Download PDF | The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (1376-1422) , Translated by David PREEST , with introduction and notes by JAMES G. CLARK , THE BOYDELL PRESS, 2009.
Pages: 482
Introduction
The chronicle compiled by Thomas Walsingham, monk of the Benedictine abbey of St Albans, is one of the most valuable and vivid narrative histories to survive from later medieval England. No other author produced such a detailed account of the events of his own time over so long a period; Walsingham continued to compile his chronicle for forty-six years, from the closing months of the reign of Edward III until shortly after the sudden death of Edward’s greatgrandson, Henry V, in August 1422. In contrast to many of his contemporaries, Walsingham’s chronicle was also a completely independent narrative, founded for the most part on first-hand reports from a host of high-profile informants.
He used documents sparingly, but as precentor of his monastery he understood the power of written records and those examples he did choose to transcribe are among the most significant royal and papal acta of the period and in several cases they are preserved uniquely in his text. He did not borrow from other chroniclers although they undoubtedly borrowed from him. In fact Walsingham’s chronicle contains a number of incidents and insights that are not recorded in any other contemporary source. It is largely to him that historians owe their knowledge of the course of key events such as the peasants’ revolt, the appellant crisis and the conquest of Normandy and — perhaps more especially — their understanding of the character of the kings: the dissipation of the elderly Edward II, the brittle, unpredictable personality of Richard II and the transformation of Prince Henry of Monmouth into the mighty Henry V.
Walsingham was also one of the only English chroniclers in this period to record in detail events in continental Europe. The opening of the papal schism and the resumption of the Anglo-French conflict projected the European powers into a period of profound political instability. France descended into civil war. Portugal and the Spanish kingdoms suffered dynastic struggles. The Low Countries became a battleground as Burgundy, England and the counts of Flanders contended for control of their burgeoning cities. Meanwhile a fugitive Roman pope could find no permanent sanctuary in the Italian peninsula as papal authority fast evaporated. Writing at some distance from these events but with a watchful eye for detail, Walsingham presents a unique if partisan perspective on the European scene.
But there is another dimension to Walsingham’s work beyond this blend of candid political commentary and reportage. By the standards of the fourteenth century, the Chronica maiora was also an accomplished work of Latin literature. To a far greater degree than any other annalist of his day, Walsingham aimed to write a history that engaged and entertained the reader with the high drama of its scenes and the high rhetoric of its speeches. His writing reflects a knowledge not only of scripture and the liturgy — as might be expected of any experienced monk — but also of the work of many ancient and medieval historians, of academic theology and even a smattering of canon law. In his use of imagery, vocabulary and the sheer vigour of some of his dramatic set pieces, Walsingham also shows himself to be a very knowledgeable student of the Classical poets and prose authors. In his chronicle we catch a glimpse of the cultural world of English monks in the later Middle Ages.
It was this learned, literary quality which recommended Walsingham’s work to later writers and it should be remembered that in reading the Chronica maiora we discover the source of much Renaissance history, of the chronicles of Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed and John Stow, and, of course, of the historical dramas of William Shakespeare.
St Albans Abbey and the Writing of Chronicles
Thomas Walsingham was one of a succession of celebrated chroniclers to have emerged from St Albans Abbey in the Middle Ages. St Albans was counted amongst the greatest monasteries in medieval England. It was set apart from the mainstream by its antiquity, its royal status, its size, and by its wealth, which was exceeded only by the greater abbeys of Glastonbury and Westminster.! But more significant than any of these distinctions was its reputation as a place of learning. From the time of its post-Conquest recovery under the rule of the Norman Paul of Caen (1077-93), St Albans was celebrated as ‘a school that was master to other schools’?
In the early years of the twelfth century Nicholas Breakspear — later to become Pope Hadrian IV, the only English pontiff — received his education at the abbey and in the generations that followed many famous scholars fought, and sometimes failed, to gain admission.* At a time when a number of the greater Benedictine abbeys and priories in England were distinguished for their artistry in the copying and decorating of manuscript books, the scriptorium of St Albans won international renown for the quality of its work.* When the monastic writers of Clairvaux and St Victor sought the means to publish their work in England, it was to St Albans that they made their first recourse.
The reputation of the abbey, its scholars, and scholarly books remained intact for the next three centuries. In the lifetime of Thomas Walsingham, St Albans was still regarded as an exemplar of monastic education and formation and its contribution to the education of the laity — through its almonry and endowed grammar school — had also come to be recognised.®° The country’s most able scholars, many of them now university graduates, continued to seek admission to the convent, abandoning an academic career for a share in its learned and literary heritage.’ The conventual library, which in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries may have expanded to hold as many as three or four thousand books, continued to attract eager readers, borrowers and bibliophiles from England and continental Europe.®
Over the course of four centuries St Albans nurtured original scholarship in a wide range of fields. In the twelfth century the monks were known for their interest in exegesis, hagiography and patristic theology.” In the early fourteenth century it was the scientific advances of Abbot Richard of Wallingford that attracted wider attention.!° In the generation after the Black Death — Walsingham’s generation — it was the talented team of academic theologians at the abbey who preached against the heresies of Wyclif that was prominent in public life.
But there is no doubt that throughout the period the monks were best known for the writing of history. The English monasteries had been committed to the compilation of chronicles since the Anglo-Saxon period and the restoration of monastic life after the Conquest had given renewed stimulus to this work.
The greater Benedictine abbeys and priories, the Canterbury convents (of Christ Church and St Augustine’s), Bury St Edmunds, Durham, Glastonbury, Evesham, Westminster and Worcester all witnessed periods of chronicle writing between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries but there was none that was either as continuous or as copious as that at St Albans. According to Thomas Walsingham, who did more than any other monk of his house to commemorate the chroniclers of earlier times, the tradition of historical writing at St Albans could be traced as far back as the mid-twelfth century when Adam Lyons the Cellarer had compiled a contemporary history and Abbot Ralph Gobion (1146-51) had composed a more ambitious history of Alexander of Macedon.!*
Their work was continued by a succession of contemporary chroniclers in the thirteenth century, Roger Wendover (d. 1236), John of Wallingford (d. 1258), William Rishanger (d. 1312) and, of course, Matthew Paris (d. 1259).!° Walsingham also recovered the names of several monks who continued to compile chronicles in the early years of the fourteenth century, amongst them Simon Binham, Henry Blaneford, Richard Savage and John Trokelowe.!4 Probably the last named was no more than an amanuensis of another but the fragments of historical texts preserved in the manuscripts of this period do attest to the presence of a number of anonymous compilers, not only at St Albans but also at its dependent priories.!°
Walsingham was not the only monk to continue this work in the centuries before the dissolution. During his lifetime there were at least three compilers of annals at St Albans whose names have not been recorded.!¢ One of these may have been the abbot’s chaplain and almoner, William Wintershill, who was remembered as a compiler of administrative records and who commissioned copies of chronicles by other authors.!” The writing of history continued in the generation after Walsingham’s death with the work of Abbot John Wheathampstead, who wrote on both contemporary and classical history, and of his own amanuensis, John Amersham.!® Even at the end of the fifteenth century an anonymous monk continued to compile summary accounts of the most recent abbots to fill the last leaves of the Liber benefactorum.'°
Thomas Walsingham and the other monks who lived and wrote at St Albans in the century after the Black Death were profoundly conscious of the tradition in which they worked. Walsingham himself chose to present his own histories — in the Chronica maiora and Gesta abbatum — as a continuation of his illustrious predecessor Matthew Paris, and his approach to the recording of contemporary events, his reading of the sources, and his refinement of his own prose style reflected his deep engagement not only with the work of Brother Matthew but also with the whole literary culture which had flourished at St Albans for so long.
