Download PDF | (Oxford Historical Monographs) Benjamin Savill - England and the Papacy in the Early Middle Ages_ Papal Privileges in European Perspective, c. 680-1073-Oxford University Press 2023.
347 Pages
Acknowledgements
This is a complete reworking of my DPhil thesis, supervised by Sarah Foot and examined by Simon Keynes and Chris Wickham in 2017. The many debts I accumulated while preparing the original thesis are acknowledged therein, but I must thank again the Wolfson Foundation, Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and Royal Historical Society for funding my research, and the ‘Jaffé 3’/‘Papsturkunden des frühen und hohen Mittelalters’ project, based at the Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen and Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, for inviting me to consult their unpublished materials and photographic collections in 2015–16. That thesis became this monograph during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020–21, with earlier groundwork put down at the British Library, Warburg Institute, IHR, Cambridge University Library, and University of East Anglia.
It was brought to completion at Trinity College Dublin. Throughout this time I have been especially grateful for the support of David d’Avray, Caroline Goodson, Nicholas Vincent, Bryan WardPerkins, and Immo Warntjes. Individual chapters were read by Katy Cubitt, Tom Licence, Levi Roach, Alan Thacker, Francesca Tinti, and Judith Werner, and improved by their comments. Julia Crick lent invaluable palaeographic advice. Felicity Hill honoured the writing pact. The late Richard Sharpe gave much needed encouragement at a critical early stage. Works-in-progress were presented to the German Historical Institute Medieval Seminar, British Academy Anglo-Saxon Charters Symposium, IHR Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, Oxford Medieval Seminar, and the St Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies Seminar. Special thanks are due to OHM and OUP, their reader (later self-‘revealed’ as Janet Nelson), and above all Julia Smith as Advisory Editor. Any errors are my own. Berlin, 2022
Introduction
As all fell silent after the reading, Berhtfrith, the king’s top man, spoke to the archbishop: ‘It would please those of us who need an interpretation to hear what the apostolic authority has to say.’ The archbishop replied: ‘Decisions of the apostolic see are expressed in a language which is tortuous and enigmatic – nevertheless, each document does reveal a single understanding of this matter at hand. I will untangle at least their sense in brief.
Our surviving evidence attests to the acquisition of a purported sixty-seven papal privileges relating to England in the early middle ages. Some are authentic, many forged, and only a few the subject of extended analysis: Berhtfrith would be alarmed to learn that there still remains much to unravel. The absence of a dedicated study has not gone unnoticed. Way back in 1839 John Mitchell Kemble, the godfather of modern Anglo-Saxon studies, promised a volume which failed to materialise before his untimely death. At the turn of the present century, two of the field’s pre-eminent scholars reiterated the call for this ‘urgent desideratum’.² Even had they not, the recurring appearance of these documents across almost all the loca classica of Anglo-Saxon historiography could not escape any student of the period.
Papal privileges (documents issued in the names of the bishops of Rome, granting or confirming special rights to individuals or institutions) meet with repeat praise in the works of Bede and his contemporaries in the Northumbrian golden age. They stand out among the documentary records of the ‘Mercian Supremacy’. Some of the most famous royal diplomas of the tenth and eleventh century cite them as precedents, while the suspicious discovery of long-lost privileges is characteristic of the archival creativity of post-Conquest England. They are tied to the names of such celebrated figures as Benedict Biscop and Aldhelm, Offa and Cynethryth of Mercia, and Saints Wilfrid, Dunstan, Æthelwold, and Edward the Confessor. We find them in texts of diverse genres: history, chronicle, and hagiography; homily, gospel book, and liturgical collection; usually in Latin, but occasionally in Old English translation. They may have even made their way into our archaeological record. Yet still no study has brought all this material together and analysed it on its own terms. That’s the task of this monograph.
