From Memory to Written Record E-Book

Michael T. Clanchy

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 966

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

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

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

List of Plates

Preface to the First Edition

Preface to the Second Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

Introduction

Being Prejudiced in Favour of Literacy

Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Literacy

England's Place in Medieval Literacy

Part I: The Making of Records

Chapter 1: Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest

The Formation of a Norman Official Memory

The Anglo-Saxon Heritage of Literacy

Latin and the Language of Domesday Book

William the Conqueror's Symbolic Knife

The Earl Warenne's Rusty Sword

Chapter 2: The Proliferation of Documents

Documents at Village Level

The Chronology of Charter Making

The Output of Royal Documents

Documents and Bureaucracy

The Work of Hubert Walter

Royal Influence on Other Records

Appendix

Chapter 3: Types of Record

The Variety of Writings

Statements Issued by Individuals

Memoranda Kept by Institutions

Learned and Literary Works

Liturgical Books

Chapter 4: The Technology of Writing

The Scribe and His Materials

Wax, Parchment, and Wood

Committing Words to Writing

Layout and Format

Rolls or Books?

Chapter 5: The Preservation and Use of Documents

Monastic Documents for Posterity

Secular Documents for Daily Use

Archives and Libraries

The Royal Archives

Ways of Remembering

Ways of Indexing

Part II: The Literate Mentality

What Reading Meant

Chapter 6: Languages of Record

Walter of Bibbesworth's Treatise

The Variety of Languages

Spoken and Written Language

Chronological Development

The Writing Down of French

Royal Documents in Latin, French, and English

Chapter 7: Literate and Illiterate

Meanings of ‘Clericus’ and ‘Litteratus’

The Question of the Literacy of the Laity

Knowledge of Latin Among Non-Churchmen

The Acquisition of Clerical Education

Educated Knights

Chapter 8: Hearing and Seeing

Symbolic Objects and Documents

The Spoken Versus the Written Word

Listening to the Word

The Spoken Word in Legal Procedure

Writings as Works of Art

Word and Image

Chapter 9: Trusting Writing

Memory and Writing

Dating Documents

Signing Documents

The Symbolism of Seals and Crosses

Forging Documents

Chapter 10: Pragmatic Literacy

Postscript by the Author

List of Abbreviations

Select Further Reading

Plates

Index

For R. H. C. Davis, my friend and teacher (1918–1991)

This third edition first published 2013 © 2013 M. T. Clanchy

Edition history: Edward Arnold Ltd and Harvard University Press (1e, 1979); Blackwell Publishers Ltd (2e, 1993); Wiley-Blackwell (3e, 2013).

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clanchy, M. T. From memory to written record : England, 1066-1307 / M.T. Clanchy. – 3rd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-5791-9 (paper) 1. Great Britain–Politics and government–1066-1485–Sources. 2. Great Britain–History–1066-1687–Sources. 3. Written communication–England–History–To 1500. 4. Oral communication–England–History–To 1500. 5. Public administration–England–History–To 1500. 6. Public records–England–History–To 1500. 7. Literacy–England–History–To 1500. 8. Scriptoria–England–History–To 1500. 9. England–Languages–History. I. Title.

DA176.C54 2013 942.02–dc23 2012002699

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Roundel showing the benefactors of Crowland abbey bringing their charters to an altar. © The British Library Board. BL Harley Roll Y6.

Cover design by www.simonlevyassociates.co.uk

List of Plates

Charters

1      Charter and seal of Ilbert de Lacy

2      Early writ of Henry I

3      Bilingual writ of Henry I

4      Writ of King Stephen

5      Symbolic knife of Stephen of Bulmer

6      Charters of William Benedict and Walter Deyville

7      Agreement between Colchester abbey and the burgesses

Tallies, accounts and rolls

8      Tally sticks of the Exchequer

9      Wallingford's first roll of tradesmen

10    Wallingford's second roll of tradesmen

11    Household roll of Eleanor de Montfort

12    Peter of Poitiers dictating to a scribe

13    Genealogical history of England

Books

14    The Canterbury or Eadwine Psalter

15    Estate book of Richard Hotot

16    Pocket book of statutes

17    Illustrated book of statutes

18    Alphabetical index

19    Portrait of Eadwine ‘the prince of writers’

20    Benefactors of Crowland abbey

Preface to the First Edition

The title and subject of this book were suggested in my paper ‘Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law’, published in History (volume LV) in 1970. Since then I have benefited from discussing its themes with colleagues at the Medieval Society and the Historians’ Discussion Group of the University of Glasgow and in other talks which I have given at the universities of Aberdeen, Dublin (UCD), Edinburgh, London (Institute of Historical Research), Manchester, Sheffield, and Stirling. I am grateful to all those who organized these talks or contributed to them. I also thank the University of Glasgow for travel grants and my fellow teachers of medieval history there for cooperating in a system of sabbatical leave which has enabled me to write. At an early stage I was encouraged by two scholars who have not lived to see this book: Max Gluckman helped me with anthropology and G. D. G. Hall with the history of law. From the confidence and enthusiasm of Mr John Davey, formerly of Edward Arnold Ltd, my ideas took publishable form.

In writing the book I have benefited from the comments of Dr Peter Davies, Professor Jack Goody, Dr Michael Richter, Mrs Felicity Riddy, Dr J. A. F. Thomson, Professor Ralph V. Turner, and Mr C. P. Wormald, who have all read drafts of particular chapters. Mrs Katherine Thomson of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources has advised me about the history of certain words, notably rotulus. The completed book was read in typescript by Dr C. H. Knowles and Professor S. E. Thorne. All these scholars have helped to eliminate errors and make positive improvements; they are not responsible for any of my mistakes.

In getting together the photographs for the plates I have had particular help from Miss Deborah Beevor, Mr Roger Custance, Miss Eleanor M. Garvey, Dr Edith Henderson, and Mr Trevor Kaye. For permission to reproduce the plates I am indebted to: the Warden and Scholars of Winchester College (plate I); the British Library Board (plates II, III, IV, XI, XV); the Law School of Harvard University (plates V, VI, VII, XVI, XVIII, XIX); the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office (plate VIII); the County Archivist of Berkshire (plates IX, X); the Houghton Library of Harvard University (plates XII, XIII); the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge (plate XIV).

