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 encyclopaedic
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.
In this manner the early history of Europe was written; the more ancient
part was stuffed with fables; and when it might have become useful in
recording passages and persons of the writer's own times, we have a
one-sided tale, wherein, while half is suppressed, the other is
disguised by flattery or by satire. Such causes are well known to have
corrupted these first origins of modern history, a history in which the
commons and the people at large had very little concern, till the day
arrived, in the progress of society, when chronicles were written by
laymen in the vernacular idiom for their nation.