From Memory to Written Record, England 1066-1307, by M.T. Clanchy
Literate thinking and doing business, whole social hierarchy, habit, social trust, exceeds capacity for action, mental confinement, a technology, not 'civilising' ..
Michael T. Clanchy wrote:
The Introduction:
This book is about the uses of literacy in the Middle Ages. It concentrates on England in the two-and-a-half centuries from 1066 to 1307 (from the Norman Conquest to the death of Edward I) because these years constitute a distinctive period in the development of literate ways of thinking and of doing business. This formative stage in the history of literacy has received less attention from scholars than the invention of printing in the later Middle Ages, although it is no less important. Printing succeeded because a literate public already existed; that public originated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Writing was not new in 1066, of course, either in England or elsewhere. In the royal monasteries of Anglo-Saxon England, as in other parts of Europe, an original literate culture had been created which was distinguished especially by its illuminated manuscripts of parchment. From these royal and monastic roots, new uses and forms of writing proliferated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and took shapes which would last for generations.
The particular argument of this book is that this growth in the uses of literacy is indicated by, and was perhaps a consequence of, the production and retention of records on an unprecedented scale (unprecedented, that is, in England). The difference between Anglo-Saxon and thirteenth-century England in this respect is marked. From Anglo-Saxon England about 2,000 charters and writs (including originals and copies and an indefinite number of forgeries) survive. From thirteenth-century England, on the other hand, tens of thousands of such charters and writs survive; this estimate is no more precise because the documents have never been systematically counted. How many documents once existed (as distinct from how many now survive), either in the Anglo-Saxon period or in the thirteenth century, is a matter for conjecture and inevitably therefore for different opinions. An estimate further on in this book suggests that eight million charters may have been written in the thirteenth century alone for smallholders and serfs.
The increase was not merely in numbers of parchments, but in the spread of literate modes both territorially and socially. By the reign of Edward I royal or seignorial writs reached every bailiff and village in England, making writing familiar throughout the countryside. Similarly the use of charters as titles to property made its way down the social hierarchy – from the royal court and monasteries (in the eleventh century and earlier) to secular clerks and knights (in the twelfth century), reaching the laity in general by the reign of Edward I. This is not to say that everyone could read and write by 1307, but that by that time literate modes were familiar even to serfs, who used charters for conveying property to each other and whose rights and obligations were beginning to be regularly recorded in manorial rolls. Those who used writing participated in literacy, even if they had not mastered the skills of a clerk. One measure of this change is the possession of a seal or signum, which entitled a person to sign his name. In Edward the Confessor's reign only the king is known to have possessed one for authenticating documents, whereas in Edward I's reign even serfs were required by statute to have them.
The book is arranged in two parts. The first part describes the making of records of all sorts, because their gradual accumulation in archives and their distribution throughout the country prepared and fertilized the ground in which literacy could germinate. Through the spread of record-making the practice of using writing for ordinary business, as distinct from using it exceptionally for solemn religious or royal purposes, became first familiar and then established as a habit. Among the laity, or more specifically among knights and country gentry in the first instance, confidence in written record was neither immediate nor automatic. Trust in writing and understanding of what it could – and could not – achieve developed from growing familiarity with documents.
The second part of the book therefore describes the growth of a literate mentality. It traces the halting acceptance of literate modes by the rulers, both clerical and lay. The use of writing for business purposes was almost as unfamiliar to many monks in the twelfth century and earlier (except in the great houses under royal patronage) as it was to knights and laity. Elementary rules of business, such as the need to write dates on letters, were only learned with difficulty because they raised novel questions about the writer's place in the temporal order. Forgery was consequently rife. Despite the increasing use of documents (both authentic and forged) traditional oral procedures, such as the preference for reading aloud rather than scanning a text silently with the eye, persisted through the Middle Ages and beyond. There were also special problems to be overcome in England, such as the variety and different status of the languages in use after the Norman Conquest.