Finally I wish to thank Miss Mary Brodie for typing, Mrs Glenna M. Satterthwaite for reading the proofs, and Miss Fay Sharman and the publishers.

M. T. Clanchy University of Glasgow

Preface to the Second Edition

The text of the first edition has been preserved as far as possible, but the footnote references have been updated throughout. The following sections of the book are substantially new: the latter parts of the Introduction; the section on ‘Documents and Bureaucracy’ in chapter ; ‘Liturgical Books’ in chapter ; ‘Wax, Parchment, and Wood’ in chapter ; ‘Ways of Remembering’ and ‘Ways of Indexing’ in chapter ; ‘What Reading Meant’ and the introduction to part II; the section on ‘The Writing down of French’ in chapter ; ‘Word and Image’ in chapter ; ‘The Symbolism of Seals and Crosses’ in chapter . The new guide to ‘Further Reading on the History of Literacy’ indicates the amount published on this subject, particularly on the history of art and literature in medieval England, since the first edition.

I am grateful to all who have sent me amendments and suggestions, and particularly to my colleagues in London at the ‘Earlier Middle Ages’ seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, the ‘Learning, Literacy, and Education’ seminar at the Warburg Institute, and the ‘Understanding Literacy’ seminar at the Medical Research Council's Cognitive Development Unit. Drs Peter Denley and Uta Frith read sections of the Introduction; they are not responsible for my opinions. As with the first edition, I am most grateful to Mr John Davey of Blackwell Publishers for his encouragement throughout.

For permission to publish the plates, I am indebted to those acknowledged in the preface to the first edition, together with the British Library for the new plate XX.

M. T. Clanchy Department of History, University College London

Reprinting has enabled me to improve the index, update the bibliography, and make corrections.

M. T. Clanchy September 1993

Preface to the Third Edition

For this edition I have written an entirely new first chapter, though it has the same title as before: ‘Memories and Myths of the Norman Conquest’. The purpose of this change is to take account of the importance of Anglo-Saxon literacy preceding the arrival of the Normans. In forming my ideas for this chapter I am most grateful for discussions with Stephen Baxter, Andrey Kasatov, Simon Keynes, Kathryn A. Lowe, Bruce O’Brien, and Teresa Webber. At the conclusion of the book I have added a ‘Postscript by the Author’ outlining the origins of From Memory to Written Record and its reception over the past thirty years. There is also a new select further reading section, listing fifty or so titles, structured around the headings of each chapter in the book. In encouraging international discussion of From Memory to Written Record I am much indebted to Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska of Utrecht University, particularly for the sessions which they have organized since 1998 at successive meetings of the University of Leeds International Medieval Congress.

I have changed the illustrations in two of the plates: plate 5 now shows a symbolic knife from Durham cathedral and plate 19 shows the portrait of Eadwine ‘the prince of writers’. For advice on the writs of King Henry I, illustrated in plates 2 and 3, I am grateful to Richard Sharpe. In the rest of the book I have made only minor changes, where phrases in the text or references in the notes were out of date. In dealing with the images for the plates and with the production of the book as a whole, I am most grateful to Isobel Bainton of Wiley-Blackwell publishers.

For renewing copyright permissions for the plates I acknowledge the Warden and Scholars of Winchester College (plate 1), the British Library Board (plates 2, 3, 4, 11, 15, and 20), the Chapter of Durham Cathedral (plate 5), Historical and Special Collections, Harvard Law School Library (plates 6, 7, 16, 17, and 18), the National Archives (plate 8), the County Archivist of Berkshire (plates 9 and 10), the Houghton Library, Harvard University (plates 12 and 13), and the Master and Fellows of Trinity College Cambridge (plates 14 and 19). I am indebted in particular to Karen S. Beck of the Harvard Law School Library.

M. T. Clanchy Institute of Historical Research, University of London

Introduction

This book is about the uses of literacy in the Middle Ages. It concentrates on England in the two-and-a-half centuries from 1066 to 1307 (from the Norman Conquest to the death of Edward I) because these years constitute a distinctive period in the development of literate ways of thinking and of doing business. This formative stage in the history of literacy has received less attention from scholars than the invention of printing in the later Middle Ages, although it is no less important. Printing succeeded because a literate public already existed; that public originated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Writing was not new in 1066, of course, either in England or elsewhere. In the royal monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England, as in other parts of Europe, an original literate culture had been created which was distinguished especially by its illuminated manuscripts of parchment. From these royal and monastic roots, new uses and forms of writing proliferated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and took shapes which would last for generations.

The particular argument of this book is that this growth in the uses of literacy is indicated by, and was perhaps a consequence of, the production and retention of records on an unprecedented scale (unprecedented, that is, in England). The difference between Anglo-Saxon and thirteenth-century England in this respect is marked. From Anglo-Saxon England about 2,000 charters and writs (including originals and copies and an indefinite number of forgeries) survive.1 From thirteenth-century England, on the other hand, tens of thousands of such charters and writs survive; this estimate is no more precise because the documents have never been systematically counted. How many documents once existed (as distinct from how many now survive), either in the Anglo-Saxon period or in the thirteenth century, is a matter for conjecture and inevitably therefore for different opinions. An estimate further on in this book suggests that eight million charters may have been written in the thirteenth century alone for smallholders and serfs.

The increase was not merely in numbers of parchments, but in the spread of literate modes both territorially and socially. By the reign of Edward I royal or seignorial writs reached every bailiff and village in England, making writing familiar throughout the countryside. Similarly the use of charters as titles to property made its way down the social hierarchy – from the royal court and monasteries (in the eleventh century and earlier) to secular clerks and knights (in the twelfth century), reaching the laity in general by the reign of Edward I. This is not to say that everyone could read and write by 1307, but that by that time literate modes were familiar even to serfs, who used charters for conveying property to each other and whose rights and obligations were beginning to be regularly recorded in manorial rolls. Those who used writing participated in literacy, even if they had not mastered the skills of a clerk. One measure of this change is the possession of a seal or signum, which entitled a person to sign his name. In Edward the Confessor's reign only the king is known to have possessed one for authenticating documents, whereas in Edward I's reign even serfs were required by statute to have them.

