ART. I.—Matthæi Parisiensis, Monachi Sancti Albani, Chronica Majora. Edited by Henry Richards Luard, D.D., Fellow of Trinity College, Registrary of the University, and Vicar of Great St. Mary's, Cambridge. Published by the Authority of the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, under the direction of the Master of the Rolls. 7 vols. 8vo. London, Vol. I. 1872—Vol. VII. 1883.
Some of our readers are not likely yet to have forgotten the remarkable essay which the late Professor Brewer contributed to our pages in 1871, and which has since been reprinted in the volume of 'English Studies,' published shortly after the author's death in 1879. English History owes a larger debt to few men of our time than it owes to Mr. Brewer. As a teacher whose pupils were always eager to listen to all that fell from his lips, and whose enthusiasm never failed to awake a kindred spark in the minds of those who looked to him for light in dark places and guidance along tortuous paths of research, Mr. Brewer has had few equals, and perhaps has left no successor who can compare with him. As a writer he was always brilliant, lucid, and vigorous, and his unrivalled 'Introductions' to the Calendars of Letters and Papers, concerned with the reign of Henry VIII., will long continue to be read by all students of our History, as necessary and indispensable interpreters of the vast storehouses of original documents which he did so much to rescue from the oblivion or obscurity to which they had previously been consigned. But it was as an organizer of research that Mr. Brewer earned his greatest fame and achieved his greatest success, and it was to him more than to any one man, to his immense persistence in urging upon the powers that be a more generous freedom of access to our Records, and to his prodigious powers of work in arranging and tabulating the enormous masses of documents of all kinds which constitute the Apparatus of English History, that this country stands indebted, and will remain indebted as long as our literature lasts.
In the Essay on 'New Sources of English History' the learned author has given us a startling account of the deplorable condition into which some of the most precious of our national manuscripts had been allowed to fall—of the utterly chaotic state of our depositories—of the hopelessness, the despair which must needs have come upon one student after another who might be fortunate enough to be turned loose into the various prison-houses of our muniments—and of the efforts made, and happily at last made with splendid success, to cleanse the Augean stable, and to let the world know something of the wealth it contained. With characteristic modesty Mr. Brewer said nothing of his own part in all that laborious and sagacious organization which resulted in our obtaining the magnificent Calendars, which have opened out to us all 'that new world which is the old' that had become almost forgotten or unknown. He was not the man to assert himself, he knew that posterity would give him his due, but with a simple desire to stimulate research, and to show how much remained to be done, and how much to be discovered and made known, he drew the attention of his readers chiefly and primarily to the value of the Calendars, and to the important results which those Calendars had already produced, and were destined to produce hereafter. He had quite enough to say upon this point, and if his life had been spared, it is probable that he would eventually have given us a more comprehensive account of the series of volumes which, though now issuing from the press pari passu with the Calendars, were originally undertaken a little later. Such an Essay by such a master would indeed have been an important aid to the student, but at the time of Mr. Brewer's lamented death the day had hardly come for such a résumé; and even now, though so much has been achieved, so much and so well, the hour has hardly arrived nor the man for taking a comprehensive survey, and giving to the public an intelligent and intelligible account of that other Library of Chronicles, and biographies, and letters, and cartularies, and those other memorials of the Middle Ages in England, which it is to be feared are hardly as well known as they ought to be, nor as widely studied as they deserve.
Meanwhile it is high time that attention should be drawn to that noble series of volumes now issuing from the press under the editorship of scholars whose reputation is assured, and whose work continues to enhance their reputation—high time that we should begin to do something like justice to the labourers, who have deserved so well at the hands of such Englishmen as have any sentiment of loyalty to the great thoughts, the great doings, and the noble lives of their forefathers. The philosopher, who 'holds the mirror up to nature,' has not of late, as a rule, missed his reward. The historian, who in his dogged, patient, toilsome fashion holds the mirror up to the life of bygone ages, has received among us scant recognition, and generally is rewarded with but barren honour. What has been done and still is doing will be best understood by briefly reviewing the progress of that movement, which has brought about the great revival of English Historical study, and under the influence of which the opinions and convictions of educated men have passed through a very decided change, one destined to produce still greater and more unlooked for changes of sentiment and belief before the present century shall have closed.
It is just fifty years since 'the Father of Record Reform,' as he has been justly called, received his patent creating him Master of the Rolls. Although as far back as the year 1800 a Commission was issued for the methodizing and digesting the National Records, and for printing such calendars and indexes as should be thought advisable; and though during the next twenty-seven years many works of supreme interest and importance were printed at the public expense, the enormous extent of our National Records were known to few, and the difficulty of consulting them, (dispersed as they were through a score of different depositories) was enough to deter all but the most resolute enquirers. It was Lord Langdale who first set himself to reduce the chaos of our archives into something like order. When the old Record Commission expired in 1837, it was by Lord Langdale's influence that the Public Record Act was passed on the 14th of August, 1838, whereby the Records named therein were placed under the custody of the Master of the Rolls for the time being, and hereupon a new era began. Nevertheless it was not till July 1850 that a vote was obtained from the Treasury for the erection of a national depository, wherein our vast archives should be assembled under a single roof, and not till 1855 that the magnificent Tabularium in Fetter Lane was opened for the reception of our muniments.
