olepen, 102, 103 William FitzStephen, 5; Vita Sancti Thomae Cantuariensis, 38, 43–44, 45, 48, 77 William of Malmesbury, 5, 72 William of Newburgh, 2, 72 William of Tyre, 125n38 William the Lion (king of Scotland), 30, 32, 98, 101, 102, 108, 110 Winchester, 95

A c k n o w l­e d g m e n t s

I carried out the initial research for this book at the Centre for Medieval Stud­ ies at the University of York, and I wrote it at the Centre for Medieval Lit­er­a­ ture (CML) at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense. My first thanks must go to the members, past and pre­sent, of ­those two institutions, who have done so much to form (and to change) my intellectual perspectives. In par­ ticu­lar, I wish to thank Pete Biller, Matthew Kempshall, Lars Boje Mortensen, Elizabeth Tyler, and Jocelyn Wogan-­Browne for having taught me so much over the years. I left ­behind many dear colleagues in York when I moved to Denmark, and I thank especially K. P. Clarke, Nicola McDonald, Matt Townend, Elizabeth Tyler, and George Younge for their warmth, generosity, and friendship. Other col­ leagues at York for whose support I am very grateful include David Attwell, Helen Barrett, Sheila Cosgrove, and Cathy Moore (in the Department of En­glish and Related Lit­er­a­ture); Gillian Galloway (in the Centre for Medieval Studies); and Mark Ormrod, Sarah Rees-­Jones, and Sethina Watson (in the Department of History). I also learned a huge amount from the undergraduate and postgraduate students I taught at York, and especially t­ hose who took my courses on high-­ medieval lit­er­a­ture. I am grateful for such productive discussions in t­ hose classes. I wrote this book over the course of two extended stays at CML in Odense, and I am especially thankful to Kristin Bourassa, Christian Høgel, and Lars Boje Mortensen for having forged such a convivial and productive working environ­ ment ­there, along with Chiara D’Agostini, Réka Forrai, Thomas Heebøll-­Holm, Steffen Hope, Dale Kedwards, Aglae Pizzone, Rosa M. Rodríguez Porto, Sacra­ mento Roselló-­Martinez, Irene Salvo García, and Julian Yolles. The in­ter­est­ing and entertaining lunchtime conversations have helped keep me sane. Through­ out the last few years I have also benefited im­mensely from the interest that mem­ bers of CML’s Interfaces Network have shown ­toward this proj­ect. Special thanks are due to Marek Thue Kretschmer, Thomas O’Donnell, Jeff Rider, Jan Rüdiger, and Wim Verbaal for their support and helpful suggestions. I am also

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Ac k n ow l­ed g m en ts

grateful to Stephen Church for his help and encouragement in the l­ater stages of writing. I thank Jerry Singerman and Ruth Mazo Karras at Penn for their support at vari­ous stages of this proj­ect and, above all, for their patience. The Press’s anon­ ymous reader, together with Andrew Galloway and Monika Otter, provided generous feedback that helped to shape this book, and I hope that the finished product is much improved as a result (although any shortcomings are of course my own). The research for this book was generously funded by the Carlsberg Foun­ dation and supported by the Danish National Research Fund, which funds the CML itself (proj­ect number DNRF102ID). I am also grateful to another public institution in Denmark, the municipal library in Middelfart, whose staff have worked so hard to shape such a productive space in which to think and to write and to be. I thank Boydell and Brewer Ltd. for permission to pre­sent, in Chapter 3 of this book, a revised version of my article “Literate Sociability and Historical Writing in ­Later Twelfth-­Century E ­ ngland,” which originally appeared in Anglo-­Norman Studies 34 (2011). Part of Chapter 1 reproduces some material from my article “Epistolary Documents in High-­Medieval Historical Writing,” which originally appeared in Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval Eu­ro­pean Lit­er­a­ tures 4 (2017): 9–38. This material is licensed u­ nder a Creative Commons Attribution-­ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Fi­nally, I wish to thank my f­ amily—­Cecilia, Toby, and Edward Bainton—­ for their unstinting support and love, and Elisabeth, Leo, and Samuel for the love, for the fun, and for every­thing ­else.