The book is arranged in two parts. The first part describes the making of records of all sorts, because their gradual accumulation in archives and their distribution throughout the country prepared and fertilized the ground in which literacy could germinate. Through the spread of record-making the practice of using writing for ordinary business, as distinct from using it exceptionally for solemn religious or royal purposes, became first familiar and then established as a habit. Among the laity, or more specifically among knights and country gentry in the first instance, confidence in written record was neither immediate nor automatic. Trust in writing and understanding of what it could – and could not – achieve developed from growing familiarity with documents.

The second part of the book therefore describes the growth of a literate mentality. It traces the halting acceptance of literate modes by the rulers, both clerical and lay. The use of writing for business purposes was almost as unfamiliar to many monks in the twelfth century and earlier (except in the great houses under royal patronage) as it was to knights and laity. Elementary rules of business, such as the need to write dates on letters, were only learned with difficulty because they raised novel questions about the writer's place in the temporal order. Forgery was consequently rife. Despite the increasing use of documents (both authentic and forged) traditional oral procedures, such as the preference for reading aloud rather than scanning a text silently with the eye, persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. There were also special problems to be overcome in England, such as the variety and different status of the languages in use after the Norman Conquest.

Outside the king's court and great monastic houses, property rights and all other knowledge of the past had traditionally and customarily been held in the living memory. When historical information was needed, local communities resorted not to books and charters but to the oral wisdom of their elders and remembrancers. Even where books and charters existed, they were rarely consulted at first, apparently because habits of doing so took time to develop. Unwritten customary law – and lore – had been the norm in the eleventh century and earlier in England, as in all communities where literacy is restricted or unknown. Nevertheless two centuries later, by Edward I's reign, the king's attorneys were arguing in many of the quo warranto prosecutions against the magnates that the only sufficient warrant for a privilege was a written one, and that in the form of a specific statement in a charter. Memory, whether individual or collective, if unsupported by clear written evidence, was ruled out of court. As written titles had only come into common use relatively recently and as few charters were sufficiently exact, the quo warranto prosecutions threatened to disfranchise nearly all the magnates. Although the quo warranto cases were rapidly suspended in the 1290s and the king's government had to concede that tenure ‘from time out of mind’ was a legitimate claim, the principle had been established for the future that property rights depended generally on writings and not on the oral recollections of old wise men. Hence the title of this book, From Memory to Written Record, refers to this shift in ways of thinking and acting, which made its mark between the Norman Conquest and the reign of Edward I.

The title is a variation of H. J. Chaytor's classic, From Script to Print (first published in 1945), which described the differences between the manuscript culture of the Middle Ages and the print culture of the Renaissance. Acknowledging its debt to Chaytor, From Memory to Written Record takes a step behind the conditions he described to the time when even important information was usually held in the memory alone and not in script of any sort. The shift from habitually memorizing things to writing them down and keeping records was necessarily prior to the shift from script to print, and was as profound a change in its effects on the individual intellect and on society. Literacy is also approached here from a different point of view from Chaytor. Whereas he was chiefly concerned with vernacular and literary works, this book (while not excluding literature) is primarily based on Latin business documents and legal records. The development of literacy from and for practical purposes of day-to-day business, rather than creative literature, is the theme of From Memory to Written Record.

A change as obvious as the growing number of records has not gone unnoticed by historians. V. H. Galbraith in particular has stated the general argument in various forms, for example:

Early society is ordered and governed by oral tradition … Then there is a long twilight of transition, during which the written record encroaches more and more upon the sphere of custom. In this way the volume of written evidence available steadily increases until we reach a time – not I think earlier than the thirteenth century – when most of society's major activities find some sort of written record. More, however, is at stake than the mere volume of evidence. As documents grow more plentiful their whole meaning changes.2

Although this book differs from Galbraith in its interpretation of particular documents, its general aim is to build upon his work and extend it from the growth of ‘public’ records (that is, the documents of the king's government) to all types of writing, and from the writings themselves to the people they affected. Modern scholars of medieval England tend to be specialists in particular types of writing, because the records are so large and complex, whereas medieval makers and users of documents would have seen less significance in such distinctions as public and private, royal and ecclesiastical, or historical and literary. Essential as they are for specialized study, these distinctions can obscure the breadth and unity of medieval experience.

This book necessarily therefore draws throughout on the expertise of other scholars and consistently uses a selective method, which needs explaining and perhaps also justifying. First of all, because it is an axiom of the argument that the number of documents markedly increased in the period 1066–1307, no single scholar can claim to have studied them all or even most in detail. This book proceeds by citing a limited number of examples, often in detail, in order to illustrate a series of propositions. These citations (many of which have been noted by previous authors in other contexts) have been selected from a large body of material; they aim to be typical or particularly significant.

An additional principle of presentation which needs explaining is that, although this book is solely concerned with the making of manuscripts, it generally cites printed editions of texts rather than the manuscripts themselves. Even where manuscripts are referred to, the reader is normally directed to a facsimile and not to the original document. This procedure has been adopted because much of the argument is novel and some readers will wish to pursue or verify translated citations or references as readily as possible. While admiring manuscript culture and trying to convey to the reader its special qualities, every author must acknowledge the advantages which printing has brought to scholars by making uniform texts available in multiple copies. Furthermore, generalizations cannot often be made directly from medieval manuscripts, because each one usually requires detailed study and presentation by an editor (to establish the best text, assess the date, identify persons, and so on) before it can be adequately understood. Editing texts and generalizing from them in books like this one are different endeavours.

