The papers gathered in this volume are striking evidence that the religious culture of medieval Europe is a central field of current historical research. That a group of professional historians can be gathered to illustrate this in so satisfying a manner reflects the efficacy of Miri Rubin’s magic wand – but is also a sign of the times. It is not so much that the interests represented in these papers are wholly new, but it is novel that they represent in their diversity a unified field of enquiry.
What part does an octogenarian scholar play in this adventure? I had supposed that he was, and ought to be, a mere spectator, enjoying a feast celebrating the end of a long career. I vividly recall Sir Frank Adcock, retired Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge, commenting on his successor’s inaugural lecture: he had been over the same evidence some years before and come to a different conclusion, and ‘I have reached the age when one does not have to change one’s mind’. As a young man, I was deeply shocked and still am – though I can make more allowance now for the self-irony. But there is much to be said for the view that over seventy, still more over eighty, scholars should be restrained from interfering, or anyway keep quiet. Shakespeare’s Jaques reckoned seven ages to the life of man; Alexander Pope, more succinctly, reduced them to two. The millions who, like bees, gather in throngs in The Temple of Fame (ll. 290–1) comprise a variety of types of men, ‘and boasting youth and narrative old age’. The natural tendency of old age is to be resisted.
Yet perhaps we have a role, though a very delicate one. Fashions change; scholarly standards remain, and of these the elderly can be guardians. But the first duty of an elderly don is to listen to his younger colleagues, to help them to realize their own vocations – not to do his bidding. From this I exempt Giles Constable, who is only by a small margin younger than me, but as the doyen of American medievalists – and with contacts in many European academies – he represents a width of scholarly experience with which I could not compete.
Paul Binski’s work has a breadth of a different kind. It is not, in the fashionable cliché, interdisciplinary: he simply tramples on the supposed boundary between history and art history – and with a delightful, and very moving, flattery lays the blame on me. What I find particularly attractive about this piece is the way great scholarship from the past – Robert Willis, Edmund Bishop – is reconciled with modern fashions prudently and sceptically interpreted. He cites the importance of the clerical elite surrounding the archbishops of Canterbury at the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries who encouraged their masters in the attempt to form a secular rival to their monastic cathedral. He might have added that the clerks of the bishop of Ely, faced with a similar lack of status and income in Ely itself – and left without occupation by the Interdict their bishop had pronounced on behalf of Pope Innocent III – took to founding a new university in Cambridge in 1209 or so to fulfil their aspirations and occupy their time.1
I still boldly call Dame Janet Nelson a younger colleague, for all that she has been president of the Royal Historical Society and vice-president of the British Academy. With great subtlety and delicacy she sketches the role of some leading figures of the Carolingian age who changed their manner of life when they were, in Bertie Wooster’s phrase, ‘well stricken in years, fifty if a day’, and shows how many aspects of politics and society were touched by the pious retreat into Benedictine care homes. Of special interest to me is St. William, ex-count of Toulouse, who settled in later life amid what Orderic Vitalis called ‘the countless rocky crags of the valley of Gellone’, in a place now adorned with the beautiful Romanesque church of St.-Guilhem-le-Desert.2 As with his master Charlemagne, he flourished after his death in a different setting, in the chansons de geste – and it was his final, ironical destiny to be the hero of one of the greatest of medieval epics, the Willehalm of Wolfram von Eschenbach. There is perhaps in this chapter a message of hope for the elderly: when a man can no longer ‘mount a horse in manly fashion, wield his weapons vigorously …’ he may live in comparative comfort in a monastery he has built for his old age, and earn a reputation for sanctity – or in our own world, an elderly scholar may sit back and rejoice in the prowess of his colleagues.
Virginia Davis, head of the department of history at Queen Mary, University of London in which the colloquium was held, gave us a foretaste of her biography of William of Wykeham – as I was brought up to call him when I enjoyed his hospitality. The episode of his late vocation to orders is a notable instance of lessons to be drawn from ordination lists in episcopal registers – and it is fascinating to see the supreme arranger of the fourteenth century arranging his own life.
The sources for the early crusades have been familiar territory since my first serious encounter with them as general editor of Nelson’s Medieval Texts, steering Rosalind Hill’s Gesta Francorum through the press; and I supposed that I had little more to learn about them. I was quite mistaken: William Purkis has shown beyond cavil how much is still to be learnt from the exceptionally rich mine of early crusading literature – and he ties his findings, most convincingly, to contemporary literature on pilgrims and pilgrimage.
That great classic Edmund Bishop’s Liturgica Historica (1918) is among my treasured possessions, often re-read; but my knowledge of medieval liturgy is skin-deep, of music more superficial still – which has been a serious failing. In both Susan Boynton is expert, and she gives us a fascinating insight into their potential, guided by devils and angels, and drawing in Radulfus Glaber, Hildegard and Peter the Venerable – and including, on the day of the colloquium, a recording of the voice of the Devil.
The boundaries of history and literature have long been one of my hunting grounds; but where I am an amateur, John Arnold is a professional, and he opens many windows into the world of lay spirituality. It is interesting to compare his account of the village mass as a triumphal community act with the popular religious movements of an earlier age, which had between about 950 and 1200 filled the English countryside with tiny, intimate churches – and the towns with even more, London to the tune of well over 100 (ninety-nine within the walls), Winchester with over fifty, and so forth, in which small communities could meet their parson and share his Eucharist. I am also intrigued to compare his early thirteenth-century penitentials with the classic literary presentation of confession from the same era – albeit to a lay hermit – when Parzival confesses to his uncle Trevrizent in Book 9 of Wolfram’s Parzival.