The absence of such an examination can seem strange, since papal privileges represent a point of intersection between two of the major areas of research interest in Anglo-Saxon historiography: charter studies, and the relationship between the early English and Rome. The study of Anglo-Saxon charters has been revolutionised over the past half-century. Thanks to a number of influential secondary works, and the steady appearance of a series of high-calibre critical editions, a sophisticated engagement with these texts has now become a hallmark of scholarship on early medieval England.³ Nevertheless, these studies have tended to focus predominantly on what one might call the native component of Anglo-Saxon documentary culture, with relatively little consideration about what happened when an additional, exotic genre of written instrument was imported into this same environment (and as we shall see, ‘exotic’ is the right word for these huge, metres-long scrolls of Mediterranean papyrus).
This does not mean, of course, that Anglo-Saxon studies has shied away from exploring mainland European influences and connections in the history of pre-Conquest England. Since at least the time of the groundbreaking work of Wilhelm Levison, this has constituted a significant substratum of the field, and scholars—taking cues from Bede himself—have often placed England’s relationship with Rome and its bishops at the forefront of these investigations.⁴ In some cases that ‘emotional connection’ and ‘close relationship’ (or ‘special relationship’) with the papacy has been perceived as a ‘characteristic phenomenon of the Anglo-Saxon period’, perhaps exceptionally so, while one scholar has gone as far as to identify Rome as the Anglo-Saxon ‘capital’.⁵
Beyond, however, Levison’s own major contributions, the documentary aspects of this relationship have, until quite recently,⁶ not always been subjected to the same kind of attention or analytical rigour as one is used to seeing elsewhere. When discussion has taken place, it has often centred around either the earliest conversion-era letters known from Bede and Gregory the Great’s Register, or, at the other end of the spectrum, the post-Conquest ‘Canterbury forgeries’, principally of interest to Anglo-Normanists and twelfth-century specialists. Accordingly, the rich insights into early English religion, politics, and society made through advances in Anglo-Saxon charter studies over the past four or five decades have not extended as far as they might into the realm of Anglo-papal communications, despite the relative wealth of material available. Most straightforwardly then, this book confronts this weak point in the scholarship by interrogating the full corpus of papal privileges in early medieval England with that same degree of scrutiny.
Doing so is about more, however, than simply filling the gaps. It is a major contention of this study that papal privileges have a usefulness for historians which far surpasses what has hitherto been expected of them, at least by AngloSaxonists. Let’s state this emphatically: papal privileges survive as a genre totally unique among our written sources for the early medieval west. Nowhere else, in this age of fragmented political and textual cultures, do we find another case of a single type of written document produced and authenticated at a single location, yet sought by, and transmitted to, individuals and institutions from diverse societies across Europe, often ones separated by different political configurations, and sometimes immense distances. It adds an exciting new dimension to the sorts of questions we can ask about early medieval England, if we reflect on the fact that privileges much like those we see at the Jarrow of Bede’s day could also be found within the space of a few decades at the monasteries of Benevento, Farfa, and Fulda. Or: that one rare witness to Mercian inheritance strategies exists only as a generic template for scribes preserved in a single north-Italian manuscript, the earliest extant citation of which comes from a few decades later, on a still-surviving Egyptian papyrus addressed to post-Byzantine Ravenna. Or indeed: that a now-lost privilege sought in person at Rome by Archbishop Oswald of York would have had its immediate parallels in documents issued for his counterparts at Latin Europe’s other frontiers, at Magdeburg, Salerno, and Catalan Vic.