Although this book makes few original observations about particular manuscripts, it is intended to provide a new general survey of the medieval documents of England in the period it concerns. Chapter on ‘Types of Record’, for example, or chapter on ‘Languages of Record’ aim to describe their subjects comprehensively though far from exhaustively. Such broad treatment is made necessary by the book's prevailing theme of literacy developing over time across many types of writing activity. This treatment has the added incidental advantage of bringing together areas of scholarship which are normally kept apart. Thus chapter discusses all written languages used in England at the time (Latin, French, English, and Hebrew in approximate order of frequency), whereas scholars often specialize in one language only. Likewise chapter includes scholastic texts and works of literature as well as charters and rolls. The inevitable superficiality of this approach is counterbalanced, in theory at least, by the range of discussion achieved.

The purpose of concentrating on one place, England, and on a well-defined period, the years from 1066 to 1307, is to make the subject manageable. More general studies of literacy, particularly by anthropologists, have emphasized both the diversity of forms which literacy can take and the common recurrent features which distinguish all literate cultures from non-literate ones.3 Descriptions of the development of literacy in particular places and periods (as in this book), on the other hand, provide a variety of readers with sufficiently detailed information to draw reliable conclusions for their own purposes. The shift from memory to written record, which occurred in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was not restricted to England, although it is most evident there. It was a western European phenomenon, as figure 1 at p. 61 suggests, which compares the number of letters extant from the chanceries of England, France, and the papacy between c.1066 and c.1200. Comparable graphs could be drawn to show the growth of documentation in the medieval kingdoms of the Spains and of Sicily, or in Germany and the Italian city-states, although the sources of information are more fragmentary in these instances. It is probable, moreover, that the letter-writing energies of the papacy, from the reign of Gregory VII (1073–85) onwards, set new standards of documentation – both in output and quality – which compelled secular governments to follow suit.

In the period 1066–1307 England was peculiarly open to continental influences because the monarchy was controlled first by the Normans, secondly by the Angevins, and then in the thirteenth century by the Poitevin and other southern favourites of King John and Henry III. Edward I likewise was a ruler of European stature and interests. Nevertheless this combination of influences created in England over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin culture which is a distinct entity rather than a mere accumulation of parts. Although English experience of literacy was far from being unique or self-contained, it presents itself as a relatively coherent whole in the period 1066–1307 because the country was dominated by a centralizing royal bureaucracy. Even though the day-to-day power and importance of the royal government has been exaggerated by ‘public’ record-oriented historians, it has left a formidable reminder of its manifold activities in the hundreds of thousands of parchments now preserved in the English National Archives. William the Conqueror's Domesday survey at the beginning of the period and Edward I's quo warranto prosecutions at the end were both countrywide inquiries which aimed to record the most important rights of the king and his feudatories in writing. Nothing on this scale survives from any other European state. The emperor Frederick II conducted a comparable survey in the kingdom of Sicily in the 1220s, but its details are now lost.

No inquiry by a medieval government ever exceeded in scope and detail the survey inaugurated by Edward I in 1279, which immediately preceded the quo warranto prosecutions. Commissioners in each county were instructed to list by name and have written down in books all villages and hamlets and every type of tenement whatsoever, whether of the rich or the poor, and whether royal or otherwise.4 The stated purpose of this survey was to settle questions of ownership once and for all. The returns have only survived in their original form from a handful of counties in the south Midlands (much of Oxfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire and parts of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire) and they vary in their attention to detail.5 Some exceed the commissioners’ instructions and list every serf by name, while others are very brief. It may be more than a coincidence that the area producing extant returns lies on a line between the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge.6 Only there perhaps were a sufficient number of clerks found to make the survey. Students, who had learned to note down their masters’ lectures, could apply this expertise to the king's business. If this hypothesis is correct, it looks as if the survey of 1279 was too ambitious even for Edward I. Only in the clerkly area of Oxford and Cambridge was literacy sufficiently widespread to fulfil his aims.7 Unlike the Domesday survey of two centuries earlier, the survey of 1279 excited little comment among chroniclers. They were by then perhaps long accustomed to, and even weary of, the monarchy's preoccupation with making surveys and lists, especially when ‘no advantage came of it’ (in the opinion of the Dunstable chronicler).8 The numerous surveys of Edward I's reign suggest that the bureaucracy's appetite for information exceeded its capacity to digest it. Making lists was in danger of becoming a substitute for action.

It is possible that Englishmen became exceptionally conscious of records as a direct consequence of the Norman Conquest. Making records is initially a product of distrust rather than social progress. By making Domesday Book William the Conqueror set his shameful mark on the humiliated people, and even on their domestic animals, in the opinion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.9 The harsh exactitude of Norman and Angevin officials, with their writs and pipe rolls, caused churchmen and ultimately even laymen to keep records of their own. Thus it has been calculated that out of 971 papal decretal letters of the twelfth century whose destination is known, 434 went to England.10 This statistic does not mean that the papal curia expended nearly half its energies on English business, but that English recipients were more careful to preserve papal letters than clergy in other European states. Similarly, of twenty-seven early collections of decretals compiled by canon lawyers in Europe as a whole, fifteen are English.11 The history of record-making and literacy in England merits separate study, provided it is understood that medieval England was part of Europe and not an island in the cultural sense.

Being Prejudiced in Favour of Literacy

A difference between this book and some previous studies of records by historians is that it tries to avoid being prejudiced in favour of literacy. Writing provides historians with their materials and it is consequently understandable that they have tended to see it as a measure of progress. Furthermore, literate techniques are so necessary to modern western society, and education in them is so fundamental a part of the modern individual's experience, that it is difficult to avoid assuming that literacy is an essential mark of civilization. By contrast, anthropological studies of non-literate societies in the third world and sociological studies of deprived urban proletariats in the west both suggest that literacy in itself is primarily a technology. It has different effects according to circumstances and is not a civilizing force in itself, although there is a relationship between national minimal literacy averages and the mastery of modern industrial technology.12 Identifying literacy as a ‘technology of the intellect’, Sir Jack Goody has given examples of how ‘writing is not a monolithic entity, an undifferentiated skill; its potentialities depend upon the kind of system that obtains in any particular society.’13

Only a minority of those who attend school can be proven to benefit, in either economic or cultural terms, from the acquisition of literacy. H. J. Graff asks: ‘How important have literacy and schooling been to occupational and economic success? Traditional wisdom, modern sociology, the rhetoric of modernization, and nineteenth-century school promotion all celebrated the role of education in determining success. Yet not all the evidence, past or present, lends credence to this view.’14 Graff shows that in the industrialized nations, schooling in literacy is primarily used for ‘training in being trained’.15 It is the schooling process which is significant and not literacy as such. Educational reformers in the nineteenth century – in Europe, America, and Japan – showed that schooling could produce an orderly, disciplined, and deferential workforce; the training of the classroom was transferable in this form to the factory floor.