Thomas Walsingham: Life and Work
While Walsingham’s chronicle is familiar to many historians as an authority for the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, the figure of Thomas Walsingham himself remains obscure. Walsingham revealed very little of himself in his own work. He did not write a prologue to the chronicle and in the whole course of the text he does not address the reader on more than a handful of occasions.?° He never refers to himself by name. In fact in a number of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the chronicle there is no mention of Walsingham at all and it would appear (as discussed below) that he himself never settled on a title that might be attached to his work and it was left to the compositors (or scribes) of the early manuscripts to compose a colophon of their own.?! Walsingham’s reticence was in keeping with monastic tradition but not with many of his fourteenth-century contemporaries, including other monastic authors, who increasingly sought recognition for their work.?
Curiously, Walsingham is also almost invisible in the institutional records of St Albans Abbey. The period in which he was writing was one of the best documented in the monastery’s history, but in the sixty years between 1360 and 1420 — the likely extent of his monastic career — there are barely half a dozen references to his presence in the community.”* These scant references to one of St Albans’ most significant authors have aroused the suspicion that the record of Walsingham and his work was deliberately suppressed after his death, either because of the provocative nature of his political commentary — which seems unlikely since the chronicle itself was repeatedly copied — or because the chronicler himself had fallen foul of the factions that fractured the community in the fifteenth century.
By English standards, St Albans was a large monastery, numbering as many as seventy monks, novices and lay brothers during Walsingham’s lifetime. These men were drawn from a variety of backgrounds, but the senior officers came from a clique of families of the lower gentry and burgess class, while the rump of the community came from lesser stock living on the abbey’s outlying estates.24 Walsingham himself was a member of this second constituency and he may have always struggled for recognition from the first.
One of the few certain dates in Walsingham’s biography is his ordination to the priesthood on 21 September 1364 at the hands of the (then) bishop of London, Simon Sudbury, and from this piece of evidence it possible to sketch the probable outline of his early life.2> In late medieval England it was customary for every monk to be ordained and the ceremony of priesting had come to be regarded as the formal conclusion of the training period that began with the noviciate.7° Canon law decreed that no man be ordained before the age of twenty-four although in the decades following the Black Death (1348-51) many English monasteries sought dispensations from this because of a severe shortage of priests. Taking into account both the necessary period of monastic training prior to ordination and the possibility of a premature priesting, it may be that Walsingham was no more than twenty-four years old in 1364 and that therefore he was born around 1340, making him, incidentally, almost an exact contemporary of both Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Froissart.
Like the majority of monks of his generation, Walsingham probably entered the cloister in his late teens or early twenties. Given his toponym it is possible that he began his monastic career at one of St Albans’ two dependent priories in Norfolk, progressing to the motherhouse before his ordination.”’ Before his ordination, and perhaps for some years afterwards, Walsingham was sent to study at Oxford, a formative experience that he recalled with real feeling in his chronicle when describing the spread of Wyclifism at the university in 1378.28 The English Benedictines had maintained a studium at Oxford — Gloucester College — since the end of the thirteenth century, and under the statutes of their General Chapter reinforced by the papal canons Summi magisti a selection of the ablest monks from every abbey and priory was sent there to study for a higher degree in either theology or (less commonly) canon law.??
The canons required a ratio of one monk in every twenty to be sent to the university, but St Albans always sent a higher proportion and perhaps as many as four or five of its monks were at Oxford at any point in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.*? It remains unclear whether Walsingham did complete a degree or whether, like many of his monastic contemporaries, he returned to the cloister empty-handed after only a short period of study. His criticism of the academic community’s apparent support for Wyclif might suggest that he cast himself in the mould of an orthodox magister theologiae. He does appear to have been remembered at Oxford as a distinguished alumnus of Gloucester College.>!
Apart from his academic studies, nothing is known of Walsingham’s early years at St Albans. His name does not appear in the records of the abbey until 1380 — perhaps as many as twenty years after he made his profession — when he is identified as the compiler of the Liber benefactorum, a register of all the benefactors and benefactions that had supported St Albans since its first foundation.** Here Walsingham is also named as precentor, one of the principal officers of the monastery responsible for the direction of the monks in the choir — including their musical performance — and the supervision of the abbey chancery, where charters and other documents were composed, copied and recorded under the seal of the convent, and the custody of the seal itself. In the greater monasteries — such as St Albans — the precentor was also responsible for the work of the scriptorium (writing room) and the supervision of the scribes, illuminators and binders engaged there in the production of manuscript books.
There is no doubt that Walsingham assumed this role: an undated passage in the anonymous life of Abbot Thomas de la Mare (1349-96), perhaps the most significant contemporary reference to Walsingham, describes how he worked alongside Abbot Thomas in the creation — the writer uses the phrase ‘a fundamentis; literally, ‘from scratch’ — of a new scriptorium where, with fellow compiler and scribes (suos conscripti), he supervised the production of many manuscripts.*? It was once believed that because the most significant products of the St Albans scriptorium were manuscripts containing chronicles that the office of precentor must have carried with it a particular responsibility for the writing of chronicles and that Walsingham was the abbey’s ‘official’ (and only) historian in the same way that a single monk at the French Benedictine abbey of St Denis always held the office of ‘historiographer royal.*4 But there is no evidence to support this. In his capacity as precentor Walsingham may have been responsible for the compilation of some important collections of abbatial and conventual documents, including the Liber benefactorum, but he did not hold a monopoly on historical writing and as already noted there were a number of other monks of his generation who compiled chronicles and other historical texts of their own.
