XIII.—Sources and Writers of English History
The attempt here made to combine a bibliography of English history with some account of the progress of English historical writing is beset with some difficulty. The evidential value of what a writer says is quite distinct from the literary art with which he says it; the real sources of history are not the works of historians, but records and documents written with no desire to further any literary purpose. Domesday Book is unique as a source of medieval history, but it does not count in the development of English historical writing. That is quite a secondary consideration; for there was much English history before any Englishman could write; and even after he could write, his compositions constitute a minor part of the evidence.
Our earliest information about the land and its people is derived from geological, ethnological and archaeological studies, from the remains in British barrows and caves, Roman roads, walls and villas, coins, place-names and inscriptions. The writings of Caesar and Tacitus, and a few scattered notices in other Roman authors, supplement this evidence. But the scientific accuracy of Tacitus’ Germania is not beyond dispute, and that light fails centuries before the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain. The history of that conquest itself is mainly inferential; there is the flebilis narratio of Gildas, vague and rhetorical, moral rather than historical in motive, and written more than a century after the conquest had begun, and the narrative of the Welsh Nennius, who wrote two and a half centuries after Gildas, and makes no critical distinction between the deeds of dragons and those of Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons themselves could not write until Christian missionaries had reintroduced the art at the end of the 6th century, and history was not by any means the first purpose to which they applied it. It was first used to compile written statements of customs and dooms which were their nearest approach to law, and these codes and charters are the earliest written materials for Anglo-Saxon history. The remarkable outburst of literary culture in Northumbria during the 7th and 8th centuries produced a real historian in Bede; Bede, however, knows little or nothing of English history between 450 and 596, and he is valuable only for the 7th and early part of the 8th centuries. Almost contemporary is the Vita Wilfridi by Eddius, but more valuable are the letters we possess of Boniface and Alcuin. The famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably started under the influence of Alfred the Great towards the end of the 9th century. Its chronology is often one, two or three years wrong even when it seems to be a contemporary authority, and the value of its evidence on the conquest and the first two centuries after it is very uncertain. But from Ecgbert’s reign onwards it supplies a good deal of apparently trustworthy information. For Alfred himself we have also Asser’s biography and the Annals of St Neots, a very imaginative compilation, while most of the stories which have made Alfred’s name a household word are fabulous. Even the Chronicle becomes meagre a few years after Alfred’s death, and its value depends largely upon the ballads which it incorporates; nor is it materially supplemented by the lives of St Dunstan, for hagiologists have never treated historical accuracy as a matter of moment; and our knowledge of the last century of Anglo-Saxon history is derived mainly from Anglo-Norman writers who wrote after the Norman Conquest. Some collateral light on the Danish conquest of England is thrown by the Heimskringla and other materials collected in Vigfusson and Powell’s Corpus Poeticum Boreale, and for the reign of Canute and his sons there is the contemporary Encomium Emmae, which is a dishonest panegyric on the widow of Æthelred and Canute. For Edward the Confessor there is an almost equally biased biography.
For the Norman Conquest itself strictly contemporary evidence is extremely scanty, and historians have exhausted their own and their readers’ patience in disputing the precise significance of some phrases about the battle of Hastings used by Wace, a Norman poet who wrote nearly a century after the battle. One version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle goes down to 1079 and another to 1154, but their notices of current events are brief and meagre. The Bayeux tapestry affords, however, valuable contemporary evidence, and there are some facts related by eye-witnesses in the works of William of Poitiers and William of Jumièges. A generation of copious chroniclers was, moreover, springing up, and among them were Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham and William of Malmesbury. Their ambition was almost invariably to write the history of the world, and they generally begin with the Creation. They only become original and contemporary authorities towards the end of their appointed tasks, and the bulk of their work is borrowed from their predecessors. Frequently they embody materials which would otherwise have perished, but their transcription is marred by an amount of conscious or unconscious falsification which seriously impairs their value. All the above-mentioned writers lived in the half-century immediately following the Norman Conquest, but their critical acumen and their literary art vary considerably. William of Malmesbury, Eadmer and Ordericus Vitalis attain a higher historical standard than had yet been reached in England by any one, with the possible exception of Bede. They are not mere annalists; they practise an art and cultivate a style; history has become to them a form of literature. They have also their philosophy and interpretation of history. It is mainly a theological conception, blind to economic influences, and attaching excessive importance to the effects of the individual action of emperors and popes, kings and cardinals. Even their characters are painted in different colours according to their action on quite irrelevant questions, as, for instance, their benefactions to the monastery, to which the historian happens to belong, or to rival houses; and the character once determined by such considerations, history is made to point the moral of their fortunes, or their fate. It is regarded as the record of moral judgments and the proof of orthodox doctrine, and it is long before ecclesiastical historians expel the sermon from their text.