Literacy has become the shibboleth of modern societies because the individual demonstrates through it an acceptance of, and success in, the industrialized schooling process. The word ‘literacy’, as it is used today, ‘indexes an individual's integration into society; it is the measure of the successful child, the standard for an employable adult’.16 A person who cannot sign his name is consequently now a social deviant, whereas in medieval society the most educated people did not often write (they perfected the art of Latin dictation) and neither did they put a value on their personal signatures: documents were ratified with crosses because the cross was the most solemn symbol of Christian truth. Signing with a cross became a symbol of illiteracy only with the secularization of western society after the Reformation. Through schooling, modern society makes those who cannot write into a potentially subversive minority, whereas in past cultures they were the norm. ‘Whatever our assumptions may be about the conduct and meaning of literacy in our world, we must be cautious about applying them to the circumstances of earlier cultures.’17

For students of the Middle Ages, a warning was sounded in the 1950s by the Hungarian historian (and opponent of Marxist progressivism), I. Hajnal. In his fundamental study of writing and scholasticism, he asked ‘whether we are right in wishing to contrast at any price spoken and written language as agents of civilization, considering the first as an obstacle to progress and the second as its active promoter’.18 An example of what Hajnal warned against appeared in the 1970s in a history of English education. Its otherwise excellent summary of the period 1066–1307 concludes:

Over the past two centuries literacy and education had certainly grown in extent and also become more secularized: England was far more civilized as a result. The vast rural majority, however, still passed their lives in mental confinement, limited by their own experiences in a small circumscribed world ruled by village custom and popularized religion.19

The first sentence equates literacy with education, and the growth of literacy with the extension of civilization and secularization. The second sentence assumes that literacy was the only medium for communicating educative ideas, and that it flourished in urban rather than rural environments.

These assumptions are inaccurate as generalizations about English or European cultural development before the nineteenth century. The most literate part of medieval Europe, at least from the thirteenth century (judging by the number of vernacular manuscripts), was Iceland, which had no towns. This was as true in the eighteenth century, when Iceland ‘achieved near total diffusion of reading and writing skills among its population (it can still claim the highest ratio of bookstores to citizens in the world)’.20 Literacy did not necessarily make medieval Icelanders happier or more prosperous, any more than the ability to read newspapers or sign their names makes people better off today. The medium is not the message. Where only a minority of a population are literate, those who are illiterate do not necessarily pass their lives in ‘mental confinement’. It may be some modern academics, rather than peasants, who risk mental confinement within the ‘small circumscribed world’ of their field of specialization. Through the division of labour, all societies confine their members’ minds within specializations. In the Middle Ages the ‘vast rural majority’ had to be knowledgeable about numerous aspects of their environment in order to survive – its flora and fauna, the cycle of the seasons, the hierarchies of persons and things. Whether they were better or worse off than modern labourers is a matter of opinion, not historical fact. Of course schooling, and reading and writing, can bring great benefits to individuals and societies, but they do not do so automatically. Everything depends upon the circumstances. What is learned in this or that school, and by whom? What is written and what read; by whom, and with what consequences?

Primarily and most obviously, it is language itself which forms mentalities, not literacy. Writing is one of the means by which encoded language is communicated; it can never be more than that. As medieval peasants have left few records other than material remains in archaeology, not much can be known about the details of their cultural values and mental experience. It is argued in chapter of this book that, judging medieval literacy even by the narrow criterion of understanding Latin, a considerable number of villagers in thirteenth-century England had some experience of literacy without formal schooling. Whether a little Latin made them or anyone else more educated, in the broad sense of understanding and mastering one's environment, is a matter of opinion. Morally and psychologically, depending on the circumstances, literacy may liberate or it may confine. In the twentieth century, political dictators and newspaper proprietors showed that they understood more about the potentialities of the growth of literacy than professors of education. ‘Ideological assumptions haunt the use of the word “literacy”. Behind its simple dictionary definition as the quality of being literate lies a morass of cultural assumptions and value judgements.’21

Over the last hundred years, in the world's industrialized nations, schooling directed by the state towards universal literacy has reinforced ideological and cultural prejudices in competing populations and set them on collision courses. This is most evident in the history of twentieth-century European states. Xenophobia, racism, and militarism were all compounded by the schooling of whole populations in the literacies of dominant vernacular languages: English, French, German, and so on. For many individuals within these populations, speaking their mother tongue, or what was described by the state's teachers as a dialect, was forbidden in school. Mass schooling in ‘literacy’, meaning the reading and writing of a standardized national language, was the instrument by which the ideology of the dominant group was enforced in each state. The requirement of a uniform and universal literacy made minority languages in Europe (Basque, Breton, Catalan, and so on) into a social problem and a political threat. In modern nations everyone has to measure up to the standard of literacy required by the state, and they are graded accordingly. ‘It is not enough to know how to read and write; the state insists that one know how to do these according to a uniform standard of correct form, and the punishment for those who do not is exclusion from its munificence, a severe penalty where the state is the chief employer’.22

Compulsory schooling in literacy brings all those who cannot read and write to the attention of the legislator. The British Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 defined ‘feeble-minded persons’ as those ‘incapable of receiving proper benefit from the instruction in ordinary schools’.23 These children, together with ‘moral imbeciles’, were to be segregated by schools at the earliest possible age and confined in institutions named ‘colonies’. Because of the belief in hereditary degeneration, children and adults in Britain (and other industrialized nations) who could not read and write were deprived of their liberty. In Germany in the late 1930s scientists and doctors designed and operated the gas chambers and incinerators in the first instance for them. Because schooling in literacy enforces conformity on children day by day as they grow up, it has become the most powerful social instrument, for good or evil, in the modern world. Like the priests of the Roman Catholic inquisition and the elders of the Protestant reformed churches, twentieth-century professors and state officials believed that their tribunals and assessment procedures regulated everything for the best. Literacy was seen as the saving grace of modern European society; no one withstood its devotees with impunity.