Reflective work on comparative methodology has stressed the need for historians to contrast only ‘like with like’, limiting comparisons to tightly controlled shared phenomena (e.g. bishops, castles, communes, coins) that might serve as spie (‘peepholes’) into the wider fabric of society.⁷ As closely comparable, sometimes nearidentical texts, produced under the ‘control’ of a single issuing body, yet found between diverse societies with otherwise few elements of extant source material in common, papal privileges have the potential to serve as just such spie. It is a potential so far largely untapped. This does not mean, of course, that we can just think of privileges as simple portals between, say, the Thames Valley and Val Trebbia, allowing us to juxtapose the two directly. As we shall see, the great differences between the existing conditions and frameworks of reference of such societies makes the application of privileges as completely straightforward comparators almost impossible. But the fact that texts much like those we are seeking to understand in England could be found elsewhere across the contemporary Latin west adds two crucial dimensions to this study. Firstly, we will not be able to speak with much authority about papal privileges in early medieval England unless we see how else they manifested themselves throughout Europe. Secondly, adopting such an approach will take this monograph beyond a basic study of a neglected genre of Anglo-Saxon evidence, and towards a far wider-ranging investigation, wherein we might pinpoint moments at which events in England correlated or contrasted with those in other societies, and ask why.
I. State of Research
Looking outside England therefore requires thinking beyond its historiographical boundaries. Here, however, the work of the historian of papal privileges in England becomes not challenged, but vastly enriched: the scale of output in this field is immense. For at least the early middle ages, the vast bulk of work on papal documents has been, and remains, Germanophone. Its roots and most significant advances lay in the same ‘golden age’ of German textual scholarship that saw the glory years of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica.⁸ Taking off in the last decades of the nineteenth century and still enduring to this day, multi-volume projects by Germanophone scholars on papal documents (Papsturkunden) have dominated and defined the field as it now stands, in the form of registers (Jaffé, 1851; second edition 1885–8; third edition 2016–; the Göttingen Academy’s Pontificia series, 1906–; the Regesta Imperii, 1968–), critical editions (the Göttingen Papsturkunden series, 1896–; the Austrian Academy’s Papsturkunden 896–1046, 1984–9; the Monumenta itself from the 1890s), and diplomatic manuals. While these projects fed into a tradition of grand-type narrative historiography that reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century,⁹ they also appeared in dialogue with a number of important studies exploring largely diplomatic problems, such as the use of formulary books, the technology and aesthetics of the documents (script, layout, writing supports), and suppositions about papal chancery organisation.¹⁰ Quite why the German historiographical tradition has invested so much into papal history is not self-evident, and one should at least be conscious of the political background that first set these gears in motion. Although the roots of a confessionalised scholarly preoccupation about the role of the papacy in sacred history date back to the publishing wars of the Reformation,¹¹ the institutionalisation of modern papal historiography—and with it, the elevation of Papsturkunden to a kind of canonical status in the study of European legal and constitutional history— must owe a good deal to a number of intersecting episodes in late nineteenth-century statecraft. If the professionalisation of the historical discipline and the maturity of the Monumenta and its related projects were fuelled by contemporary German nationalism and state-building, the kinds of subject matter and source material they prioritised also depended upon immediate developments in confessional high politics. The modern birth of early medieval studies in Germany cannot be viewed apart from the Taking of Rome and dissolution of the Papal States in 1870; the conclusion of the First Vatican Council and triumph of Ultramontanism that same year; the Catholic revival and Prussian-Vatican ‘culture war’ of the subsequent decade; followed by the opening of the Vatican Archives in 1882 and, in consequence, the foundation of the German Historical Institute at Rome six years later.¹² We therefore need to be wary of some of the statist and confessional baggage that this field inevitably brings. Less obviously, one also needs to be conscious that the preoccupation of that fin de siècle generation of researchers in the unravelling of the hidden mysteries of the papal chancery, and in the editing, ordering, and registration of papal documents as an end in itself, was in no small part a projection of the hyper-bureaucratic mentalities of their late nineteenth-century state.