Outside the king's court and great monastic houses, property rights and all other knowledge of the past had traditionally and customarily been held in the living memory. When historical information was needed, local communities resorted not to books and charters but to the oral wisdom of their elders and remembrancers. Even where books and charters existed, they were rarely consulted at first, apparently because habits of doing so took time to develop. Unwritten customary law – and lore – had been the norm in the eleventh century and earlier in England, as in all communities where literacy is restricted or unknown. Nevertheless two centuries later, by Edward I's reign, the king's attorneys were arguing in many of the quo warranto prosecutions against the magnates that the only sufficient warrant for a privilege was a written one, and that in the form of a specific statement in a charter. Memory, whether individual or collective, if unsupported by clear written evidence, was ruled out of court. As written titles had only come into common use relatively recently and as few charters were sufficiently exact, the quo warranto prosecutions threatened to disfranchise nearly all the magnates. Although the quo warranto cases were rapidly suspended in the 1290s and the king's government had to concede that tenure ‘from time out of mind’ was a legitimate claim, the principle had been established for the future that property rights depended generally on writings and not on the oral recollections of old wise men. Hence the title of this book, From Memory to Written Record, refers to this shift in ways of thinking and acting, which made its mark between the Norman Conquest and the reign of Edward I. …
… In the period 1066–1307 England was peculiarly open to continental influences because the monarchy was controlled first by the Normans, secondly by the Angevins, and then in the thirteenth century by the Poitevin and other southern favourites of King John and Henry III. Edward I likewise was a ruler of European stature and interests. Nevertheless this combination of influences created in England over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an amalgam of Anglo-Saxon, French, and Latin culture which is a distinct entity rather than a mere accumulation of parts. Although English experience of literacy was far from being unique or self-contained, it presents itself as a relatively coherent whole in the period 1066–1307 because the country was dominated by a centralizing royal bureaucracy. Even though the day-to-day power and importance of the royal government has been exaggerated by ‘public’ record-oriented historians, it has left a formidable reminder of its manifold activities in the hundreds of thousands of parchments now preserved in the English National Archives. William the Conqueror's Domesday survey at the beginning of the period and Edward I's quo warranto prosecutions at the end were both countrywide inquiries which aimed to record the most important rights of the king and his feudatories in writing. Nothing on this scale survives from any other European state. The emperor Frederick II conducted a comparable survey in the kingdom of Sicily in the 1220s, but its details are now lost.
Plate 13: Genealogical history of England
No inquiry by a medieval government ever exceeded in scope and detail the survey inaugurated by Edward I in 1279, which immediately preceded the quo warranto prosecutions. Commissioners in each county were instructed to list by name and have written down in books all villages and hamlets and every type of tenement whatsoever, whether of the rich or the poor, and whether royal or otherwise. The stated purpose of this survey was to settle questions of ownership once and for all. The returns have only survived in their original form from a handful of counties in the south Midlands (much of Oxfordshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire and parts of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire) and they vary in their attention to detail. Some exceed the commissioners’ instructions and list every serf by name, while others are very brief. It may be more than a coincidence that the area producing extant returns lies on a line between the university towns of Oxford and Cambridge. Only there perhaps were a sufficient number of clerks found to make the survey. Students, who had learned to note down their masters’ lectures, could apply this expertise to the king's business. If this hypothesis is correct, it looks as if the survey of 1279 was too ambitious even for Edward I. Only in the clerkly area of Oxford and Cambridge was literacy sufficiently widespread to fulfil his aims. Unlike the Domesday survey of two centuries earlier, the survey of 1279 excited little comment among chroniclers. They were by then perhaps long accustomed to, and even weary of, the monarchy's preoccupation with making surveys and lists, especially when ‘no advantage came of it’ (in the opinion of the Dunstable chronicler). The numerous surveys of Edward I's reign suggest that the bureaucracy's appetite for information exceeded its capacity to digest it. Making lists was in danger of becoming a substitute for action.
It is possible that Englishmen became exceptionally conscious of records as a direct consequence of the Norman Conquest. Making records is initially a product of distrust rather than social progress. By making Domesday Book William the Conqueror set his shameful mark on the humiliated people, and even on their domestic animals, in the opinion of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The harsh exactitude of Norman and Angevin officials, with their writs and pipe rolls, caused churchmen and ultimately even laymen to keep records of their own. Thus it has been calculated that out of 971 papal decretal letters of the twelfth century whose destination is known, 434 went to England. This statistic does not mean that the papal curia expended nearly half its energies on English business, but that English recipients were more careful to preserve papal letters than clergy in other European states. Similarly, of twenty-seven early collections of decretals compiled by canon lawyers in Europe as a whole, fifteen are English. The history of record-making and literacy in England merits separate study, provided it is understood that medieval England was part of Europe and not an island in the cultural sense.