Walsingham’s service as precentor shaped his outlook as a writer, giving him a sensitivity not towards the historical record per se but rather towards the raw materials on which it depends, the charters, letters and other documents which come into the chronicler’s hands, and the language, style and often strikingly different context in which they were compiled. His eye for the detail of a document is evident throughout his chronicle. He draws attention to the demands of the St Albans rebels regarding the abbey’s charters and describes in detail the damage done to the conventual archive.*> Whenever he gives a digest of a document rather than a full transcription, he is careful to preserve its key diplomatic features, and when a document is deficient in some way — such as the parliament roll of which he appears to have had only a partial transcript — he tells the reader so.*° The importance of his own abbey’s archive is a constant preoccupation and it is in the proprietorial tone of the exemplary former office-holder that he reports the theft of the precentor’s roll in 1414.°7 His love of the scriptorium, of the mechanics of book and document production, never left him. In a passage towards the end of the chronicle (1417) he describes vividly the cache of Lollard tracts discovered near St Albans, noting features of their script and decoration and number of blasphemous annotations that filled their margins.*®
Whether Walsingham was appointed precentor in 1380, or whether he had already held the office for several years, remains unclear and it may be only coincidental that he began to compile his chronicle in 1376. But there is no doubt that he continued to hold the office for another fourteen years until he was appointed prior of the monastery’s dependency at Wymondham in 1394.°° It is difficult not to see this appointment as a demotion for Walsingham: he was trans-ferred from a position of influence at the heart of the mother house to one of its satellites, a priory of no more than a dozen monks.*? The last years of Abbot Thomas de la Mare appear to have been troubled by infighting at St Albans and Walsingham was one of several senior monks to be sent away, perhaps because they had pressured the aged and increasingly incapacitated abbot to stand aside.*!
According to the anonymous continuator of the Gesta abbatum, Walsingham was unhappy at Wymondham and one of the first acts of de la Mare’s successor, John Moot, after his election in 1396, was to release the former precentor ‘from his worldly cares’ and recall him to St Albans.” It has been suggested that his two years at Wymondham represented a fundamental turning point in Walsingham’s life that also provides the key to interpreting his work as a chronicler.*? It is true that it brought an end to his career as precentor and removed him from his position at the centre of book — and document — production at St Albans, but it does not appear to have had a significant effect on his approach to historical writing. There are some stylistic differences between the earliest and latest passages of the chronicle — notably in the number of references to classical literature — but its scope and structure remain remarkably consistent throughout.
Already a man of sixty on his return from Wymondham, Walsingham did not hold office again. He remained active at St Albans for another twenty-five years or more and appears to have been regarded as a figure of some authority and seniority; at the election of John Wheathampstead in 1420 it was Walsingham who led the monks into the chapter house to conduct the ballot.44 This was his final appearance in the abbey records, but he lived on for another two years at least to record the death of Henry V in August 1422. It is possible that he was still living — in his mid or late eighties — at the end of the decade.*°
The Chronica maiora was the product of a monastic career which spanned more than sixty years, as much as a third of which Walsingham passed as the presiding officer of the monastery’s chancery and scriptorium. But it was not the only outcome of his long years at St Albans. Walsingham was a prolific writer and his chronicle can only be properly understood when set alongside the many other works that he is known to have composed or compiled. He was not only a committed chronicler of contemporary events but also of the changing fortunes of his own monastic community and alongside the Chronica maiora he compiled a continuation of Matthew Paris’s great Gesta abbatum. He was not the first to continue Matthew’s work but his narrative was more comprehensive and more colourful than those of his predecessors and it provided a proper appreciation of the recovery of the abbey after the Black Death under the direction of Abbot Thomas de la Mare.*° He also composed dozens of brief biographies of past abbots and priors, episcopal, royal and seigniorial benefactors for the Liber benefactorum, reflecting extensive research into the earliest cartularies and chronicles in the abbey’s collection.4” He returned to these early sources to compile a series of short narratives recalling the re-foundation of St Albans after the Norman Conquest and its rise to prominence in the twelfth century.** Walsingham may also have been the author of the original account of the life and martyrdom of Saints Alban and Amphibel, the Tractatus de nobilitate, vita et martirio sanctorum Albani et Amphibali that appears in the same manuscript as his Gesta abbatum continuation. The colophon claims that the text is a translation from a French original but no such source is known to survive and the Latin style of text is strikingly similar to Walsingham’s own Chronica maiora.*? He may also have been the compiler of the collection of miracle stories celebrating the shrine of St Alban that also appears in this manuscript.>°
These works of domestic history and hagiography were the staple diet of English monks in the Middle Ages and as a monk of St Albans, a monastery with a centuries-old tradition of historical writing and an unrivalled archive, it was almost inevitable that Walsingham — like many of his colleagues — would continue this work. What set him part from his contemporaries was that he also read, researched and wrote on a wide range of subjects rarely seen in contemporary cloisters. It was presumably in his capacity as precentor that he composed a treatise on musical notation, the Regulae de figuris compositis et non compositis et de cantu perfecto et imperfecto et de modis significandi which survives in one fifteenth-century manuscript unconnected with St Albans.°! It is perhaps the only work on the subject to have been written by an English monk in the post-Conquest period and it provides one of the earliest English witnesses to the new forms of polyphonic notation first developed in fourteenth-century France.** It is possible that Walsingham was also the author of a philosophical treatise known only from its incipit as “Natura est duplex’ that is preserved in two fifteenth-century manuscripts.°? A university-educated monk in a community of graduates, there is no doubt that Walsingham did develop an interest in academic topics, and among the unattributed essays that were sketched into the manuscript BL, Royal MS 13 E IX, compiled under his supervision, was a study of the controversial Oxford theologian, Richard Fitzralph.
But the most remarkable — and in many ways, un-monastic — of Walsingham’s other writings were those on classical literature. In the course of his career, Walsingham produced no fewer than four major studies — their structure is so idiosyncratic it is difficult to call them commentaries — of classical authors and texts. Possibly the earliest of these was the Historia Alexandri magni principis, in which he recounted the story of Alexander of Macedon and his conquests by weaving together the narratives of both classical and early medieval authors, explaining points of etymology, literary devices and mythological references wherever necessary.>° He adopted the same approach for in his Dites ditatus, a study of the Trojan War based on the Ephemeris belli Troiani of Dictys Cretensis but which also drew on dozens of other classical Roman authors, many of them rarely seen in fourteenth- and fifteenth- century England.*° Walsingham was also the author of the Archana deorum, a more conventional commentary upon the fifteen books of the Metamorphoses for which again he drew together a diversity of authorities from the earliest commentators of Christian antiquity (Fulgentius, Lactantius) to the work of contemporary scholars such as John Ridevall and Pierre Bersuire.°” He also compiled a collection of accessus (critical introductions) and short commentaries for readers of thirty of the greatest classical poets, including Lucan, Ovid, Seneca, Terence and Virgil. Some of these were culled from earlier sources, but several, such as his précis of Lucan’s Civil War and his study of Seneca’s Tragedies, may have been his original compositions.°® As a Classical scholar, Walsingham had no obvious counterpart in fourteenth-century England; indeed his work recalled an earlier age — of William of Malmesbury, or even earlier, of Bede — when Latin literature formed the foundation of the monastic curriculum. The range of his reading testifies to the riches that were still to be found in the library of St Albans Abbey even after 1350, although the rarity of some of his sources would suggest that he also made contact with scholars beyond the convent walls.>?