Many years ago Gillian Keir and I published a book on the history of London in the mid middle ages, and I collaborated with Caroline Barron in work for the London volume of the British Atlas of Historic Towns. I have often written and lectured on urban church dedications and it is a pleasure to be reminded of those of London. By drawing in guild chapels and the like she has greatly enlarged our knowledge of late medieval dedications; and with St. Zita (of whom I had never heard) Caroline Barron has done more, in adding delightfully a dimension to our understanding of how obscure cults developed and prospered in the late middle ages.
Giles Constable, in his masterly overview of the whole field of medieval church history – which it was a privilege to hear and is a delight to re-read – rightly observed how unfashionable it was among many professional historians in our early days. I say many, because my own personal experience was rather different. I embarked on historical research in my teens in apprenticeship to my father, Zachary Brooke, whose own career had begun in the world of Pope Gregory VII, and in later years was engaged with Dom Adrian Morey in editing the letters of Gilbert Foliot and in laying the foundations for the prosopography of the twelfth-century English church. Under my father’s inspiration I gave up collecting engine numbers and took to collecting medieval archdeacons and abbots. The archdeacons, to my great delight, were taken up by Diana Greenway, Joyce Horn and others in the new Le Neve of the Institute of Historical Research. The abbots led to my first meeting with David Knowles – later to be one of the most powerful influences on my studies – which issued many years later in our first volume, with Vera London, of Heads of Religious Houses, a series now completed in two more volumes, partly based on Vera’s work, by David Smith. The interests represented by these projects have stayed with me all my life, and it has been a particular satisfaction to see the standards and aims of the best scholarship of the early and mid twentieth century continued and advanced. The guidance of David Knowles led me, as a student, to study St. Francis and so to meet my wife, Rosalind, and to labour, not just for seven years, like Jacob, but for sixty, as her assistant. Giles Constable started his career, as I did, editing a twelfth-century letter collection: he gave us too modest a reminder of his work, which is fundamental for the understanding of the monastic world and the friendship networks on which so much has been built since then. All the studies in this book illustrate the basic importance of the proper use and understanding of historical sources – texts, craftsmanship, architecture, music, drama and sermons – and the ways in which they can be woven together. They also illustrate the value of collaborative research, which has been particularly evident to me in my recent work in support of the editors of English Episcopal Acta of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, in which under the direction of David Smith and Philippa Hoskin we have been guided in palaeography by Theresa Webber, in sigillography by Sandy Heslop, in detecting forgery – a common occupation of the period – by Martin Brett and Julia Barrow, and so forth. The elderly can help to ensure that the best standards and insights of former times are preserved; younger scholars can find new expertise, new interests and fashions and insights to build on them.
To build on them: textual study, to which most of my life has been dedicated, as editor, general editor or assistant, is the crucial foundation for the interpretation and understanding of numerous aspects of medieval culture; and even so mundane an activity as precise chronology has unexpected lessons to teach us. Giles Constable referred to the re-editing and re-assessment of the early Cistercian constitutions. Some recent work in this field has ignored the vital observation, made long ago by Christopher Holdsworth, that the early constitutional documents are not necessarily a reliable guide to the practice of the early Cistercians.3 My own work on Heads revealed to me that the Cistercians were the only medieval religious order whose members could tell us the exact day on which each house was founded. Doubtless in practice a foundation took months and years to complete; but some crucial event, commonly (one supposes) the entry of the monks to the monastic choir, was carefully remembered, and recorded in the lists of the abbeys of the order which survive from the late twelfth century and later. Evidently they were intended as a guide to seniority in an order whose members met annually in general chapter – were a guide to order of seating, a vital matter in the eyes of twelfth-century religious. But it is manifest that the memory of these exact dates went back to a very early period in the history of the order – a clear indication, I would think, that the general chapter (in some form) was a primitive feature of it.4 If so, it is an interesting case in which a careful study of chronology throws a gleam of light on the practices of medieval religious not revealed by their constitutional documents. Medieval culture is a palace with many entries: the more we use the fuller will be our understanding of the treasures within.
Thus far an old man’s reflection on the riches which Miri Rubin and her accomplices have gathered for me – and for a wider audience: I am exceedingly grateful. The colloquium from which this book emerged began in the Institute of Historical Research under the baton of David Bates, and finished in Queen Mary, University of London under the guidance of Miri Rubin and Virginia Davis – to them I owe special and heartfelt thanks.
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1 See C. N. L. Brooke, ‘What happened in 1209?’, in The University of Cambridge: an 800th Anniversary Portrait, ed. P. Pagnamenta (2008), pp. 33–5.
2 Orderic Vitalis, Ecclesiastical History, ed. and trans. M. Chibnall (6 vols., Oxford, 1969–80), iii. 218–19. The church is portrayed in a photo by the late Wim Swaan (plate 1 of C. N. L. Brooke, Rise and Fall of the Medieval Monastery (Folio Soc., 2006; 3rd edn. of The Monastic World of 1974), p. xviii).
3 On the interpretation of the early Cistercian statutes, Holdsworth’s chapter in Cistercian Art and Architecture in the British Isles, ed. C. Norton and D. Park (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 40–55 is still fundamental. For the texts see note in Brooke, Rise and Fall, p. 281, n. 12, and for their interpretation, cf. Brooke, Rise and Fall, p. 254.
4 This is contrary to the indications of the earliest copies of the constitutional documents of the order. See the discussion in Brooke, Rise and Fall, pp. 254–5 and 282, nn. 19–21.