Partly because he has much more contemporary and subsequent source material available to him than had those covering earlier periods, and partly because of his own fluid prose, M. T. Clanchy has produced a work that is at once a chronology of his chosen centuries and a thematic treatise on the development of writing itself.
This very readable author has the ability to describe historic events illustrated by examples familiar to today’s world; he demonstrates a knowledge of language and feelings of empathy and understanding which I hope will be apparent from some of the quotations represented in this review.
Historians are inclined to accept the Bayeux Tapestry as more accurate a record than some of the contemporary writings.
“In the Bayeux Tapestry the invaders are not described as ‘Normans’ but as ‘Franci’, that is ‘Franks’ or ‘Frenchmen’. …… fair number of [those] who fought at Hastings were not Normans anyway, but men from Brittany, Maine, Picardy and Flanders”.
In the early years post-conquest a number of rebellions, the suppression of which led to King William’s ‘Harrying of the North’ in the winter of 1069-70 “William suppressed them with such vigour and ruthlessness that his methods were felt in retrospect to be un-English”.
“The English aristocracy was eliminated by William the Conqueror …… Similarly all bishops and abbots were foreigners by 1086 and as a consequence the English language ceased to be used as the written language of government and of religious life.” The effects of the Norman conquest on language are therefore rich in paradoxes. English declined in the short term as a literary language and yet it gained new life as the spoken language of the people and reemerged, enormously enriched, two centuries later. French, from being a despised vernacular in 1066, became in the twelfth century a literary language of high status.”
“The greatest single achievement of William the Conqueror was his making of Domesday Book in 1086, a year before he died. This survey of the land, county by county, was done with such thoroughness that the Anglo Saxon Chronicle commented with pardonable exaggeration that there was not one ox nor one cow nor one pig which was left off the record……. Whether Domesday Book had any more immediate purpose than a general though extraordinarily detailed survey of the land has been much debated.” “[This] could not have been made without the Anglo-Saxon organisation of shires and hundreds and the habit of settling property disputes at meetings of the county court in the presence of royal officers.” “Domesday Book declared the results of the Conquest like the results of a cricket match.”
After the Conqueror’s death his sons vied for the crown. When William Rufus was killed while hunting in The New Forest in 1100 this meant that “To the New Forest Henry [the first] owed his kingdom”.
The story is told in the set of Rufus Stone pictures from https://derrickjknight.com/2012/11/19/rufus-stone/
Although still using tally sticks for calculation of the king’s income and expenditure at first, the Exchequer became a new institution of government, which continued to embrace feudalism to some extent.
As part of the wider Christian community, Archbishops Lanfranc and Anselm, introduced, in their different ways Pope Gregory VII’s “Gregorian Reform” to the Anglo-Saxon Church.
“In the period 1066-1135 the number of religious of all sorts (both monks and nuns) as distinct from the secular clergy [who lived more int the world] is estimated to have increased from about 1,000 persons at the time of the Norman Conquest to 4,000 or 5,000”.
“in increasing numbers in Henry II’s reign in particular, [the Angevins] men who had been born in England, but they were not little Englanders or the vanguard of an Anglo-Saxon revival. On the contrary they were the products of a competitive and cosmopolitan education exemplifying the ideals of French chivalry like William the Marshal or the clerical superiority of the schools of Paris and Bologna like Thomas Becket. Latin and French were therefore the languages in which they excelled, and not English.”
From the death of Henry I in 1135 there were continuing struggles for the kingdom. King Stephen is considered the classic weak king. “[His] ‘weakness’ or kindness is most vividly illustrated in the biography of William the Marshall. As a child William had been handed over as hostage to Stephen by his father who repudiated the boy, saying that he had the equipment to make more sons. Stephen should have hanged the boy, but instead he took him from the place of execution to his tent. There they were found playing ‘knights’ with plantain stalks; Stephen had given William first turn in the game and he had cut off the head of the king’s ‘knight’. Stephen’s kindness had, as so often, brought him a further humiliation instead of success.”