Walsingham’s immersion in classical culture had a considerable impact on his writing of contemporary history. Throughout his chronicle, but especially in the later sections of the text, he cultivates a classical style of narration in which even the most commonplace events — the sailing of another expedition to France, another dispute in parliament over the subsidy — are reported as moments of great passion and high drama. The four ships that founder off the coast of [King’s] Lynn in 1406 in Walsingham’s hands fall victim to an Ovidian sea stirred up by Scylla and Charybdis.© The routine arguments between Archbishop Arundel and the commons over the royal subsidy are similarly redrawn with Arundel cast into the role of Argus.°! It was perhaps also Walsingham’s reading of the classics which sharpened his wit and encouraged him to explore the comic potential of contemporary events, whether in the sharp satire of his treatment of Richard and his courtiers, or the bawdy burlesque of the Welsh women and their outrages in the Glyn DWr war.°? In the later sections of the chronicle, Walsingham’s use of language and imagery becomes increasingly inspired by, if not directly borrowed from, the Latin classics, to the extent that some set pieces — such as the English victory at Agincourt in 1415 — read as if they have been entirely relocated in a classical landscape.
The Making of the Chronica maiora, 1376-1422
Walsingham’s chronicle was his life’s work and the scope, structure and style of the text evolved over the course of his long career. But the precise nature of this process of evolution is not readily recovered from the surviving manuscripts. There is no autograph copy of the complete chronicle, although there are two manuscripts of portions of the text (down to 1392) which may have been copied directly under Walsingham’s supervision and which may contain his own directions to the compositor.°4 The most complete manuscripts, from which the printed editions have been derived, were made in the mid fifteenth century, and with no obvious connection to St Albans or one of its satellites, they stand at some distance from any lost original.®° Walsingham’s own intentions for the text, his method of working and the extent of his revisions, must therefore be teased out from beneath the layers of improvements and interventions made by subsequent generations of compositors, readers and scribes.
Structure
Walsingham probably first planned his chronicle as a continuation of the Chronica maiora of his St Albans predecessor Matthew Paris, compiled in the middle years of the thirteenth century. This is how the text was presented in the two surviving manuscripts connected with Walsingham, BL, Royal 13 E IX and BL, Royal 14 C VII: the Royal manuscript was in fact first compiled by Matthew and Walsingham simply added a quire of his own narrative at the end. Later compilers working in contexts where Matthew Paris was less well known preferred to treat the chronicle as a continuation of Ranulf Higden’s contemporary Polychronicon but at St Albans it seems the Chronica maiora was always pre-eminent.®’ It is possible that Walsingham was inspired to continue Paris’s chronicle in response to the political tensions that attended the accession of Richard I in 1377, in the same way that Matthew himself had written against the background of the baronial wars. But he was also aware that other writers had already continued the Chronica maiora to the beginning of the fourteenth century and he was eager to extend their work into his own day. He was sensitive towards the traditions of his own house and in compiling his own Chronica maiora, his aim was as much to continue the commemoration of St Albans and its monastic community as it was to develop a critical commentary on current events. Indeed for his own monastic colleagues, Walsingham probably intended his contemporary history to be read alongside his continuation of Matthew Paris’s Gesta abbatum, the two texts serving as complementary narratives of the struggles of monastic religion in the secular world.
The original portion of Walsingham’s chronicle, that is the portion written for the most part in his own words, begins in 1376, although he — or possibly a colleague or co-compiler of one of the early manuscripts — used extracts from other histories to connect his own narrative with those, including the continuators of Matthew Paris, covering the period from 1272.°° Although the most complete manuscripts of the chronicle compiled after Walsingham’s death give the impression of a seamless narrative between 1376 and 1422, there is no doubt that the text passed through several distinct phases of compilation at his own hands. The first dozen years of the chronicle (1376-88) were composed as a discrete narrative during the years that it described and in its earliest form gave fuller treatment to the key events of the first two years, the Good Parliament and following it the turbulent relations between John of Gaunt, the commons and the city of London. During these years it appears that Walsingham recorded events as they occurred and even in the later, revised text translated below the chronicle retains something of its early spontaneous character. His reporting of foreign affairs, such as the revolt of the Ghentois (1378-82) and the troubles of Urban VI (1378-88), is often confused and sometimes repetitious as he struggles to assimilate the snippets of news that have found their way to St Albans.°? This first recension of the chronicle was notable not only for the level of detail in the narrative — which Walsingham never reproduced in the later portions of the chronicle — but also for its outspoken criticism of Gaunt whose ambition and appetite for power Walsingham presented as the principal cause of the political instability.”0 Whether by design, or simply because of the permeable nature of the St Albans scriptorium, this ‘scandalous’ (as it has been called by some historians) recension of the chronicle began to circulate almost as soon as it was compiled, reaching other monasteries — Norwich and possibly Westminster — if not much further afield.7! By the end of the 1380s the suspicions surrounding Gaunt had been eclipsed by new anxieties about the behaviour of the king himself. In the aftermath of the appellant crisis, Gaunt emerged as something of an elder statesman, a guarantor of stability, guarding the realm from the worst excesses of the crown. Walsingham responded to the change in the political climate with the wholesale revision of the ‘scandalous’ chronicle, substituting the more moderate and nuanced narrative that appears in the translation below. It is possible that he came under pressure from his abbot who was now anxious to ally himself with the Lancastrian dynasty. Generally the chronicles composed at the abbey do not appear to have been regarded as the official voice of the monastery, but at the end of the 1390s Abbot John Moot had become closely (and perhaps covertly) associated with the critics of Richard II and it may be that he turned to Walsingham’s text as a timely source of propaganda.’2 Walsingham did not entirely eschew political commentary but never again did he express such bitter resentment towards any political figure, reserving his most splenetic outbursts instead for universal enemies, the French, the mendicant friars and John Wyclif.73
The ‘scandalous’ recension of the chronicle was not the only portion of Walsingham’s chronicle that appears to have been compiled as a discrete narrative. He also treated his account of the peasants’ revolt of June 1381 as a self-contained text and reproduced a portion of it verbatim in his continuation of the Gesta abbatum.’4 This was one of the most carefully structured sections of the whole chronicle. Walsingham offers his readers a complete ‘history’ of the revolt, framing his account with his own reflections on its origins and its wider significance for the ecclesiastical and seigniorial authorities. Rather than the general report of the whole episode presented by other contemporary commentators, he provides parallel narratives of the revolt in the city of London and in the provinces, in Cambridgshire, Kent, Norfolk, Suffolk and, of course, at St Albans itself.7> If not writing at the actual time of revolt, Walsingham surely began work on this narrative shortly afterwards since he was able to gather a greater body of documentary evidence than in many other sections of his chronicle: not only copies of the charters and letters issued by the crown and the abbot of St Albans but also the vernacular broadsides of the peasant leaders themselves.”°
The later sections of the chronicle, covering the final decade of Richard II and his deposition, and the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V, have a uniform character that would suggest that the text was carefully edited, perhaps at the close of each reign. Here there is no obvious repetition and Walsingham appears to be writing with the benefit of hindsight when he reports the uprisings against Henry IV and the campaigns and conquests of Henry V.’” His accounts of the political situation in France and of the resolution of the papal schism also suggest foreknowledge of the consequences of each episode: in the case of the Council of Constance he worked directly from the official acta.7® Whether Walsingham alone was responsible for this work, or whether a subsequent compiler should be credited as editor remains open to question. How long he remained active at St Albans after 1422 may never be known. The chronicle ends abruptly at the summoning of Henry VI’s first parliament in 1422.7? Perhaps this was Walsingham’s chosen conclusion to his work, but even by his standards it is somewhat understated. We might not expect a lengthy envoi from a writer who preferred to conceal himself, but it is surprising that he did not leave his readers with one of the stern homilies he had used so often before. There must be a strong possibility that Walsingham died with the chronicle unfinished and that it was one or more of the compilers and copyists who came after him who brought it to a close. It is worth noting that another late work of Walsingham’s, his history of Normandy, the Ypodigma Neustriae, also appears to have been hurriedly finished by another hand; from its prologue, which Walsingham addressed to Henry V, the Ypodigma purports to be a polemical account of the duchy and its relationship with the kingdom of England, but this aim is soon forgotten and the text becomes just another general history of the post-Conquest period.®?