Lord Langdale died in April 1851;[1] he was succeeded in the Mastership of the Rolls by Lord Romilly, then Sir John. A happier choice could not have been made. To Lord Langdale belongs the credit of carrying out the grand scheme for consolidating the various collections of documents, which, as we have said, had up to this time been widely dispersed, and the very existence of the larger mass of which was known only to a few experts. To Lord Romilly we owe it that the great original sources of English History so assembled have been rendered accessible to any student who desires to consult them; and it is to him, too, that we are indebted for the issue of that unrivalled series of 'Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland, from the Invasion of the Romans to the Reign of Henry VIII.,' which has laid the foundation for a science of history firmer and deeper and wider than before was believed to be even attainable.
Great men are at once the leaders and the product of their age. When Lord Langdale set himself to his task he was only attempting that which had been talked of since the reign of Edward II. For five centuries the unification of our National Records had been recommended and advised by lawyers, statesmen, and scholars from generation to generation, but no practical scheme had ever been suggested, and the difficulties in the way of reform were supposed to be insuperable. It was a Herculean task, and one that grew ever more arduous the longer it was postponed. During the first quarter of the present century profound dissatisfaction had begun to be felt at the condition of our historical literature. The ordinary text-books were full of fables, more than suspected to be fables, and which yet it was extremely difficult to disprove satisfactorily. Theories which had long passed current were being rudely assailed, and yet—in the face of the obstacles that hindered research—stubbornly held their ground, or were repeated with peremptory dogmatism. A deep distrust of the old methods and the old assumptions had given rise to a widespread desire to drag forth from their hiding-places any documents, however dry or recondite, which might throw some clear light upon our national life and manners, and not only upon mere events of national importance during Medieval times. A desire to know the truth was in the air. The science of history had passed out of its infancy, and the stirrings of a new craving—the passion of Research—were making themselves felt in that mysterious restlessness which indicates that the old smooth-faced docility, the old childish submission to tutelage, the old unquestioning acceptance of authority, has gone for ever, and a new life has begun. The year before Lord Langdale received his appointment as Master of the Rolls, the Surtees Society had been founded for the printing of unedited MSS. illustrative of the history of the northern counties; and in the same year that the old Record Commission expired, the English Historical Society was started, a society which numbered amongst its promoters such men as the late Mr. Kemble, Mr. H. O. Coxe, Sir T. Duffus Hardy, and Mr. Stevenson—the leaders and teachers of that school of younger men who have so ably followed in the steps of their seniors, and who, mounting on the shoulders of the giants, have gained a wider view than it was given to those others to attain. The five years that followed saw the foundation of the Camden, the Percy, and the Chetham Societies, not to mention many another that has done useful work in its way. The labours of these pioneers soon made it quite apparent that the sources of our national history—social, ecclesiastical, and political—were quite too voluminous for private enterprise to deal with, and would demand the co-operation of a body of trained scholars and the resources of the public exchequer to make them available as apparatus for the teachers of the future.
On the 26th of January, 1857, Sir John Romilly submitted to the Treasury his memorable proposal for the publication of certain materials for the History of England;[2] and on the 9th of February a Treasury Minute was put forth approving of the plan that had been drawn up as one 'well calculated for the accomplishment of this important national object in an effectual and satisfactory manner within a reasonable time.' Forthwith arrangements were made for the issue of that series of works which is now known as the 'Rolls Series,' a collection which has already extended to upwards of 200 volumes.
The lines laid down by Sir John Romilly were almost exactly those which had been followed by the English Historical Society. Every editor was to 'give an account of the MSS. employed by him, of their age and their peculiarities;' he was to add 'a brief account of the life and times of the author, and any remarks necessary to explain the chronology; but no other note or comment was to be allowed, except what might be necessary to establish the correctness of the text.' The restriction was absolutely necessary if only for this, that when the 'Rolls Series' was first commenced even the most accomplished of its editors were mere learners. The time had not yet arrived for comments. The text was wanted first in its completeness and integrity.
Looking back to this period—little more than a quarter of a century ago—it is difficult for us to realize the deplorable condition into which our historical literature had been allowed to fall. Kemble's great work, the 'Codex Diplomaticus ævi Saxonici,' the first volume of which appeared in 1839, and his 'History of the Saxons in England,' published in 1849, came upon the great body of intelligent men as the revelation of new things. It is sufficient to turn to the chapter on the Constitutional History of England before the Conquest, in Hallam's 'History of the Middle Ages,' to be assured how meagre and superficial even Hallam's knowledge was of everything before the Norman invasion. It was no fault of his; he made good use of all such materials as were then accessible to the student—that is, all such as had been printed; for that incomparably larger apparatus which since Hallam's days has been published to the world, it was for all practical purposes as if it had never existed at all. Even men of culture and learning were persuaded that all that was ever likely to be known about the religious houses had been collected in the new edition of Dugdale's 'Monasticon.' It is hardly too much to say that of the history of English monasticism Hallam knew nothing. Dr. Lingard himself had very little more to say of the great Abbeys than his predecessors, and had a very inadequate conception of the part they played in the development of our institutions; and when Dr. Maitland wrote his brilliant 'Essays on the Dark Ages,' he hardly names St. Edmundsbury or St. Alban's, and though one of his most fascinating chapters is concerned with the early days of Croyland, his only authority for the beautiful story, which he has handled so skilfully, is a romantic narrative attributed to Ingulphus, which has been demonstrated to be a somewhat clumsy though a clever forgery. Of the Mendicant Orders—of the work they did, of the influence they exercised, and of the attitude adopted towards them in the 13th century by the parochial clergy on the one hand, and by the monks on the other—even less was known, if less were possible, than of their wealthier rivals.