The line of monastic historians stretches out to the close of the middle ages. Most of the great monasteries had their official annalists, who produced such works as the Annals of Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Burton, Waverley, Dunstable, Bermondsey, Oseney, Winchester (see Annales Monastici, 5 vols., ed. Luard, and other volumes in the Rolls series). Some of them are mainly local chronicles; others are almost national histories. In particular, St Albans developed a remarkable school of historians extending over nearly three centuries to the death of Whethamstede in 1465 (see Chronica Monasterii S. Albani, Rolls series, 7 vols., ed. Riley). Only a few of the 235 volumes published under the direction of the master of the Rolls, and called the Rolls series, can here be mentioned. Other medieval writers have been edited for the earlier English Historical Society; some of them have been re-edited without being superseded in the Rolls series. For the reign of Stephen we have the anonymous Gesta Stephani in addition to the writers already mentioned, several of whom continue into Stephen’s reign. For Henry II. we have William of Newburgh, who reaches the highest point attained by historical composition in the 12th century; the so-called Benedict of Peterborough’s Gesta Henrici, which Stubbs tentatively and without sufficient authority ascribed to Richard Fitznigel; Robert of Torigni; and seven volumes of “Materials for the History of Thomas Becket,” which contain some of the best and worst samples of hagiological history. For Richard and John the chronicles of Roger of Hoveden, Ralph de Diceto (Diss), Gervase of Canterbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, and a later continuation of Hoveden, known under the name of Walter of Coventry, are the best narrative authorities.
With the accession of Henry III., Roger of Wendover, the first of the St Albans school whose writings are extant, becomes our chief authority. He was re-edited and continued after 1236 by Matthew Paris, the greatest of medieval historians. His work, which goes down to 1259, is picturesque, vivid, and marked by considerable breadth of view and independence of judgment. The story is carried on by a series of jejune compilations known as the Flores historiarum (ed. Luard). Better authorities for Edward I. are Rishanger, Trokelowe and Blaneforde, Wykes, Walter of Hemingburgh, Nicholas Trevet, Oxnead and Bartholomew Cotton, and others contained in Stubbs’s Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II. In the 14th century there is a significant deterioration in the monastic chroniclers, and their place is taken by the works of secular clergy like Adam Murimuth, Geoffrey the Baker, Robert of Avesbury, Henry Knighton and the anonymous author of the Eulogium historiarum. Monastic history is represented by Higden’s voluminous Polychronicon, which succeeds the Flores historiarum. A brief revival of the St Albans school towards the end of the century is seen in the Chronicon Angliae and the works of T. Walsingham, which continue into the reign of Henry V. For Richard II. we have also Malverne and the Monk of Evesham; for the early Lancastrians, Capgrave, Elmham, Otterbourne, Adam of Usk; and for Henry VI., Amundesham, Whethamstede, William of Worcester and John Hardyng, as well as a number of anonymous briefer chronicles, edited, though not in the Rolls series, by J. Gairdner, C.L. Kingsford, N.H. Nicolas and J.S. Davies.
These are the principal English historical writers for the middle ages; but as the connexion between England and the continent grew closer, and international relations developed, an increasing amount of light is thrown on English history by foreign writers. Of these authorities one of the earliest is the Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (ed. Michel); briefer are the Chronique de l’Anonyme de Béthune and the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. A large number of French and Flemish chronicles illustrate the history of the Hundred Years’ War, by far the most important being Froissart (best edition by Luce, though Lettenhove’s is bigger). Next come Jehan le Bel, Waurin’s Recueil, Monstrelet, Chastellain, Juvenal des Ursins, and more limited works such as Créton’s Chronique de la traison et mort de Richard II.