The translation of the chronicle that appears below reproduces the text found in the most reliable of the early manuscripts compiled during Walsingham’s lifetime or within a generation of his death.8! This is generally regarded as the most complete version of the text, as revised by Walsingham and (very probably) the first generation of copyists and compilers who came after him. It has been suggested that Walsingham also wrote a shorter version of the text, recalling his predecessor Matthew Paris who precised his own Chronica maiora as a Historia minor or Historia Anglorum.®? A number of the manuscripts do contain passages that appear to have been abridged from the most complete version of the text and on this evidence it has been conjectured that there was once an entirely separate Chronica minora circulating alongside Walsingham’s Chronica maiora but that no copy of the text has survived. But it is dangerous to develop an argument on the basis of manuscripts whose very existence is only speculative. There is abundant evidence that Walsingham’s chronicle was repeatedly copied and extracted, both during his lifetime and immediately after his death, under the direction of a number of different compilers and it is surely possible that the abridgement of the text can be explained simply in terms of their successive interventions.
Scope
Walsingham was not the first to continue Matthew Paris’s Chronica maiora and in the interests of creating a single, seamless narrative he adopted the same format as his predecessors. He made no attempt to divide his text into books or chapters but as in any of the earliest monastic annals he arranged his material according to the regnal year. His only concession to his readers was to provide running heads for the reigns of Richard and the Henries although these were not always reproduced in the later manuscript copies.** Like his predecessors, the routine events of each year — the meetings of parliament, the notable obituaries, the king’s keeping of Christmas — provided a framework for the rest of the narrative. For much of the chronicle, Walsingham also closed the account of the year with a summary of events, frequently including a summary weather report. Within this framework, Walsingham addressed a very wide range of subjects. The outlook of many other contemporary chroniclers — monastic and secular — was limited by their own preoccupations. The anonymous monk of Westminster who compiled a chronicle of the years 1381-88 described the events that directly affected his abbey — such as the sudden death of Sir William Ufford in St Stephen’s chapel and the proceedings of the Merciless Parliament (1388) — in disproportionate detail, but was indifferent to, or uninformed about, matters beyond the capital.*4 In the same way, although Adam Usk offered a number of important insights into high politics that were beyond the reach of cloister-bound commentators, his concentration on his own career progression through continental Europe meant many significant events received only the most cursory notice.8> Certainly Walsingham was preoccupied with the affairs of his own abbey. He was prepared to juxtapose a report of national importance with stories of the miraculous intercession of his patron saint at a nearby church, or the visitation to the monastic community by representatives of the Benedictine General Chapter.®° Like many monastic commentators there were times when he viewed matters of national and international importance as if through an inverted telescope, seeing only the enormous significance of his own house. His account of the peasants’ revolt is one of the most accurate and comprehensive of all contemporary accounts, but it is also badly imbalanced with the anarchy in the city of London attracting barely half the number of pages devoted to the tenants and townsmen of St Albans.®” But this tendency was tempered by a genuine fascination for the world beyond his convent walls. Witnessing profound upheavals over a period of forty years, Walsingham became deeply engaged in the debates and dramas of national political life. His discussions of the downfall and deposition of Richard I and the rise of the Lancastrian regime have none of the customary detachment of a monastic chroni-cler but demonstrate a genuine understanding of the dynamics of personal monarchy and magnate power.** Unusually for an English writer of this period, Walsingham was also a enthusiastic observer of foreign affairs and his interest extended beyond the familiar territories of Flanders and the kingdom of France to the German territories, Hungary, Naples and, perhaps most notably, the Iberian kingdoms.8? His account of the dynastic conflict between Castile and Portugal and the uneasy but enduring Anglo-Portuguese alliance is more detailed than any other non-Hispanic authority.°° But Walsingham’s wider interests were not purely political. He also cultivated an interest in the cultural and social mores of his time and made space in his chronicle to describe changing patterns of dress, gender relations, language and even sexual behaviour.!