¹³ Registers, editions, and diplomatic analyses can, anyway, only take us so far. Without them, modern scholarship on papal history would be impossible. But defining the source material is only the beginning of analysis, and we must not fall into the trap of fine-tuning and fetishising the critical texts of Papsturkunden at the expense of further interpretation and the application of wider historical questions—something akin to what Mark Mersiowsky has called the carta edita, causa finita approach of certain strands of diplomatic scholarship.¹⁴ Important and wider-ranging interpretive work on earlier medieval Papsturkunden has nevertheless emerged in the latest generation of Germanophone scholarship, much of it a by-product of those more recent institutional efforts. Specialist studies by Hans-Henning Kortüm and Jochen Johrendt, together with a series of collected volumes published by the Göttingen Academy have demonstrated what scholars can achieve through a trans-regional approach to this unique corpus. These have applied questions about communication, memory, preservation, beneficiary influence, and regional identity across this continent-wide body of evidence, with a view in particular to the worlds of its recipients, rather than Rome.¹⁵ This research has appeared alongside a smaller number of studies working within what has sometimes been called the ‘new diplomatic’, and has focused upon principally non-verbal aspects of papal privileges, analysing them as material artefacts and visual instruments of power.¹⁶ Together, these projects have indicated how much is possible if we emancipate Papsturkunden from the confines of specialist textual analyses, thinking of them as more than just evidence for the administrative capacities of papal Rome. These studies have, however, entirely passed over England. There may be good reasons for this. Far fewer papal privileges (and no originals) survive from early medieval England, making it extremely difficult to integrate this material into the relatively big-data comparative analyses which these studies sometimes prefer. Indeed, the English evidence is comparably weakest from the later ninth to early twelfth centuries, the period with which this most recent wave of scholarship has largely concerned itself. Nevertheless: whatever sensible research considerations might lie behind this generational move away from the Anglo-papal evidence, its long-term effect has certainly been negative. It has cemented a trend within continental work on the early medieval papacy that treats England as a marginal outsider, and, within Anglo-Saxon studies, done little to remedy a reluctance to engage with non-Anglophone developments in papal historiography. The single area in which scholarship on early medieval papal privileges has seriously expanded beyond the confines of German-language specialist literature, meanwhile, has been in dedicated studies of ‘exemption’ and ‘protection’. This topic has seen important contributions over the past century from scholars across Europe and North America, covering material from both Anglo-Saxon England and continental Europe. The documents now labelled under these terms were undoubtedly important, and this book will turn to them on several occasions. Nevertheless, the predominance of this subject across much of the scholarship has probably had a distorting effect on wider perceptions of papal privileges in early medieval Europe. Firstly: grants of this kind made up only one part of the privileges issued by the popes, who from at least the later eighth century became increasingly preoccupied with guarantees for pre-existing church property. Focusing so much attention upon these quite particular kinds of privilege has therefore perpetuated a false impression that ‘papal privileges’ were essentially synonymous with grants of ‘protection’/‘exemption’, an approach that significantly misrepresents the nature of most documents actually petitioned from Rome across these centuries. Secondly: these studies typically lean towards a pronounced teleological position, particularly one of a legalistconstitutionalist bent, something which continues to haunt many modern approaches to early papal history. ‘Protection’ and ‘exemption’ would emerge as highly important legal categories in the central middle ages, having a particular significance, for example, in the history of Cluniac monasticism. But in searching primarily for the ‘growth’ or ‘origins’ of these high-medieval phenomena across earlier centuries, many studies show only limited concern for early medieval developments in their own right, preferring instead to trace a line which culminates towards their author’s period of core interest. Even Barbara Rosenwein’s excellent Negotiating Space (1999) betrays this tendency, beginning with Urban II’s privileging of Cluny in 1095, before tracing across 150 pages the developments leading towards that point, and then ending with an excursus on its implications for the United States Constitution. Amidst all this, dedicated work on papal privileges in early medieval England has not flourished. Early twentieth-century contributions made by German scholars from the Monumenta school—the early medieval sections of Walther Holtzmann’s Papsturkunden in England (1930–52), and Levison’s England and the Continent (1946)—set an exceptionally high standard, and their work remains indispensable. What follows will very much be an exercise in standing on giants’ shoulders. Yet these studies remain not just unsurpassed but also not substantially developed upon. The Göttingen Academy’s planned Anglia Pontificia project currently sits on hiatus. More recent publications surveying the past and future of papal documentary scholarship seem almost to move England out of the picture altogether, celebrating the achievements made over the past century in studying papal documents at the ‘core’ of Europe (Italy, France, Germany), while looking forward to future progress in research on its ‘peripheries’ (Iberia, central and eastern Europe, Scandinavia).