Through schooling in literacy, disadvantaged or dissident groups in unitary national states were classed as aliens. The United States of America restricted the meaning of its Declaration of Independence from British rule by imposing literacy tests on voters. Descendants of slaves and other racially disadvantaged immigrants were required to read aloud and comprehend ‘any section of the Constitution of this state’, to quote the Mississippi State Constitution of 1892.24 Like a school teacher or professor, the Mississippi state official might choose whatever section of the Constitution was most likely to make difficulties for the examinee. In Ireland, following its revolution against British rule in the 1920s, the Irish Republic imposed a literacy test in the Irish language on all holders of public office. Compulsory schooling and literacy tests have proved an effective way of marking out minorities for discrimination. To consider instances only from the industrialized nations in the half-century 1930–80, potentially dissident groups have been marked out by separate but compulsory schooling in Germany, Israel, Japan, South Africa, the UK, the USA, and the USSR.

It may be a consequence of mass literacy, rather than a coincidence, that the mass killings of the twentieth century were done by the most schooled populations in the world's history. Conscription and compulsory schooling have marched together. ‘Con-scription’, as the word itself implies, is a process of literacy: school leavers get ‘en-listed’; recruits ‘sign up’; casualties are ‘written off’. The skills of the traditional schoolmaster and his usher – in listing, marking, scheduling, and disciplining – which had long been instruments of intimidation for the individual pupil, were applied by the nation states of the twentieth century to terrorizing whole populations. The archetypal teacher of the Middle Ages had conventionally been depicted in the form of Lady Grammar, brandishing a birch rod and seated on a professorial chair above her cowering and half-naked pupils. In the words of Alan of Lille (writing in the 1180s), ‘in one and the same action she is father and mother; by her blows she makes up for a father, by her milk she fills the role of mother.’25 Schooling provides models for oppression as much as for enlightenment.26 In the advanced nations of the twentieth century, Lady Grammar and her pupils graduated from the schoolroom to the drill hall and the prison camp.

Medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation Literacy

The state schooling of the last hundred years has distorted our picture of how literacy developed over the preceding ten or more centuries. In the commonest view, the perspective is foreshortened and the colour obscured in order to highlight the present. The medieval past is seen as a period of ignorance (synonymous with illiteracy) and barbarism; these were the ‘Dark Ages’ awaiting the enlightenment of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the progressive reforms of the nineteenth century. How could literacy have been widespread before the invention of printing, the liberalization of religious teaching, and the direction of schooling by democratic states? Medievalists have no short answers to these questions. They have no sociological data, covering large populations or periods in a statistical form, with which to measure literacy rates. They rely largely on individual cases, which cannot be proved to be typical, and inferences and estimates which will always remain controversial. This is why general histories of the Middle Ages do not address the development of literacy in any detail, even though this omission gives the impression that literacy was of little importance or was not widespread.

The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Middle Ages, 1250–1520 edited by R. Fossier mentions literacy only in the context of the invention of printing: the printing of the Bible meant that ‘the illiteratus of the Middle Ages would henceforth be able to drink at the very fountain of knowledge.’27 Certainly the printing press produced many more copies of texts. Whether this increase in volume motivated the illiterate of the sixteenth century to drink in knowledge is unlikely; there is no demonstrable relationship in modern schooled societies between the volume of reading material available and the number of literates. The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe edited by G. Holmes, in its few references to literacy, shows the difficulty of estimating numbers. For the early Middle Ages, T. Brown suggests that the level of lay literacy in Italy ‘far exceeded other areas of the west: 77% of witnesses who appeared in Lucca charters of the 890s were able to sign their names’.28 Although counting signatures does at least measure something consistent, it cannot be an adequate measure of literacy in medieval societies because more people (probably many more) learned to read than to write. The papyrus and parchment charters of early Italian cities like Lucca are indeed an impressive record of Latin legal writing.29 Whether literacy levels in Italy exceeded those in other areas of the west is more doubtful. Reading and writing in the early Middle Ages may have been as common in Merovingian Gaul and Visigothic Spain, and likewise in both pagan and Christianized England and Ireland. In all these places vernacular and proto-vernacular literacies were developing in symbiosis with Latin, as the contributors to R. McKitterick's The Uses of Literacy in Early Medieval Europe demonstrate.30 Although the language might be less classical than in Italy, and some of the writing materials (particularly the soft woods used for message sticks) were less durable than parchment, they probably served well enough at the time. As Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth-century Italian-educated poet (and bishop of Poitiers), acknowledged:

The barbarous rune may be delineated on tablets of ash-wood: What papyrus does, a smoothed stick does just as well. (Barbara fraxineis pingatur runa tabellis: Quodque papyrus agit, virgula plana valet.)31

Estimating numbers is as problematic at the end of the Middle Ages. Concluding The Oxford Illustrated History of Medieval Europe, M. Vale puts no figures on his estimate that ‘the proportion of literate people among the population of northern Europe was probably lower than that found in Italy by 1500.’32 Vale's ‘probably’ indicates his awareness that the stereotype of more literacy in Italy than in northern Europe may be mistaken. Addressing the same question of what proportion of the population was literate, D. Brewer in The New Pelican Guide to English Literature suggests that in England ‘probably more than half the population could read, though not necessarily also write, by 1500.’33 More people could read than write. Even so, how could half the population have learned to read, when few boys were sent to school and even fewer girls? The answer depends on what was valued in reading. Medieval assumptions about functional literacy differed from modern ones. Literates were expected to function primarily as believers in Christian Scripture. The emphasis in reading (and writing) was therefore put not on mass schooling for the state's and industrialists’ purposes, but on prayer: collectively in the church's liturgy and individually at home with a Book of Hours. Instruction in reading was primarily domestic: by one individual to another, most typically by mother to child.

