From Memory to Written Record

England 1066 - 1307

Michael T. Clanchy

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118295984
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

This seminal work of scholarship, which traces the development of literacy in medieval England, is now fully updated in a third edition.

• This book serves as an introduction to medieval books and documents for graduate students throughout the world
• Features a completely re-written first chapter, 'Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest', and a new postscript by the author reflecting on the reception to the original publication and discussing recent scholarship on medieval literacy
• Includes a revised guide to further reading and a revision of the plates which illustrate medieval manuscripts in detail

Part I

The Making of Records

1

Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest

Medieval people lived in the shadow of the former Roman Empire and so Latin remained the principal language of record, long after it had ceased to be anyone's mother tongue, across the whole medieval millennium from 500 to 1500. To be ‘literate’ (litteratus) meant to know Latin. This was the language of the medieval Bible and hence of the church and clergy in the west, just as it continued to be the principal language of law and government. England was exceptional in developing a written Anglo-Saxon vernacular which functioned alongside Latin or independently of it. The earliest texts extant in Old English are the laws of King Aethelberht of Kent, which were written down between 597 and his death in 616. Along with laws went title-deeds which might combine Latin and English: the clauses of conveyance were in Latin, while the details of the boundaries of the property were written in English so that they could be read aloud in court directly from the document and followed on the ground by witnesses. By the reign of Alfred the Great (871–99) ‘the use of the written word for utilitarian or practical purposes was widespread; and a particularly strong case can be made in respect of vernacular documents’.1 By this time, through the use of English alongside Latin, ‘the written word had been accommodated within secular society’.2 Writing was no longer therefore a clerical monopoly. A hundred and fifty years later, at the time of the Norman Conquest, written Old English was being used routinely as the language of government.

By killing King Harold at the battle of Hastings in 1066 William of Normandy had assured himself of the throne, but it took years to establish Norman rule across the whole of England. At first it was not even inevitable that William's government would be characterized as Norman rule, since he claimed England as the lawful heir of King Edward the Confessor (1042–66); the battle of Hastings had simply removed a usurper. William was crowned as rex Anglorum, ‘king of the English’, and he might have governed in accordance with English ways if he had learned to speak English and insisted that his followers did likewise. Perhaps he had hoped to do this; the chronicler Orderic Vitalis says that at first William struggled to learn some English because he wanted to understand court proceedings without an interpreter and to pronounce fair judgements.3 But he was thwarted by repeated rebellions and the need to reward his followers with lands in England. To do this, the Normans enforced the rule that all those who had supported Harold in any way were rebels and their property was therefore forfeit. As early as 1067 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was complaining that William ‘gave away every man's land’.4 By the twelfth century it was recognized that numerous English tenants had been expropriated and had never gained redress.5 This explains how, by the time of William the Conqueror's death in 1087, virtually all the great landowners in England were Normans (or associates of Normans including Bretons and Flemings), although Anglo-Saxons remained numerous in the lesser ranks of royal officers.6 Without them, rents could not be collected and local government could not function.

‘Perhaps the greatest change imposed by the Norman Conquest was linguistic. We still know little of how long or deeply Normans and English were divided by their vernaculars’ or how Latin, which was so well established, may have offered at some social levels a lifeline of communication between the French-speaking invaders and the native English.7 From about 1070 King William ceased routinely to issue instructions (‘writs’ in legal parlance) in Old English, as his predecessors had done, though there are one or two examples of royal writs in English as late as the 1080s.8 Particularly after the defeat of the great English rebellions in 1069–70, legal documents in Old English, which had symbolized accessibility and trustworthiness to Anglo-Saxons, may now have seemed to represent challenges to Norman authority. The whole process in the county and hundred courts (villages were grouped into ‘hundreds’), which was conducted in English, must have seemed alien to the Normans, though they had to come to terms with it. Shortly after his appointment in 1071, the first Norman abbot of Abingdon recruited ‘pleaders from among the English whom no wise person dared oppose’.9 The new landlords, or rather their local agents (for Norman magnates like William de Warenne or Roger of Montgomery did not go around the country in person searching for their land), needed to clarify and secure their titles to property on the ground. Otherwise they might fall into disputes with each other, as well as with hostile villagers, since a number of Norman claimants might be granted land in the same county or even in the same hundred.

Generally, the Normans established their titles to property in England by the authority of royal writs (in Latin) and by using local juries to reinforce their claims. The jurors’ testimony overrode all other forms of proof, whether in Latin or English and whether written or oral, because it was publicly and collectively sworn on the Gospels or on the relics of the saints. This would later be called a ‘verdict’ (veredictum or verum dictum in Latin, meaning a ‘true saying’). Because it involved a public appeal to divine authority, a jury verdict was comparable with the ‘judgements of God’ elicited by the ordeals of water (involving the threat of drowning) and hot iron in criminal trials. Such sanctions frightened people into revealing what was believed to be the truth. Local men of good standing would have had no wish either to perjure themselves or to alienate their neighbours by making contentious verdicts, but they were compelled to participate in juries by their Norman masters. Thus, for example, when property at Ely came into contention in the aftermath of Hereward the Wake's rebellion in 1071, William the Conqueror issued a writ instructing Archbishop Lanfranc to find out ‘who had the lands of St Etheldreda (of Ely) written down and sworn (scribi et jurari), how were they sworn, who swore them and who heard the jury (or ‘the oath’ – juratio)’.10 Thus numerous people were to be cross-examined: the local officials and their scribes who had conducted the jury, the jurors themselves, and the witnesses in court who had heard the jurors’ verdict.

A jury might use documents (such as earlier charters in Latin or English) to inform themselves about aspects of a case; but the process was essentially oral, since the jurors – in theory at least – spoke the truth from their hearts in their own tongue. The jury process therefore privileged oral testimony, whether in English or French or any other vernacular. But, once the verdict had been declared orally, its testimony could be rendered into a written record in Latin, provided there was a clerk with the linguistic competence to do this. In 1086 this procedure for establishing titles to property was applied across most of England in the survey which led to the making of Domesday Book. It was called ‘Domesdei’ (‘Doomsday’) in English because it seemed comparable in its terrifying strictness with the Last Judgement at the end of time.11 (The image of Christ in Majesty, seated as a judge holding a book, would have been familiar to anyone entering a medieval church, either sculpted over the entrance or as a mural painting within.) Domesday Book comprised the verdicts of thousands of juries, detailing people and property in every village back to the reign of Edward the Confessor. ‘In all, over 60,000 witnesses were probably heard in the course of the Domesday inquiry.’12 Oaths had been taken ‘by almost all the inhabitants of the land’ (according to one contemporary description).13

Confronted in local courts by legal documents in English and talk which they could not control nor even understand, the Normans had at last stumbled on a solution. Domesday Book, which was written in Latin throughout, created for all of them a majestic source of law and entitlement in England. Placed in the royal treasury at the centre of government, it was known there as ‘the judicial book’ (liber judiciarius).14 The adjective judiciarius evoked the authority of ...