Walsingham addressed this wide array of subjects in roughly chronological order except where the complexity of the issue — such as the conflict over the crown of Naples, or the simultaneous military campaigns of Henry V and his captains — made it impossible for him to maintain it.°? His aim was always to maintain a balance between national and international affairs, to the extent that his coverage of some episodes, such as the momentous parliaments of 1376 and 1388, was necessarily foreshortened. But there were a number of themes to which he attached a particular priority, and for which he created space in the chronicle for an especially extended treatment. Perhaps the most important of these was the ongoing struggle of the orthodox Church against John Wyclif, his teachings and their supporters. In the earliest section of the chronicle, Walsingham devotes dozens of pages to the first condemnation of Wyclif in 1378, and although he was generally reluctant to reproduce documents unedited, he transcribes in full the identical bulls dispatched to the archbishop of Canterbury, the king and the university of Oxford and also appends the official list of condemned opinions.?? Walsingham returns to this theme on a number of occasions between 1382 and 1415, each time engaging in a lengthy digression and giving a full transcript of condemned opinions and other documents.”4
Of equal importance to Walsingham was the story of corruption and crisis in the Roman papacy, which he traced from its beginnings at the election of Urban VI in 1378 to the final, consensual election of Pope Martin V in 1417. Here too Walsingham was at pains to present the documentary record without any of his usual paraphrasing.®° The story of the schism presented Walsingham with a vehicle for his own anti-papal prejudice which appears to have pre-dated the schism and was fuelled both by traditional English resentment of papal provisions and contemporary Benedictine suspicions of the promotion of (mostly mendicant) papal chaplains.?°
Another recurrent theme also reflected these corporate rivalries. At regular intervals throughout the chronicle, Walsingham went out of his way to report incidents which cast suspicion on the mendicant friars, whether through their supposed support for political conspiracy, popular sedition or even outright heresy.” In these passages more than any other in the chronicle, Walsingham speaks directly to his monastic readers, reporting these slanders apparently for no better reason than to add to the burden of sin that he and his colleagues already attributed to the mendicant order.”®
These matters were the preoccupation of the clerical (if not exclusively monastic) community in which Walsingham had passed the greater part of his life, and, for which, primarily, he was writing. But he also developed a number of secular themes that reflected the preoccupations of the community of magnates and upper gentry upon which his monastery was increasingly dependent. Between 1376 and 1388 he followed the fortunes of the city merchants as they fought for confirmation of their liberties. Over the forty years of the chronicle he also observed closely the deepening crisis in crown finance, the growing burden of taxation and — not without a degree of sympathy — the mounting anger amongst the elected commons.” But these were subordinate to his enthusiastic reporting of the French war that runs throughout the text. Perhaps like the aristocratic patrons of St Albans themselves, Walsingham preferred to focus on the daring exploits of English armies in the field than on the political stalemate that their diplomats found frequently at the negotiation table. He was also more inclined to celebrate the martial prowess of the English captains — from Sir Hugh Calveley in the 1370s and ’80s to Thomas, duke of Clarence after Agincourt — than to measure their moral worth.!°° When the army of Sir John Arundel ran riot while waiting to embark from Southampton in 1379, Walsingham’s expressions of outrage are mitigated by the level of lively detail and dialogue that he lends to the story.!°! In these passages the sober, sterile moralising of his monastic education was eclipsed by his exposure to the secular culture of chivalry that surrounded him.
Sources
The scale and scope of Walsingham’s chronicle reflect his access to a wide variety of sources. The second half of the fourteenth century witnessed the wider circulation of official documents, newsletters and other digests of royal and parliamentary acta as the English government began to recognise the political benefits of disseminating information.!°? Even in the provinces it was now possible for chroniclers to piece together a more or less complete record of public affairs and many of the most authoritative accounts of the period — the anonymous chronicles of the monk of St Mary’s York (the so-called Anonimalle Chronicle) and Westminster Abbey, and the history of the Leicester canon Henry Knighton — were founded on extracts from the rolls of parliament, newsletters reporting on the progress of the war or other notable happenings, royal proclamations and other ephemera.!% St Albans Abbey was better placed than most to intercept the trail of parchment that now issued from Westminster, Windsor, Kennington and other places of government. Not only did the abbot and convent maintain their own collection of public records — to which Richard I himself had recourse — but they also played host to the officers of state themselves on more than one occasion; it was to St Albans that the keeper of the realm, Edmund, duke of York, retreated in 1399 in the dying moments of the regime.!4 Walsingham is therefore likely to have been able to lay his hand on copies of almost any of the acta of the period as well as many of the unofficial records: not only newsletters but also popular broadsides and other suspect or seditious texts. But in comparison to his contemporaries, he made limited use of this material in his own writing. He rarely transcribed documents in full, preferring to paraphrase or précis their contents, or to transform them into reported speech.! It was only those documents he regarded as the most significant or unusual that he reproduced verbatim in the chronicle and in this his judgement differed markedly from many other chroniclers. To some extent his selection reflected his own technical interest in scriptorial practice; the products of continental chanceries aroused greater interest than their domestic counterparts, and the cryptic vernacular correspondence of Jack Straw and his colleagues was too strange not to be transcribed.! But he also prioritised the documents that expounded his principal themes. Thus the text of the bulls, decrees and other documents concerning the condemnation of Wyclif (1377-78) and the summoning of the Councils of Pisa and Constance (1409, 1414-17), and even the archbishop of Bordeaux’s circumlocution before Henry IV (1414) on the subject of the schism, were each faithfully transcribed.!°7 However, many of the key documents of Ricardian and Lancastrian politics, such as Richard I]’s questions to the justices at Nottingham (1387), the proceedings of the Merciless Parliament (1388) and the articles of deposition themselves (1399), were reported only sketchily, or even omitted entirely.!°8 Indeed when it came to domestic concerns, such as the regular sessions of parliament, Walsingham was apparently disinclined to consult the official record and reported only what he had been able to learn at first or second hand. When parliament removed from Westminster to Gloucester in 1378, he had almost nothing to say at all.!°° To what extent Walsingham was dependent, as other commentators were, on newsletters and other public records for his reporting of military campaigns and other affairs overseas is difficult to determine. In a number of cases — Cambridge’s expedition to Portugal (1381-2), Despenser’s crusade (1383) — his account appears to match those known to have been derived from these sources, but the language, imagery and a number of incidental details are his own.!!°