¹⁷ It may not be too early to detect parallels here to the current political mood in Europe. This disinclination among papal specialists to engage with England has, anyway, not always been compensated by enthusiasm within AngloSaxonist scholarship. Hans Hubert Anton’s ten-page study of 1975 on the authenticity of a number of Bede-era English privileges remains perhaps the most cited work.¹⁸ The British Academy’s Anglo-Saxon Charters series (1973–), while making invaluable contributions in this area, has remained inconsistent from volume to volume as to whether or not to include papal documents as part of the English documentary corpus: when they do appear, they have sometimes been relegated to appendices with more limited commentary. This is of course perfectly reasonable, given that papal documents did not fall within the original remit of the British Academy project, which already has the task of covering almost two thousand English charters, writs, and wills. But a result of this divided treatment is that, while Anglo-Saxon charter scholarship has exploded since the 1970s, and at the same time numerous volumes of both technical and interpretive work have appeared as a result of well-funded, institutionalised continental research on Papsturkunden, these two strands of scholarship have not only largely failed to interact, but have arguably become increasingly alienated from one another. Considering, as outlined above, the important potential of papal privileges as comparative tools, this parting of ways has implications beyond the relatively narrow world of diplomatic. It may have had a detrimental effect upon how both Anglophone and continental scholars have been prepared to situate Anglo-Saxon England within early medieval Europe more generally .
II. This Book: Scope and Structure
This monograph therefore sets out to explore what we can learn from the surviving evidence for papal privileges in early medieval England. It fully engages with the advances made in both Anglo-Saxon studies and specialist papal historiography over the past century, while also using the rare, Channel-crossing potential privileges offer to investigate what insights they might generate about England within the wider European picture. It works on the basic premise that we should not treat papal documents in England separately from either the ‘native’ English texts among which they survive, nor the huge corpus of almost 800 papal privileges acquired elsewhere across the Latin west throughout this same period, of which they comprised only a small part (see Table 1.1).¹⁹ It does so on the conviction that studying them in isolation creates a false divide that may have made little sense in light of contemporary practices; that such an approach allows us to generate new observations, connections, and comparisons so far overlooked; and that it also provides a much needed occasion to bring together bodies of scholarship traditionally divided between specialist fields. It addresses textual issues in the source material and establishes a preliminary groundwork for a workable corpus of authentically early medieval papal privileges in England, but treats this as a way towards asking wider and more interesting questions, rather than as an end in itself. Moreover, while a study of this size can only aim to do as much as to focus principally upon England, its explorations of what we might gain from taking a more regionalised, petitioner-focused approach to engagement with the papacy in this period will, I hope, be of value to those working on other parts of Europe as well. In a still-relevant intervention of 1995, Tom Noble complained of the ‘morbidity’ of much historical writing on the early medieval papacy within the wider field of early medieval studies. Whatever the transformations of the latter discipline since the mid-twentieth century, much work within the former has remained committed to tracing out a linear narrative, geared around the gradual realisation of a fixed papal ‘idea’ along a ‘series of political-diplomatic encounters’, ultimately looking forward to its supposed culmination under Innocent III (1198–1216) or Boniface VIII (1294–1303).