Whether or not Henry II had ordered the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, it was certainly prompted by their arguments. “The king’s misfortunes in the next two decades were attributed by hostile critics to divine judgement on Becket’s murder.”
Concerning law and order, the book attributed to the chief justiciar, Ranulf Glanvill, describes “…material… arranged in a logical order, distinguishing between civil and criminal business, and starting with claims of right to land before proceeding to churches, status, dower and so on.” as the system of Henry.
“By going on a crusade only three months after his coronation Richard I tested the resilience of the Anglo-Norman government to its uttermost……[he] spent only six months of his ten-year reign on this side of the Channel.”
“Any person in the public eye acquires a mixed reputation.” “The disasters of [King John’s] last years shaped his obituary notices. Not even a partisan could argue that a king was successful who in 1213 had made England a vassal of the pope, in 1214 was defeated by Philip Augustus, in 1215 submitted to Magna Carta, and who died in 1216 with his treasure lost and the French occupying London.”
“Magna Carta is one of the best known documents of the English speaking world.”
“A formal peace was made with Louis of France in 1217.”
“Henry III’s flamboyant regime crashed in 1258 with a suddenness which only the wisdom of hindsight has made look inevitable.” “[He] was temporarily brought down …. by a confederation of seven magnates…. who used the provisions of the Magna Carta to lead to the Commune of England. By his death in 1272 he had been back in power for four years.”
The second half of Clanchy’s book, a few pages longer than the first, traces the development of the written word.
Throughout the 13th century objects like swords held as proof of ownership gave “like today’s wedding rings” symbolic title. The written word had some catching up to do. “The growth of resilience on writing has been a continuing process without a precise beginning or end.”
The proliferation of documents “….. meant that government became more dependent on literates”. “Even the lowest class in society, vagrants, were expected to carry certificates of good character.” “Comparable with testimonials of trustworthiness are the warrants of lawful purchase which accompanied sales of livestock.” Chief justifier Archbishop Hubert Walter was mostly responsible for the proliferation in England of “a European and continuing phenomenon.” “An educated Englishman in the thirteenth century would have become familiar with a variety of writings in his lifetime – charters to safeguard his landed property, royal writs for litigation, homilies for devotion, romances [in French] for entertainment, and so on. “The primary records most commonly met with are letters of one sort or another.” A charter is a public letter issued by a donor recording a title to a property.”
“The most remarkable early accounts are the household rolls made in 1265 for Eleanor, Countess of Leicester, the sister of Henry III and wife of Simon de Montfort. These record her expenditure, mainly for the supply of food and drink….”
Rolls are written records in a long format which are stored in tubular form. Books contained cumulative material such as yearly chronicles and collections of title deeds. “once the idea of copying documents into books for greater security and convenience became familiar, the practice took many forms.” “Liturgical manuscripts are the prime form in which the habit of using and possessing books reached the laity from the thirteenth century onwards.”
“Through Books of Hours, ladies introduced their families and children to prayer – and hence to literacy – in their own homes.” “These books were all made for women”. “Their dimensions are the same as small modern paperbacks.” “Upon them the future of literacy in Western Culture largely rested.”
The growth of literacy “was not a simple matter of providing more clerks and better schooling, as it penetrated the mind and demanded changes in the way people articulated their thoughts, both individually and collectively in society. The shift from memory to written record, then, was a cultural one, taking place [over a considerable length of time] in the imaginations and assumptions of numerous individuals.” In a de luxe book like the Lambeth Apocalypse the pictures are undeniably ornate…. In their sensationalism these ‘Domesday Books’ are the equivalent of the tabloid press of the twentieth century.”
“… reading and writing were not automatically coupled at the end of the twelfth century, nor was minimal ability to perform these actions described as literacy…. Although the average medieval reader may have been taught to form the letters of the alphabet with a stylus on a writing tablet, he would not necessarily have felt confident in penning a letter or a charter on parchment.” By that token I am certainly not computer literate while many youngsters of today definitely are, even if they are not confident in holding a pen to form letters.
Since the almost half century since M.T. Clanchy produced the first edition of this work with pen, typewriter, or even computer, we are now in the next era of communicating thought and language.