Walsingham was equally selective in his use of the work of other historians. There is no doubt that he did draw on a number of the anonymous chronicles of the mid-fourteenth century — such as the continuation of Adam Murimuth and the earliest of the Polychronicon continuations — to connect his own contemporary history with the earlier continuations of Matthew Paris.!!! But he does not appear to have continued to consult these works for the period after 1376, when he began to write his history in his own words. There is no correspondence between the text of Walsingham’s chronicle and the continuations of the Eulogium historiarum — a chronicle that originated at Malmesbury Abbey — and the Polychronicon that circulated widely at the end of the fourteenth century.'!? Nor is there any evidence that Walsingham was either aware of, or borrowed from the contemporary chronicles composed during his own lifetime at a number of other greater Benedictine houses, Glastonbury, Westminster Abbey and St Mary’s Abbey, York.!!3 He had much to gain from reading both the anonymous Westminster chronicle and the Anonimalle Chronicle compiled at York: both authors were at times better informed than he about court ceremonial and the proceedings of the commons, but in spite of connections between their monasteries and his, there is no evidence of contact.!'* There is no doubt that the anonymous monk of Evesham who composed the Historia vitae et regni regis Ricardi secundi at the turn of the fifteenth century became dependent on Walsingham’s chronicle for his account of the king’s last decade and deposition, but the relationship was only one-sided.'!> Walsingham was more familiar with the work of past historians. His passing reference to the return of Thomas Becket from exile in 1170 betrays his knowledge of Herbert of Bosham’s Life.!!® The comparison of the unfortunate murdered Bury monk, John Cambridge, to the legendary King Beldgabred can only have come from the Historia Britonum of Geoffrey of Monmouth.'!” His preference for the archaic names of peoples and places — Britons and Gauls, Armorica and Neustria — suggests that he was well versed in other early histories, not only Bede’s Historia ecclesiastica and William of Malmesbury’s Gesta regum but also William of Jumiéges’ Gesta Normannorum."'8
But for Walsingham, as for Matthew Paris before him, written sources, whether in other chronicles or official documents, were subordinate to the first-hand accounts he was able to acquire from his own circle of friends and informants.!!° The tone and the telling details of many of his narrative passages, of the ceremonies and proceedings of court and parliament and the many military campaigns of the period, would suggest that they were derived from those who had witnessed them for themselves. Walsingham does not identify any of his informants by name, but many of the public figures that feature in his chronicle were familiar faces at St Albans. Abbot Thomas de la Mare had been a councillor of Edward IH and cultivated a close friendship with Edward the Black Prince and his princess, Joan of Kent.!?° After the deaths of both king and prince, Countess Joan entered into a close personal (and possibly political) alliance with Abbot Thomas, and through her intercession many prominent courtiers were introduced to the abbey.!?! It may have been under the influence of members of the countess’s household that Walsingham developed his suspicions of John of Gaunt in the months following the Good Parliament. It was at her insistence that Sir John Chandos, Sir Lewis Clifford, and Sir Richard Sturry were admitted to the abbey confraternity in 1381, a ceremony which must have been witnessed by Walsingham and may have exposed him to the whisperings already current about their suspected sympathy for Lollardy.!?? Many of the greater knights and magnates were also well known at St Albans: the celebrated campaigner Sir Robert Knolles was listed among members of the confraternity, and Henry Percy, Gaunt’s ally and earl marshal was described in the Liber benefactorum (which Walsingham compiled) as a ‘great defender of our house’.!?? If Walsingham had access to him or his retainers, it might explain his detailed documenting not only of the ongoing border battles, but also of the political tensions provoked by Percy and Gaunt in the months following Richard’s accession. Thomas, duke of Gloucester, was also benefactor of the abbey, and this might explain Walsingham’s sympathetic treatment of him and his fellow appellants: it is worth noting that Gloucester is also known to have possessed a copy of the earliest ‘scandalous’ recension of Walsingham’s chronicle his private library.!*4 During the decade of Richard’s tyranny, St Albans drifted away from the political mainstream perhaps as a result of the ageing Abbot De la Mare’s retreat from public life but their early support for the Lancastrian cause projected the convent back into the court circle at the accession of Henry IV. From the moment of the deposition, the monks were called upon to serve in the settlement of the new regime. They became the captors of a prominent political prisoner, Bishop Thomas Merke of Carlisle, who had remained with King Richard to the end.!#° Richard’s body passed through St Albans before its burial at King’s Langley and it was Abbot John Moot (1396-1401) who presided over the funeral.!”° Walsingham must have learned much from both these experiences and when Moot was succeeded in the abbacy by the well-connected William Heyworth, he secured a permanent correspondent in the Lancastrian court.!?7 Indeed it may be that this succession of abbots proved to be Walsingham’s most important informants. Their position in parliament, and, on occasion, at court or in meetings of the king’s council, made it possible for Walsingham to receive regular dispatches from the very heart of royal government.!?8
Style
Walsingham’s preference for personal testimony shaped his writing style. As if to preserve something of the character of the original reports, wherever possible he worked dramatic dialogues into his narrative, drawing the speeches of the protagonists either from the supporting documents, or, probably more frequently from his own imagination.!*? Even in passages of pure narrative he adopted a highly personal tone, employing expressions that were colourful and confiding and at times colloquial to the point of vulgarity.!2° Here he also demonstrates an eye for high — and low — comedy that may owe as much to his exposure to secular culture as it does to his interest in classical satire.!3! It appears he was conscious of the contrast this offered to the other chroniclers of his own day and at one point he was moved to express the hope that his readers would not be scandalised by what he had written.!5? But at the same time there was also a sober and studied — though no more conventional — dimension to his work. Juxtaposed with the passages of vivid and sometimes violent expression were those in which Walsingham was determined to display his scholarly credentials. Here the narrative is woven together from fragments of classical poetry and prose, Lucan’s De bello civili, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Statius’ Thebaid, the satires of Juvenal and Persius and Virgil’s Aeneid.!3> There was more to these references than scholarly conceit. Walsingham recycled these fragments to fashion an authentic classical style for his own prose, correct even down to the detail of the terms used for different forms of weaponry on the battlefield.!>4 As the writing of the chronicle progressed he became ever more obsessed with this enterprise to the point that his descriptions of the exploits of Henry V, and in particular the Agincourt battle, depart some way from the historical reality of the events they purport to represent.!*> This technique set Walsingham far apart from his contemporaries, monastic and secular and anticipated the classically-inspired histories of subsequent generations.
Walsingham and his contemporaries: the influence of the Chronica maiora
Walsingham wrote in a period that has been seen as the Indian summer of the medieval monastic chronicle. The second half of the fourteenth century saw a return to historical writing in many of the greater abbeys and priories in England, in some case for the first time since the golden age of the twelfth century. The stimulus for this was derived in part from the success of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon, the first major English history to appear for more than two centuries, which inspired many houses to customise and continue it with their own domestic and regional interests centre stage.!3° But like Walsingham himself, it was also true that in the aftermath of the Black Death a new generation of monks had emerged with an academic education and a taste for scholarship. In the period during which Walsingham was writing there were new contemporary histories in production at many of the Benedictine monasteries in the orbit of St Albans, not only Evesham, Westminster and York, but also Bury St Edmunds, St Augustine’s Abbey, Canterbury and Reading.!9” There is also evidence of a wide variety of historical writing alongside Walsingham at St Albans itself. He was not the only monk of his generation to continue the Gesta abbatum, and an anonymous author — perhaps his exact contemporary, the abbot’s chaplain William Wintershill — composed a biography of Abbot Thomas de la Mare.!*8 The same author may also have composed the account of the period 1392-1406 which was printed in the Roll Series under the title of the Annales Ricardi secundi et Henrici quarti.!°? Another anonymous monk compiled an annal of the first decade of the abbacy of John Wheathampstead,!*° while two other named monks collaborated on an epitome of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History.!*! To a contemporary observer Walsingham would have appeared as only one of a whole monastic community committed to the writing of history.