²⁰ If it is now true that this kind of master-narrative no longer has many advocates, an alternative approach has yet to take its place. This book, focusing upon one region’s engagement with papal documentary culture at particular moments across the early middle ages—and viewing those engagements primarily from the perspective of that regional society, rather than according to any developmental narrative of the papal centre— seeks to contribute to a new way of writing long-form early medieval papal history which might challenge at least some of the ‘moribund’ tendencies identified by Noble. As for chronology, this book covers the period from c. 680 up to 1073: that is, from the point around which our evidence for authentic monastic privileges in the English kingdoms begins, up to the death of Alexander II (1061–73). Although Chapter 3 provides a review of all genuine and forged privileges from the Gregorian missions (597–604) onwards, the three authentic texts from these earliest decades pertain to the organisational efforts of the conversion, a topic which has already enjoyed extensive treatment. The study proper therefore commences with the pontificate of Agatho (678–81), when we first see English monastic leaders heading to Rome to acquire privileges in person. Ending at 1073 is a more arbitrary decision. But a study of this size covering more than four centuries would have only a limited usefulness, and the fact that acquisitions of privileges in England fall silent for a generation following the end of Alexander’s pontificate, together with its rough proximity to the Norman Conquest, makes it an appropriate point at which to bring this early medieval investigation to a close. Altogether this period gives us sixty-seven purported privileges from the seventh to eleventh centuries, of which just under half can be considered authentic. A necessary caveat: there is little chance that this figure accurately reflects the full number of acquisitions which actually took place. Historians of the early middle ages are now more attuned than ever to problems of archival losses and how they might have warped our understanding of the past.²¹ Northumbria’s early medieval records have come down to us in a state of especial devastation, and in parts of this book observations about ‘England’ refer more accurately to the Southumbrian polities. It is also the case, as we will see in Chapter 5, that the destruction and mutilation of documents could occur within a contemporary setting that was far from accidental. Nevertheless, there is still reason to believe that when it comes to papal privileges, the surviving record, for all its very real problems, has not distorted our picture of early medieval reality beyond all recognition.²² Archival losses predominantly, if not exclusively, affect ephemera (e.g. letters of transitory import or deeds concerning perishables), lay or private charters (which in Anglo-Saxon England could be rendered in the vernacular, and thus especially vulnerable to later disposal), or memoranda and other notes of informal, minor interest. By contrast, early medieval papal privileges were extraordinary, maybe even quasi-sacral documents, whose very acquisition involved for the English an enormous investment of time and resources, and which were usually granted with perpetual validity. Meanwhile, although it is true that twelfth- and thirteenth-century processes of archival reorganisation would have led to the loss or at least corruption of many original papal documents (see discussion in Chapter 8), this will have also saved many of the texts from oblivion during the Reformation, when cartularies and other mixed-media codices had a much higher chance of survival than loose papalia.²³ Some destroyed or lost privileges (deperdita) have also left their trace in a number of narrative works, and even footprints in archives overseas. Moreover, the fact that the tenth century, the period for which our documentary survivals are richest in Anglo-Saxon England, is also when our evidence for papal privileges is poorest suggests that certain lacunae reflect more than just archival accidents. Overall, the reader must remain as cautious as ever of accepting an absence of evidence as evidence of absence. But our source base is sufficiently strong for us to think that, in what follows, arguments about silence are more than simply arguments from it. Before we get started, it’s important to be clear as to what we mean by papal privileges, as opposed to other papalia. We may define a papal privilege relatively widely in this book as any document issued, or purporting to have been issued, in the name of the bishop of Rome, granting or confirming some kind of special treatment to a particular named individual and/or institution, usually with perpetual validity. Across the continental corpus, these might concern rights over property or possessions, local economic arrangements, the use of liturgical vestments, rights of appeal to Rome, seating arrangements at councils, rights of authority over other persons or churches, or conversely the exclusion of the authority of other persons or churches. They were documents which, as with most other charters or diplomas, were perceived as having a limited applicability: what they granted pertained specifically to the named beneficiary, and was not meant as a general rule for the church at large. (In this respect they differ from what canonists would later call ‘decretals’: literally, privileges set out an instance of ‘private law’—priva lex—rather than general law.)