Society must have considerably advanced ere it could have produced an historical record; and who could have furnished even the semblance but the most instructed class, in the enjoyment of uninterrupted leisure, among every people? History therefore remained long a consecrated thing in the hands of the priesthood, from the polytheistical era of the Roman Pontiffs who registered their annals, to the days that the history of Christian Europe became chronicled by the monastic orders.[1] Had it not been for the monks, exclaimed our learned Marsham, we should not have had a history of England.
The monks provided those chronicles which have served both for the ecclesiastical and civil histories of every European people. In every abbey the most able of its inmates, or the abbot himself, was appointed to record every considerable transaction in the kingdom, and sometimes extended their views to foreign parts. All these were set down in a volume reserved for this purpose; and on the decease of every sovereign these memorials were laid before the general chapter, to draw out a sort of chronological history, occasionally with a random comment, as the humour of the scribe prompted, or the opinions of the whole monastery sanctioned.
Besides these meagre annals the monasteries had other books more curious than their record of public affairs. These were their Leiger-books, of which some have escaped among the few reliques of the universal dissolution of the monasteries. In these registers or diaries they entered all matters relating to their own monastery and its dependencies. As time never pressed on the monkish secretary, his notabilia runs on very miscellaneously. Here were descents of families, and tenures of estates; authorities of charters and of cartularies; curious customs of counties, cities, and great towns. Strange accidents were not uncommon then; and sometimes, between a miracle or a natural phenomenon, a fugitive anecdote stole in. The affairs of a monastery exhibited a moving picture of domestic life. These religious houses, whose gate opened to the wayfarer, and who were the distributors of useful commodities to the neighbouring poor—for in their larger establishments they included workmen of every class—did not, however, maintain their munificence untainted by mundane passions. Forged charters had often sealed their possessions, and supposititious grants of mortuary donations silently transferred the wealth of families. These lords of the soil, though easy landlords, still cast an “evil eye” on the lands of their neighbour. Even rival monasteries have fought in meadows for the ownership; the stratagems of war and the battle-array of two troops of cudgelling monks might have furnished some cantos to an epic, less comic perhaps than that of “The Rape of the Bucket.”
In the literary simplicity of the twelfth to the fourteenth century, while every great monastery had its historian, every chronicle derived its title from its locality; thus, among others, were the Glastonbury, the Peterborough, and the Abingdon Chronicles: and when Leland, so late as the reign of Henry the Eighth, in his search into monastic libraries, discovered one at St. Neot’s, he was at a loss to describe it otherwise than as “The Chronicle of St. Neot’s.” The famous Doomsday Book was originally known as “Liber de Winton,” or “The Winchester Book,” from its first place of custody. The same circumstance occurred among our neighbours, where Les grandes Chroniques de Saint Denys were so called from having been collected or compiled by the monks of that abbey. An abstract notion of history, or any critical discrimination of one chronicle from another, was not as yet familiar even to our scholars; and in the dearth of literature the classical models of antiquity were yet imperfectly contemplated.
It is not less curious to observe that, at a time when the literary celebrity of the monachal scribe could hardly pass the boundaries of the monastery, and the monk himself was restricted from travelling, bound by indissoluble chains, yet this lone man, as if eager to enjoy a literary reputation, however spurious, was not scrupulous in practising certain dishonest devices. Before the discovery of printing, the concealment of a manuscript for the purpose of appropriation was an artifice which, if we may decide by some rumours, more frequently occurred than has been detected. Plagiarism is the common sin of the monkish chronicler, to which he was often driven by repeating a mouldy tale a hundred times told; but his furtive pen extended to the capital crime of felony. I shall venture to give a pair of literary anecdotes of monkish writers.
Matthew of Paris, one of these chroniclers, is somewhat esteemed, and Matthew of Westminster is censured, for having copied in his “Flores Historiarum” the other Matthew; but we need not draw any invidious comparison between the two Matthews, since Matthew the first had himself transcribed the work of Roger the Prior of Wendover. The famous “Polychronicon,” which long served as a text-book for the encyclopædic knowledge of the fourteenth century, has two names attached to it, and one, however false, which can never be separated from the work, interwoven in its texture. This famed volume is ascribed to Ranulph, or Ralph Higden of St. Werberg’s Monastery, now the Cathedral of Chester. Ralph, that he might secure the tenure of this awful edifice of universal history for a thousand years, most subdolously contrived that the initial letter of every chapter, when put together, signified that Ralph, a monk of Chester, had compiled the work. Centuries did not contradict the assumption; but time, that blabber of more fatal secrets than those of authors, discovered in the same monastery that another brother Roger had laboured for the world their universal history in his “Polycratica Temporum.” On examination, the truth flashed! For lo! the peccant pen of Ralph had silently transmigrated the “Polycratica” into the “Polychronicon,” and had only laid a trap for posterity by his treacherous acrostics![2]
These universal chroniclers usually opened, ab initio, with the Creation, dispersed at Babel reach home, and paused at the Norman Conquest. This was their usual first division; it was a long journey, but a beaten path. Whatever they found written was history to them, for they were without means of correcting their aptitude for credence. Their anachronisms often ludicrously give the lie to their legendary statements.
Most of these monastic writers composed in a debased Latinity of their own, bald and barbarous, but which had grown up with the age; their diction bears a rude sort of simplicity. Yet though they were not artists, there were occasions when they were inevitably graphic—when they detail like a witness in court. These writers have been lauded by the gratitude of antiquaries, and valued by philosophical historians. A living historian has observed of them, that “nothing can be more contemptible as compositions; nothing can be more satisfactory as authorities.” But it is necessary that we should be reminded of the partial knowledge and the partial passions of these sources of our earlier modern history. Lift the cowl from the historiographers in their cells recording those busy events in which they never were busied, characterising those eminent persons from whom they were far removed; William of Malmesbury, not one of the least estimable of these writers, confesses that he drew his knowledge from public rumours, or what the relaters of news brought to them.[3] In some respects their history sinks to the level of one of our newspapers, and is as liable to be tinged with party feelings. The whole monastery had as limited notions of public affairs as they had of the kingdom itself, of which they knew but little out of their own county.
No monastic writer, as an historian, has descended to posterity for the eminence of his genius, for the same stamp of mind gave currency to their works. Woe to the sovereign who would have clipt their wings! then “tongues talked and pens wrote” monkish. There was a proverb among them, that “The giver is blessed, but he who taketh away is accursed.” None but themselves could appeal to Heaven, and for their crowned slaves they were not penurious of their beatitude. They knew to crouch as well as to thunder. They usually clung to the reigning party; and a new party or a change of dynasty was sure to change their chronicling pen. Hall, the chronicler of Henry the Eighth, at the first moment when it was allowable to speak distinctly concerning these monkish writers, observed, “These monastical persons, learned and unliterate, better fed than taught, took on them to write and register in the book of fame the arts, and doings, and politic governance of kings and princes.” It seems not to have occurred to the chronicler of Henry the Eighth that, had not those monks “taken on them to write and register,” we should have had no “Book of Fame.” It is a duty we owe to truth to penetrate into the mysteries of monkery, but the monks will always retain their right to receive their large claims on our admiration of their labours.
There was also another class of early chroniclers throughout Europe; men who filled the office of a sort of royal historiographer, who accompanied the king and the army in their progress, to note down the occurrences they deemed most honourable or important to the nation. But incidents written down by a monk in his cell, or by a diarist pacing the round with majesty, would be equally warped, by the views of the monastery in the one case, or by a flattering subservience to the higher power in the other.