In fifteenth-century western European culture the ideal of the mother teaching her little boy to read was enshrined in the recurrent image of the Virgin Mary with the Child Jesus and a Book of Hours; for girls, there was the parallel image of St Anne (the Virgin's mother) teaching her to read.34 Early reading, for purposes of prayer, was everyone's ideal by 1500. Maybe half the population could read, in medieval England and throughout Latin Christendom, if by reading is meant the ability to recognize the written words of the best-known prayers. The really significant point is not the proportion of the population which could read (in whatever sense), but the fact that the dynamic of literacy was religious. Until the introduction of compulsory elementary schooling in the nineteenth century, individual prayer (whether Catholic or Protestant) remained the foundation of European literacy. This is why, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the most literate societies were rural and remote but conscientiously Protestant: Iceland (which has already been mentioned), Denmark, Scotland, and Sweden.35 Likewise in colonial America, literacy was most widespread in the Protestant countryside of the North: ‘the motive behind such Protestantism, whether or not it added schools (and therefore writing) to its programme, was that men – and often women – should learn to read the Word of God.’36 At the same time, in South America and parts of Asia, Jesuit and other Catholic missionaries were pioneering literacies for reading Scripture in non-Latinate vernaculars.

Before the twentieth century, in Europe and its colonies throughout the world, it was pastors and priests (rather than schoolteachers) who pioneered the diffusion of literacy among the masses. Missionaries had to teach reading and writing, because the Middle Ages had irreversibly established Christianity as a religion of a book: that is, the Bible and the mass of explanatory writings which stemmed from it. In medieval Latin, ‘writing’ (scriptura) and holy ‘writ’ (scriptura) became synonymous, as did office ‘clerks’ (clerici) and the church's ‘clergy’ (clerici). Exceptions to the latter rule are the notaries of the Italian city-republics. They were an elite of professional writers, who established a special status distinct from both ecclesiastics and laymen. They developed as ‘writers’ in every sense: scriveners, secretaries, law clerks, calligraphers, prose stylists, litterati, authors, journalists. When the writing of Latin became distinct from Italian vernaculars, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the smartest notaries added teaching the classics and expertise in rare books to their repertoire. The most influential group was the circle in later fourteenth-century Florence around the notary Coluccio Salutati. Poised between ecclesiastics and laymen, the notaries’ programme of classical studies became known as ‘humanism’ in the fifteenth century, and they as ‘humanists’. They proved excellent propagandists for their classical curriculum; so much so that their idea of an Italian Renaissance has become a commonplace. The humanists claimed to be the true litterati, who had brought Europe out of the millennium of medieval barbarism into the classic light of knowledge and civilization.

As has often been pointed out, the Renaissance humanists’ programme of studies was deliberately elitist and backward-looking. Their origins as clerks and middlemen, standing between the nobility and the people in the Italian city-republics, made them into courtiers and patron-seekers. They aimed to dominate the educational curriculum, not to bring literacy to the masses. In their limited and well-defined objective of educating their masters, the humanists succeeded. Their speciality of Latin and Greek prevailed in the schooling of upper-class men in western Europe for five centuries, from approximately 1450 to 1950. Their claim that the Middle Ages were a despicable period of barbarism subsists to the present day in the pejorative meanings of ‘medieval’. Although they only targeted the elite, the humanists changed everyone's perceptions of literacy. This is most obvious in typography: humanist script remains the model for printing and word-processing throughout the world. This replacement of medieval (‘Gothic’ was the humanists’ opprobrious term) book hands by italic and other classical letter-forms best illustrates what the Italian Renaissance achieved. The new script had been created by the professional writers in Salutati's circle in Florence, particularly by the exquisite calligraphy of the notary Poggio Bracciolini, and it was disseminated throughout Europe a century later by printed books.37 In lettering, as in other areas of literate culture, the humanists achieved a fundamental change of style by repeatedly and provocatively challenging long medieval practice.

As far as the history of literacy is concerned, the humanists have been all too successful as propagandists, since the educated public (including many historians) continue to accept them at their face value. A writer on the social history of medieval Books of Hours in 1988 described medieval Europe as: ‘a largely illiterate society; even by 1500, persons who could read were a small fraction of most nations (the more advanced of the early-Renaissance Italian towns were perhaps the only exceptions).’38 Here are displayed the fundamental presumptions that humanist propagandists wanted their patrons to believe about their rivals, the ecclesiastics (who were accused of monopolizing literacy) and the lay nobility (who were dismissed as illiterates). Coluccio Salutati and Poggio Bracciolini would indeed have agreed that, by contrast with the unlettered nations north of the Alps, their city of Florence was in that cultural vanguard of the ‘more advanced of the early-Renaissance Italian towns’. Triumphing over contradiction and absurdity, the humanists advanced backwards towards their Renaissance, looking forward (in the words of Petrarch) to the time ‘when the darkness breaks and the generations to come manage to find their way back to the clear splendour of the ancient past’.39 Popular belief in progress and in the march of mind originated in the humanists’ need to distance themselves from the dark Middle Ages.

Humanist schoolmasters propagated and reinforced all sorts of myths and dubious ideas about literacy, such as that it stems from schooling rather than the home, that it is the preserve of schoolmasters rather than mothers, that its inspiration is secular rather than religious, that it is elitist rather than inclusive, uniform rather than multicultural, and town-centred rather than rural. All these assumptions fed into the state schooling programmes of nineteenth-century reformers (who had themselves been educated in the classical curriculum) and thence into the beliefs of the schooled populations of today. Within their own terms of reference as propagandists and patron-seekers, the humanists were absolutely right; their peculiar curriculum of ancient Greek and Latin did require a special and exclusive sort of schooling, which was ultimately epitomized in the Victorian Classical Sixths of the English public schools and their equivalents in the other European nations.

