Books, libraries and archives

It was not only at Glastonbury that a sense of the past was strongly felt. The most impressive and ancient of all English monuments, Stonehenge, in Wiltshire, had first been noticed in writing by Henry of Huntingdon and Geoffrey of Monmouth, who had suggested that it had been magically transported by Merlin from Ireland. Not until the fourteenth century, however, did illustrations and crude ‘maps’ of the stones begin to appear. Similar drawings were still being produced in the 1440s. At Bury St Edmunds and at St Albans, attempts were made to draw up ‘Books of Benefactors’, not merely listing but attempting physically to portray the chief figures of the monastic past, even down to highly Disneyfied drawings of King Offa or Cnut. Other written reminders of the past were assiduously preserved and copied. At St Albans, Thomas of Walsingham, the most significant chronicler of the early fifteenth-century, not only wrote his history as a deliberate continuation of the earlier work of Matthew Paris, but ended his career composing an Epitome of Norman history, in which he joined up the events of his own lifetime to the duchy’s earliest chronicles, running from Rollo in 911 AD to Henry V’s conquests after 1417.

A similar interest was shown in the old English past. Although it was immensely popular in the twelfth century, only two surviving manuscripts of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the greatest of Anglo-Saxon books written in Latin, survive from the century after 1200. By contrast, no less than eighteen survive from the fourteenth century and a further eleven from the century after 1400. Bede himself was not canonized until 1935, but his grave at Durham was already, by 1400, being exhibited as a curiosity and potential shrine. Other English saints became the focus of revived attention. Requests had been made ever since the 1220s for the canonization of Osmund, first Norman bishop of Salisbury, but it was not until a further campaign of petitioning, in 1457, that the Pope officially recognized Osmund as a saint. At Winchester, the remains of the Anglo-Saxon St Swithun were translated to a major new shrine as late as 1476. Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, whose merits as a saint had never been recognized by the papacy, was rediscovered in the 1360s by John Wycliffe and his followers, who assiduously read and recopied the manuscripts of Grosseteste’s works that they found mouldering in the library of the Franciscan convent at Oxford, recognizing in Grosseteste one of the earliest and most outspoken critics of the Pope’s claim to worldly rule.

As this story suggests, the libraries of medieval England were themselves increasingly piled high with the lumber of several centuries of literary and intellectual endeavour. In the fourteenth century, in an era when all books had to be consulted as handwritten manuscripts, many of them very rare, attempts were already being made by the Franciscans of England to compile a register listing all of the principal authors and texts required for study, a finding list cross-referenced to where precisely in England the books of these authors might be read. This guide, the so-called Registrum Anglie, was itself then used by Henry of Kirkstead, prior of Bury St Edmunds, who not only catalogued the more than 1,500 manuscripts that were already to be found at Bury, but compiled biographical and bibliographical registers of his own, listing as many monastic authors as were known to him with details of where, amongst more than 180 other English locations, their works might be consulted. Endeavours such as this, involving travel and communication amongst dozens of individual libraries, not only produced the first ancestors of Google and the properly annotated searching aid, but some of the earliest scholarly investigations of the identity of authors, the precise attribution of their works, in short exactly the sort of thing that medieval historians are still engaged in writing more than 600 years later.

Nor was it only monks who took to this sort of work. William of Worcester, the well-educated son of a Bristol saddle maker, secretary to Sir John Fastolf and hence involved with the Pastons in the execution of Fastolf’s will, was an early humanist and rediscoverer of the classical past who learned Greek and translated Cicero into English. He also toured England in search of antiquities and topographical curiosities, copying out what he found into a series of notebooks that very soon became valuable historical curiosities in their own right. At much the same time, John Rous of Warwick began writing his own antiquarian histories of the earls of Warwick (lavishly illustrated from tombs and seals), a history of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (intended to disprove that the Greek mathematician Pythagoras was involved in the foundation of Cambridge), and a chronicle of the bishops of Worcester. Like William of Worcester, Rous deserves to rank as one of the first true antiquaries in English history, as interested in the development of styles of armour as he was in recording historic monuments or the population of the villages through which he passed.

As early as the reign of King John, when a man named William ‘Cucuel’ is recorded taking receipt of chancery rolls dispatched from the itinerant court, the kings of England had an archivist. The task of maintaining the royal archive nonetheless became ever more arduous and awesome as the thirteenth century progressed and the mountains of parchment began to pile up. Already by the 1320s, when they were listed by the King’s treasurer in a systematic ‘array’, the King’s records were being treated as a vast time-capsule, none of them more venerable or more famous than Domesday Book. By the 1420s, the records of the twelfth or thirteenth centuries were of little or no use in the day-to-day business of government. Some were occasionally consulted. Most were left undisturbed from one end of a century to the next. The very fact, however, that they were not destroyed but kept, catalogued and arrayed tells us something important about fifteenth-century attitudes.

England was now officially a nation with a past, with its kings as the chief guardians and symbols of that heritage. With an interest in the past, and with antiquarianism came the deliberate collection of old things, not just as religious relics but merely because they were self-evidently ‘old’. Richard Bury, bishop of Durham from 1333, author of the first surviving treatise on books as artefacts, scoured the secondhand book stalls of England in search of rarities. Autograph hunters are to be found as early as the 1390s, seeking out specimens of the handwriting of Abbot Thomas de la Mare of St Albans, ‘copious and untidy but speedy’, treasured in part because of the sanctity of the writer, in part as simple souvenirs. There was more than mere sentiment to such attitudes. Those who control the past generally possess the power to control the future. The processes of law, for example, in which the tracing of manorial descents, the verification of pedigrees and the proving or disproving of title occupied a central place, supplied a powerful incentive to historical research. It is no coincidence that one of the chief targets of the peasants of 1381 had been the burning of manorial records, and with them the proofs of hated servitude. It was by careful manipulation of the genealogical records of the royal family that such political coups as the Lancastrian seizure of power in 1399 and the Yorkist rebellion of the 1450s were brought to pass. In the fifteenth century, to adapt the words of T.S. Eliot, ‘England was now and History’.