²⁴ While sometimes ambiguous and certainly not exclusive, the use of the term priuilegium for these papal documents is contemporary, and although these texts were subject to wide variation, they nevertheless show certain consistent patterns in their structure, wording, content, and external appearance. This suggests that they would have been recognised at the time as a genre in their own right. This definition is intentionally flexible. The later distinctions made by the lawyers of the twelfth century onwards, between ‘solemn’ and ‘simple’ privileges, are not useful for studying these earlier centuries.²⁵ Nevertheless this definition does not include all output attributed to the papal chancery, and one must be clear that this book is not concerned with papal texts in England in toto. Admonitory papal letters, replies on matters of church discipline or organisation, penitential letters, synodal decisions, or letters detailing Roman judicial proceedings are not included here. Admittedly, the dividing line between papal ‘letters’ and ‘diplomas’ such as privileges is not clear cut, especially since papal documents typically assumed an epistolary form (‘X to Y, greetings . . .’, ‘. . . Farewell’). In this book I follow the definition set out by Achim Thomas Hack between medieval letters and diplomas. Hack argues that, despite the limited contemporary vocabulary for the difference between these two categories, the typical ‘dialogue-character’ of a letter (as opposed to the one-way ‘declaratory’ style of a diploma), together with the usual assumption in a letter of a spatial and therefore temporal distance between sender and recipient (as opposed to the implication of a public grant made to an immediate, present recipient usually found in a diploma) does indicate a genuine distinction, one which contemporaries would have appreciated.²⁶ However, I depart from Hack in acknowledging that the functions and perceptions of such texts could change over time, or between different audiences. If a text that have might have initially fallen under the rubric of a letter (such as the admonitory message of one Pope John to an Ealdorman Ælfric, or Leo IX’s remarks to Edward the Confessor concerning Exeter) came in due course to be preserved within an institution’s archive as a written guarantee of its special status, then that letter could indeed become a diploma or ‘privilege’ in the eyes of some, whatever its originally intended genre or purpose. In some cases, therefore, the decisions taken in this book as to what qualifies as a ‘privilege’ are necessarily subjective. Yet that subjectivity may itself be historical, reflecting the probability that, to contemporaries, what did and what did not qualify as a papal priuilegium may not have always felt absolutely clear, and could well have become contested. This book follows a bipartite structure. Part I lays the foundations, looking first at the immediate setting of papal privileges in early medieval Europe, exploring how they were petitioned, drawn-up, conveyed, and then introduced into their beneficiaries’ regional societies (Chapter 2). It then turns to the known corpus of privileges for England, establishing as far as possible the shape and authenticity of the source base upon which a sustained analysis might rest, and in the process providing a working handlist for the reader (Chapter 3). Part II consists of four separate studies of papal privileges at work in four distinct periods of early medieval England. Chapter 4 investigates the significance of a handful of privileges acquired by English beneficiaries around the turn of the eighth century. It considers their implications for contemporary conceptions of monastic and episcopal space, while also setting these documents within (but also, outside of) a continental documentary culture beginning in fifth-century Provence. Chapter 5 takes the form of a more close-focus case study, investigating the ways in which royal men and women of the ‘Mercian Supremacy’ sought to use papal privileges to secure their own familial inheritance, and how these—initially, it seems, highly successful—efforts were later supressed, forgotten, and misremembered. Chapter 6 turns to the later tenth-century Cerdicing ‘Kingdom of the English’, and asks why we see such little evidence for papal privileges in this emerging polity, at just the same time as their use was proliferating across much of the post-Carolingian world. Chapter 7 then looks to the last decades of Anglo-Saxon England and the coming of the Norman Conquest, when a new generation of ecclesiastics sought to engage with the early leaders of the papal reform movement. To avoid as far as possible the imposition of a linear narrative, these four chapters each take the form of stand-alone studies, although the reader will see that there are ways in which Chapter 7 works like something of a sequel to that preceding. A book of this size can only go as far as to explore what we can know of these documents within their own immediate, early medieval setting, and needs to draw the line at investigating at any length their afterlife in the high middle ages. We cannot, however, ignore the fact that the changing attitudes and practices of that period had important implications for our own access to the earlier past: a brief ‘coda’ therefore addresses this issue (Chapter 8), before some final concluding remarks (Chapter 9).
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