History and the Written Word - University of Pennsylvania Press

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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

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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

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Afterword 113 List of Abbreviations

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Notes 121 Bibliography 175 Index 000 Acknowl­edgments

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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 ­ ere, most basically, performed—­documents in the High ­Middle Ages. I ask h 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 Anglorum of the Augustinian canon William of Newburgh (d. ca. 1198).13 Documents, meanwhile, are a crucial fea­ ture of the history written in the wake of Thomas Becket’s murder, which was perhaps the defining historical moment of the age and simulated one of the most intense periods of historiographical activity of the entire ­Middle Ages. Most of Becket’s Lives quote the letters through which the conflict, at least in part, had played out.14 Fi­nally, documents also can be found, translated into French and transposed into verse, in the period’s vernacular history-­writing. Documents fea­ ture in the Estoire of the civil war between Henry II and his son, Henry the Young King (1173–74), written by the schoolman Jordan Fantosme (a text given the misleading title of Jordan Fantosme’s Chronicle in its modern edition),15 and documents play a prominent role in the Vie de Saint Thomas written by Guernes de Pont-­Sainte-­Maxence,16 a literate cleric who was apparently not attached to any single institution or patron.

If the first reason for focusing on the Age of the Angevins is quantitative, the second is qualitative. If this age was a “golden age of historiography in ­England,”17 to use Gransden’s “often-­quoted” phrase,18 then successive genera­ tions of modern scholars have attributed part of its luster to its historians’ use of

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documents. H ­ ere, ­after all, was a kind of history-­writing that fi­nally looked like ­ iddle Ages. This sort of something modern, even though it was written in the M 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 ­Middle Ages.

Yet, although documents feature in almost ­every modern account of the history-­writing of the Age of the Angevins, Angevin historians’ use of documents has only ever been seriously studied from a diplomatic perspective.21 That is, ­today’s historians and diplomatists have tended to “mine” this period’s history-­ writing for its documents,22 carving out a purely documentary sphere from a 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

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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 ­were at the very fulcrum of the institutional and social changes that increasing literacy helped to bring about. The written word, that is, was as central to history-­writers’ 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, ­ ere presented.”34 Guernes I was the reader of the letters and documents that w 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 ­here 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.

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The first of ­those new perspectives concern 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 ­either more literate or more intensive in this period. But I do ar­ gue that using literate technologies (as Diceto and Howden undoubtedly did) ­ ere) did not necessarily im­ and being interested in them (as they undoubtedly w ply involvement with a bureaucratic state. ­Because lordship—­government’s less rational antagonist, which snapped at its heels throughout this period—­was just as interested as government in harnessing the power of the written word. By looking closely at who exactly wrote history for whom in this period, I argue that it was literate lords rather than the “central government” whose interests administrator-­historians and their history-­writing tended to serve.

The second new perspective I offer is informed by the relatively new field of ­ ecause if the g­ rand narrative of the rise of the state, cultural memory studies. B 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

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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 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, a­ fter all, vanishingly small, at least compared to surviving documents in Latin. Th ­ ose few French documents that do survive, as Clanchy argued, are “exceptions prov­ ing the rule that French was not yet a language of rec­ord for royal government in ­England.”54 One implication of this is that, almost by definition, French history-­writing could not function as a form of rec­ord itself, or at least it could not do so in the same way that Latin history-­writing could. For formal and lin­ guistic reasons, documents found a comfortable home in Latin history-­writing: ­there is ­little to distinguish the language and the prose form of Latin chronicles from the discourse of documents themselves, at least formally speaking. French history-­writing, by contrast, was a more difficult environment for documents in

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which to thrive in their original form. For one ­thing, the history was not writ­ ten 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 dis­ courses that called out to a listening audience; writers of French history tended to position their audience, meanwhile, as if they w ­ ere experiencing a commem­ oration of the past rather than witnessing a written monument to it. Latin docu­ ments, therefore, would have to be translated, versified, and rendered into an oralizing register if French history-­writing ­were to use it—­all ­things that risked distorting them somehow, imperiling their authenticity and undermining their status rec­ords.

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

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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 ­today 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 ­going 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.

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