To what extent Walsingham himself was aware of these other writers, even those active in his own convent, is unclear. He did maintain scholarly contacts within, and possibly beyond, St Albans, but these were directed towards his interest in classical scholarship rather than contemporary history. The example of Matthew Paris has shown that it was perfectly possible for a prolific scholar to remain in splendid isolation for much of his career even when part of a much patronised, politicised community such as St Albans.!4* But what is beyond question is that — whether or not he was aware of it himself — Walsingham’s own work did have a considerable impact upon them. From the end of the 1380s, when the ‘scandalous’ recension of the first decade of the narrative was complete, Walsingham’s chronicle reached a wide readership not only at St Albans and its sizeable network of dependent houses, but also, it seems, in many other monasteries and secular communities elsewhere. It is unlikely that readers were aware of Walsingham’s name, but in several of the surviving manuscripts the colophon did connect the chronicle with St Albans. It is possible that the text was deliberately disseminated — published — from the scriptorium as other original compositions were in this period although if this was the case it was a process over which Walsingham himself appears to have had little control given the number of different forms — a continuation of Matthew Paris, of the Polychronicon, the earlier scandalous narrative or subsequent recensions — in which it was reproduced.!4? It may be more plausible to suggest, however, that it was an ad hoc, unplanned process that bypassed the St Albans authorities and reflected the preoccupations and priorities of individual scribes.!4+ Either way, there is scarcely a single contemporary history composed in the last quarter of the fourteenth and the first quarter of the fifteenth century that does not bear the imprint of Walsingham’s work. The greater part of the anonymous St Albans Annales was derived directly from the Chronica maiora to the extent that historians have often assumed that it represented nothing more than another recension of Walsingham’s own work, although there is both codicological and textual evidence that disproves this.‘45 The anonymous Evesham monk who composed the text known as the Historia et vita regni regis Ricardi secundi also borrowed extensively from Walsingham and thus provides a valuable early witness to the extent of its circulation.!4° A number of the anonymous continuations of the mid-fourteenth- century chronicles, not only the Polychronicon but also of the chronicle of Adam Murimuth and the Eulogium historiarum also drew material from the Chronica maiora to the extent that the descent of these texts in manuscript in the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries can only properly be understood in terms of their relationship to Walsingham.'*” Only the anonymous chronicles composed at Westminster and York (i.e. the Anonimalle Chronicle), both of which appear in unique manuscripts connected with their respective houses, appear to have remain insulated from the influence of St Albans.
These works were completed before 1422, but it is clear that the influence of Walsingham’s chronicle endured at least for a generation after his death. The early fifteenth-century chronicler Thomas Otterbourne reproduced many of Walsingham’s stories of Richard II and the Lancastrians, refracted through the anonymous Annales of which he appears to have possessed a now lost copy.!48 Chroniclers of Otterbourne’s generation, such as John Streeche of Kenilworth and the author of the lost life of Henry V which served as the source of the English life of 1513, also appear to have been aware of the later portion of the Chronica maiora, perhaps through the medium of a Polychronicon continuation.'“? It is possible that Walsingham’s work was also known to the Augustinian friar John Capgrave, a prolific historian and author of another history of Henry V.!5° From the middle years of the fifteenth century there was something of a slump in the production of manuscripts of medieval Latin chronicles and Walsingham’s work, like that of Matthew Paris, was eclipsed by works written in the English vernacular such as the Brut and the various London chronicles.!>! There were echoes of Walsingham, and other St Albans works, in the ‘Cronicles of England’ published almost simultaneously by William Caxton and the St Albans printer between 1480 and 1485, but it was to be another ninety years before Walsingham’s own Latin text first appeared in print.
Editions and Translations
Given its obvious importance and influence upon subsequent generations of historians, printed editions of Walsingham’s chronicle have proved remarkably scarce. The first printed text was produced under the supervision of Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, in 1574 and although it was derived from early manuscripts then in his possession it did not represent a critical edition.!>? In the same period the antiquarian John Stow and other scholars began to collaborate on a translation of the earliest scandalous recension of the text, working directly from the surviving manuscripts. Only a fragment of this translation now survives and there is no evidence that it was printed, although Stow’s reading of the text undoubtedly informed his own chronicle compilations.!>4 A portion of Walsingham’s text was printed a second time by William Camden in 1603 as part of his Anglica, Normannica, Hibernica Cambrica et veteribus scripta.'°> These first two editions of the chronicle do not appear to have enjoyed a wide circulation and were never reprinted; it is likely that Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences read Walsingham only at second or third hand through the writings of those — such as Edward Hall, Raphael Holinshed and John Stow — who had worked directly from the manuscript copies. It was another two hundred and fifty years before a scholarly edition was attempted under the auspices of the Rolls Series and the editorship of Henry Thomas Riley and Edward Maunde Thompson.!°° Riley and Thompson were conscious of the confusion caused through the repeated reproduction of the chronicle in manuscript and their main concern was to disentangle its different recensions.
Their decision to print the principal recensions as separate volumes in the series was a reasonable one but they created more confusion than they resolved by ascribing to them different (and wholly spurious) titles, the Chronicon Angliae for the earliest ‘scandalous’ text covering 1376-88 and the Historia Anglicana for the complete, revised text that continued down to 1422. The virtue of these texts was that they were transcribed from the earliest and most valuable of the extant manuscripts of the chronicle, BL, Cotton MS Faustina B IX, BL, Cotton MS Otho C IJ and BL, Harley MS 3634—Oxford, Bodl., Bodley MS 316, for the ‘scandalous’ recension and BL, Royal MS 13 E IX, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 7, and College of Arms, Arundel MS 7 for the subsequent revision. It is for this reason that modern historians have continued to refer to them. In 1937 V. H. Galbraith sought to elucidate some of the problems that Riley and Thompson had failed to resolve with the publication of another recension of the last portion of the chronicle preserved (as part of a Polychronicon continuation) in Oxford, Bodl., Bodley MS 462.19” The Bodley manuscript provided new evidence of the significant expansions and revisions that had been made in the text of the chronicle between 1406 and 1420, such as the introduction of new political anecdotes — the story of Sir Robert Waterton and the curry-comb, for example — and a number of new document transcripts. Recently, John Taylor, Wendy Childs and Leslie Watkiss have embarked on a new critical edition of the complete text which incorporates (but does not always question) the discoveries and interpretations made by the Rolls Series editors and V. H. Galbraith.
The Translation
The text printed below is a translation of Walsingham’s chronicle from 1376, the date at which he began to work independently and to write — with the exception of documents — in his own words, down to 1422, the date at which the narrative ends in the most complete of the extant manuscripts. The translation has been made from the text printed by Riley as the Historia Anglicana and transcribed by him from the Royal and College of Arms manuscripts, collated together with the chronicle from 1406-1420 printed by Galbraith as The St Albans Chronicle, in turn transcribed from the manuscript Oxford, Bodl., Bodley MS 462. Thus it represents the fullest and most fully revised text of Walsingham’s Chronica maiora that is known to have circulated in fifteenthcentury English manuscripts and might have been accessible to readers in the later Middle Ages.
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