Chronicles, however, grow less important as sources of history as time goes on. Their value is always dependent upon the absence of the more satisfactory materials known as records, and these records gradually become more copious and complete. They develop with the government, of whose activity and policy they are the real test and evidence. Perhaps the most important thing in history is the evolution of government, the development of consciousness and a will on the part of the state. This will is expressed in records; and, as the state progresses from infancy through the stage of tutelage under the church to its modern “omnicompetence,” so its will is expressed in an ever widening and differentiating series of records. The first need of a government is finance; the earliest organized machinery for exerting its will is the exchequer; and the earliest great record in English history is Domesday Book. It is followed by a series of exchequer records, called the Pipe Rolls, which begin in the reign of Henry I., and dating from that of Henry II. is the Dialogus de scaccario, which explains in none too lucid language the intricate working of the exchequer system. It was Henry II. who gave the greatest impetus to the development of the machinery for expressing the will of the state. He began with finance and went on to justice, recognizing that justitia magnum emolumentum, the administration of justice was a great source of revenue. So national courts of law are added to the national exchequer, and by the end of the 12th century legal records become an even more important source of history than financial documents. The judicial system is described by Glanvill at the end of the 12th, and by Bracton and Fleta in the 13th century (for the exchequer see the Testa de Nevill and the Red Book of the Exchequer). During that period the Curia Regis threw off three offshoots—the courts of exchequer, king’s bench and common pleas; and records of their judicial proceedings survive in the Plea Rolls and Year Books, some of which have been edited for the Rolls series, the Selden and other societies. Numerous other classes of legal and administrative records gradually develop, the Patent and Close Rolls (first calendared by the Record Commission, and subsequently treated more adequately under the direction of the deputy keeper of the Records), Charters (which were first grants to individuals, then to collective groups, monasteries or boroughs, then to classes, and finally expanded—as in Magna Carta—into grants to the whole nation), Escheats, Feet of Fines, Inquisitiones post mortem, Inquisitiones ad quod damnum, Placita de Quo Warranto, and others for which the reader is referred to S.R. Scargill-Bird’s Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents preserved in the Record Office (3rd ed., 1908). Every branch of administration comes to be represented in records almost as soon as it is developed. The evolution of the army which won Creçy and Poitiers is accompanied by the accumulation of a mass of indentures and other military documents, the value of which has been illustrated in Dr Morris’s Welsh Wars of Edward I. and George Wrottesley’s Creçy and Calais from the Public Records. The growth of naval organization is reflected in the Black Book of the Admiralty; the growth of taxation in the Liber custumarum and Subsidy Rolls; the rise of parliament in the Parliamentary Writs (ed. Palgrave), in the Rotuli parliamentorum, in the Official Return of Members of Parliament, and in the Statutes of the Realm; that of Convocation in David Wilkins’s Concilia. The register of the privy council does not begin until later in the 14th century, and then is broken off between the middle of the 15th and 1539.
Local as well as central government begets records as it grows. From the Extenta manerii of the 12th century we get to the Manorial Rolls of the 13th, when also we have Hundred Rolls, records of forest courts, of courts leet and of coroners’ courts, and a variety of municipal documents, for which the reader is referred to Dr C. Gross’s Bibliography of British Municipal History and to Mrs J.R. Green’s more popular Town Life in the Fifteenth Century. The municipal records of London, its hustings court and city companies, are too multifarious to describe; some classes of these documents have been exemplified in the works of Dr R.R. Sharpe. Ecclesiastical records are represented by the episcopal registers (for the most part still unpublished), monastic cartularies, and other documents rendered comparatively scarce by the spoliation of the monasteries, and scattered proceedings of ecclesiastical courts. (See also the article [Record].)
Documents, other than records strictly so called, begin to grow with the habit of correspondence and the necessity of communication. A few letters survive from the time of the Norman kings, but the earliest collection of English royal letters is the Letters of Henry III. (Rolls series). Contemporary are the Letters of Grosseteste, and a little later come the Letters of Archbishop Peckham and Raine’s Letters from Northern Registers (all in the Rolls series). Private correspondence appeared earlier in the voluminous epistles of Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath (ed. Giles). This is a somewhat intermittent source of history until we come to the 15th century, when the well-known Paston Letters (ed. Gairdner) begin a stream which never fails thereafter and soon becomes a torrent. The most important series of official correspondence is the Papal Letters, calendared from 1198 to 1404 in 4 vols. (ed. Bliss, Johnson and Twemlow). Subsidiary sources are the Political Songs (ed. Wright), treatises like those of John of Salisbury, Gerald of Wales, and, later, Wycliffe’s works, Netter’s Fasciculi Zizaniorum, Gascoigne’s Loci e libro veritatum, Pecock’s Repressor, and the literary writings of Chaucer, Langland, Gower, Richard Rolle and others.