The diffusion of literacy beyond the upper class, on the other hand, primarily through reading the Scriptures and writing in vernaculars, did not have to meet all the conditions demanded by Renaissance schoolmasters. Before compulsory schooling in the nineteenth century, literacy in Europe and America was most widespread in remote rural Protestant areas, like Iceland and Massachusetts (as has already been pointed out). In other words, literacy spread best in the places least influenced by the Italian humanist curriculum. Nineteenth-century school reformers were indeed promoters of widespread instruction in literacy, albeit at an elementary and minimal level; Renaissance humanists were not. Teaching in vernaculars was the foundation of modern European mass literacy, not the humanists’ curriculum of dead languages. This is not to say that Latin and Greek were an unproductive curriculum, but only that they could never be the basis of mass elementary schooling. The humanists had made no such claims for them; they had aimed to be influential, not popular. Like his medieval predecessor, Lady Grammar, the Renaissance schoolmaster wielded a big stick to make his pupils love him.

Another assumption about the spread of literacy, which was successfully promoted by the humanists, is the belief that Rome (and by extension Renaissance Italy) was the apex of the world: culture diffused downwards and outwards from the capital to the provinces. The diffusion in the sixteenth century of classical architecture, or italic letter-forms in printed books, from Renaissance Italy as far as the Orkney Islands and Latin America appears to confirm the humanists’ belief. But closer examination suggests that the reverse proposition – that innovation often originates at the peripheries and makes its way to the centre, where it is monopolized and redirected – has as much to commend it as a generalization about cultural diffusion. In this light, the first humanists themselves can be seen as provincials, making their way spiritually – and sometimes in person (as in the case of Poggio Bracciolini, the papal secretary) – from their colony of Florence to classical and papal Rome.

England's Place in Medieval Literacy

In From Memory to Written Record, the role of peripheries vis-à-vis centres is an important question because England is the focus of attention. Conceptually, England stood on the edge of the medieval world, which was centred on Jerusalem: England, the Anglo-Saxon Aelfric had declared, was on ‘the outer rim of the earth's circumference’.40 Innovation can be easier on the fringes of a culture, where cross-fertilization makes adaptation more necessary and the centre's dominance is less secure. Within England itself in the twelfth century, growing-points can be observed on the frontiers: notably in the region of Hereford on the Welsh border and Durham on the Scottish border. From the Welsh border came the most original and influential authors writing Latin for entertainment – Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map, and Gerald of Wales – and the cathedral city of Hereford itself was an international focus for the numerate sciences of the medieval curriculum.41 At Durham cathedral in the 1100s the greatest innovation in medieval church building (the rib-vault) took shape, as did Domesday Book (if P. Chaplais's hypothesis is correct), and England's twelfth-century Renaissance may be seen to originate there.42 The Durham monks took over the Northumbrian heritage of Bede's Jarrow and Cuthbert's Lindisfarne, much as the Florentine humanists claimed classical Rome's past for their city; in each case artists, writers, and propagandists (including forgers) gave impressive form to a myth.

Hereford and Durham exemplify innovation at the peripheries within twelfth-century England. England as a whole, as far as literacy is concerned in the period 1066–1307, played a comparably innovative role vis-à-vis medieval Europe. England in 1066, with its Anglo-Saxon and Germanic civilization, stood at a meeting-point of languages and cultures. Across the Channel to the south were the nations of Romance languages writing in Latin. The seaways to the north, as far west as Iceland and east as Russia, were dominated by the Scandinavians writing in runes. To the west lay the Celtic lands of Wales, Ireland, and the highlands and islands of Scotland, writing in ogams and Gaelic. Much of this area had never been conquered by the Romans and had experienced Latinization only through the church. Pope Gregory VII expected the Norman conquerors, headed by Archbishop Lanfranc as primate, to assert Latin uniformity over the whole of the British Isles. The conquest of Ireland was seen by the papacy as the justifiable process of bringing barbarians into line with Rome. Gerald of Wales praised Henry II as the western Alexander the Great, who by invading Ireland in 1171 had revealed marvels in the west to match those of the east.43 In twelfth-century European literature the British Isles became a place of fascination and mystery, remote in time and place, the land of King Arthur, Morgan la Fey, and Merlin the magician and master of writing.44 A journey to Britain, the islands of the Ocean Sea, was the equivalent of going to outer space in twentieth-century science fiction. In Cligés (composed in the 1170s) Chrétien de Troyes has his hero go from Greece to England, ‘which at that time was called Britain’, because he wished to win a reputation for courage. Britain itself was believed to take its name from Brutus, a defeated Trojan, who had been promised a new Troy in the western lands beyond the sunset. In his life of Thomas Becket, William Fitz Stephen identified this promised land with London, which he claimed was older than Rome and the birthplace of the Emperor Constantine as well as of Becket.45

Because England stood on the periphery of Latin culture, its attitude to it was ambivalent. Its writers either excelled in their mastery of Latin learning and enthusiasm for things Roman, as Bede had done in the eighth century and John of Salisbury did in the twelfth, or they eschewed Latin, like the Old English poets and prose writers and the writers of French and Middle English after 1066. The practice of writing in some form of the English language, probably in runes, was well established enough at the time of Augustine's mission in 597 to ensure that the laws of Aethelberht of Kent were written down in Old English instead of Latin. This is an extraordinary instance of missionaries of the Roman church tolerating the writing down of a barbarian language. The practice of writing laws in the vernacular had become so well established in England by the time of the Norman Conquest that it probably provided the precedent for the so-called Laws of William the Conqueror being written in the new vernacular of French in the twelfth century.46

French first developed as a written language not in France, but in England in the century after the Norman Conquest.47 French was first seen as a distinct language when isolated in England, whereas in eleventh-century France it was no more than one of many unwritten vernaculars. In France writers were taught that Latin was the only proper way to write, whereas in England generations of monks as well as lay people had learned that English had a literature alongside Latin. France had great writers in the period 1050–1150 (Peter Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildebert of Lavardin, and many others), but they all wrote in Latin apart from the troubadour poets of the south. The pride of the Norman ‘French’ knights, who had sung the Chanson de Roland