[On writing in Europe, see exhibit by Rosamond McKitterick, 13 July 2022]
Plate 8: Tally sticks of the Exchequer
Plate 9: Wallingford’s first roll of tradesmen:
This short roll lists people by trades, recording how much each person owes for the year to practise his trade in the town. The portion illustrated lists, under headings in the left-hand margin, the glovers (Wa[n]ti[ere]s) andmercers (Mercat [iari]i) or general traders. Other portions list butchers, carpenters, hosiers, smiths, weavers, etc. After each person’s name is entered the sum due from him, followed by details of payment.
Being Prejudiced in Favour of Literacy
A difference between this book and some previous studies of records by historians is that it tries to avoid being prejudiced in favour of literacy. Writing provides historians with their materials and it is consequently understandable that they have tended to see it as a measure of progress. Furthermore, literate techniques are so necessary to modern western society, and education in them is so fundamental a part of the modern individual's experience, that it is difficult to avoid assuming that literacy is an essential mark of civilization. By contrast, anthropological studies of non-literate societies in the third world and sociological studies of deprived urban proletariats in the west both suggest that literacy in itself is primarily a technology. It has different effects according to circumstances and is not a civilizing force in itself, although there is a relationship between national minimal literacy averages and the mastery of modern industrial technology. Identifying literacy as a ‘technology of the intellect’, Sir Jack Goody has given examples of how ‘writing is not a monolithic entity, an undifferentiated skill; its potentialities depend upon the kind of system that obtains in any particular society’. …
… The most literate part of medieval Europe, at least from the thirteenth century (judging by the number of vernacular manuscripts), was Iceland, which had no towns. This was as true in the eighteenth century, when Iceland ‘achieved near total diffusion of reading and writing skills among its population (it can still claim the highest ratio of bookstores to citizens in the world)’. Literacy did not necessarily make medieval Icelanders happier or more prosperous, any more than the ability to read newspapers or sign their names makes people better off today. The medium is not the message. Where only a minority of a population are literate, those who are illiterate do not necessarily pass their lives in ‘mental confinement’. It may be some modern academics, rather than peasants, who risk mental confinement within the ‘small circumscribed world’ of their field of specialization. Through the division of labour, all societies confine their members’ minds within specializations. In the Middle Ages the ‘vast rural majority’ had to be knowledgeable about numerous aspects of their environment in order to survive – its flora and fauna, the cycle of the seasons, the hierarchies of persons and things. Whether they were better or worse off than modern labourers is a matter of opinion, not historical fact. Of course schooling, and reading and writing, can bring great benefits to individuals and societies, but they do not do so automatically. Everything depends upon the circumstances. What is learned in this or that school, and by whom? What is written and what read; by whom, and with what consequences?
Primarily and most obviously, it is language itself which forms mentalities, not literacy. Writing is one of the means by which encoded language is communicated; it can never be more than that. As medieval peasants have left few records other than material remains in archaeology, not much can be known about the details of their cultural values and mental experience. It is argued in …this book that, judging medieval literacy even by the narrow criterion of understanding Latin, a considerable number of villagers in thirteenth-century England had some experience of literacy without formal schooling. Whether a little Latin made them or anyone else more educated, in the broad sense of understanding and mastering one's environment, is a matter of opinion. Morally and psychologically, depending on the circumstances, literacy may liberate or it may confine. ….
… The main contention of From Memory to Written Record is that lay literacy grew out of bureaucracy, rather than from any abstract desire for education or literature. The demands of the royal Exchequer and courts of law compelled knights in the shires and burgesses in the towns to create lesser bureaucracies of their own. The borough of Wallingford's rolls of tradesmen … and Richard Hotot's estate book … illustrate this process very well, as does the image of the benefactors of Crowland pressing forward to present their charters to the abbey … However, emphasizing the growth of bureaucracy can obscure a parallel development in the history of medieval literacy whereby clerical habits and values were absorbed into lay households, not so much through knights and burgesses responding to tax demands and royal writs, as through their ladies acquiring prayer-books for their private use. Judging from extant Books of Hours, this was a development of the thirteenth century in which England was to the fore, though under the stimulation of French and Flemish artistic influences. …
… From Memory to Written Record addresses an archaeological fact which demands an explanation: that masses of writings survive from twelfth- and thirteenth-century England by comparison with the preceding Anglo-Saxon and Roman periods. Probably this was because more documents were made, as well as more being preserved. This book argues that this accumulation of documents, and their bureaucratic use, made more people literate. The numbers of medieval documents can be measured to some extent, whereas the number of literate people cannot.
The Source:
Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England 1066-1307, Wiley-Blackwell 2013
Plate 19: Portrait of Eadwine ‘the prince of writers’
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.