Part 45

Our earliest information about the land and its people is derived from geological, ethnological and archaeological studies, from the remains in British barrows and caves, Roman roads, walls and villas, coins, place-names and inscriptions. The writings of Caesar and Tacitus, and a few scattered notices in other Roman authors, supplement this evidence. But the scientific accuracy of Tacitus' _Germania_ is not beyond dispute, and that light fails centuries before the Anglo-Saxon conquest of Great Britain. The history of that conquest itself is mainly inferential; there is the _flebilis narratio_ of Gildas, vague and rhetorical, moral rather than historical in motive, and written more than a century after the conquest had begun, and the narrative of the Welsh Nennius, who wrote two and a half centuries after Gildas, and makes no critical distinction between the deeds of dragons and those of Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons themselves could not write until Christian missionaries had reintroduced the art at the end of the 6th century, and history was not by any means the first purpose to which they applied it. It was first used to compile written statements of customs and dooms which were their nearest approach to law, and these codes and charters are the earliest written materials for Anglo-Saxon history. The remarkable outburst of literary culture in Northumbria during the 7th and 8th centuries produced a real historian in Bede; Bede, however, knows little or nothing of English history between 450 and 596, and he is valuable only for the 7th and early part of the 8th centuries. Almost contemporary is the _Vita Wilfridi_ by Eddius, but more valuable are the letters we possess of Boniface and Alcuin. The famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was probably started under the influence of Alfred the Great towards the end of the 9th century. Its chronology is often one, two or three years wrong even when it seems to be a contemporary authority, and the value of its evidence on the conquest and the first two centuries after it is very uncertain. But from Ecgbert's reign onwards it supplies a good deal of apparently trustworthy information. For Alfred himself we have also Asser's biography and the _Annals of St Neots_, a very imaginative compilation, while most of the stories which have made Alfred's name a household word are fabulous. Even the Chronicle becomes meagre a few years after Alfred's death, and its value depends largely upon the ballads which it incorporates; nor is it materially supplemented by the lives of St Dunstan, for hagiologists have never treated historical accuracy as a matter of moment; and our knowledge of the last century of Anglo-Saxon history is derived mainly from Anglo-Norman writers who wrote after the Norman Conquest. Some collateral light on the Danish conquest of England is thrown by the _Heimskringla_ and other materials collected in Vigfusson and Powell's _Corpus Poeticum Boreale_, and for the reign of Canute and his sons there is the contemporary _Encomium Emmae_, which is a dishonest panegyric on the widow of AEthelred and Canute. For Edward the Confessor there is an almost equally biased biography.

For the Norman Conquest itself strictly contemporary evidence is extremely scanty, and historians have exhausted their own and their readers' patience in disputing the precise significance of some phrases about the battle of Hastings used by Wace, a Norman poet who wrote nearly a century after the battle. One version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle goes down to 1079 and another to 1154, but their notices of current events are brief and meagre. The Bayeux tapestry affords, however, valuable contemporary evidence, and there are some facts related by eye-witnesses in the works of William of Poitiers and William of Jumieges. A generation of copious chroniclers was, moreover, springing up, and among them were Florence of Worcester, Henry of Huntingdon, Simeon of Durham and William of Malmesbury. Their ambition was almost invariably to write the history of the world, and they generally begin with the Creation. They only become original and contemporary authorities towards the end of their appointed tasks, and the bulk of their work is borrowed from their predecessors. Frequently they embody materials which would otherwise have perished, but their transcription is marred by an amount of conscious or unconscious falsification which seriously impairs their value. All the above-mentioned writers lived in the half-century immediately following the Norman Conquest, but their critical acumen and their literary art vary considerably. William of Malmesbury, Eadmer and Ordericus Vitalis attain a higher historical standard than had yet been reached in England by any one, with the possible exception of Bede. They are not mere annalists; they practise an art and cultivate a style; history has become to them a form of literature. They have also their philosophy and interpretation of history. It is mainly a theological conception, blind to economic influences, and attaching excessive importance to the effects of the individual action of emperors and popes, kings and cardinals. Even their characters are painted in different colours according to their action on quite irrelevant questions, as, for instance, their benefactions to the monastery, to which the historian happens to belong, or to rival houses; and the character once determined by such considerations, history is made to point the moral of their fortunes, or their fate. It is regarded as the record of moral judgments and the proof of orthodox doctrine, and it is long before ecclesiastical historians expel the sermon from their text.

The line of monastic historians stretches out to the close of the middle ages. Most of the great monasteries had their official annalists, who produced such works as the Annals of Tewkesbury, Gloucester, Burton, Waverley, Dunstable, Bermondsey, Oseney, Winchester (see _Annales Monastici_, 5 vols., ed. Luard, and other volumes in the Rolls series). Some of them are mainly local chronicles; others are almost national histories. In particular, St Albans developed a remarkable school of historians extending over nearly three centuries to the death of Whethamstede in 1465 (see _Chronica Monasterii S. Albani_, Rolls series, 7 vols., ed. Riley). Only a few of the 235 volumes published under the direction of the master of the Rolls, and called the Rolls series, can here be mentioned. Other medieval writers have been edited for the earlier English Historical Society; some of them have been re-edited without being superseded in the Rolls series. For the reign of Stephen we have the anonymous _Gesta Stephani_ in addition to the writers already mentioned, several of whom continue into Stephen's reign. For Henry II. we have William of Newburgh, who reaches the highest point attained by historical composition in the 12th century; the so-called Benedict of Peterborough's _Gesta Henrici_, which Stubbs tentatively and without sufficient authority ascribed to Richard Fitznigel; Robert of Torigni; and seven volumes of "Materials for the History of Thomas Becket," which contain some of the best and worst samples of hagiological history. For Richard and John the chronicles of Roger of Hoveden, Ralph de Diceto (Diss), Gervase of Canterbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, and a later continuation of Hoveden, known under the name of Walter of Coventry, are the best narrative authorities.

With the accession of Henry III., Roger of Wendover, the first of the St Albans school whose writings are extant, becomes our chief authority. He was re-edited and continued after 1236 by Matthew Paris, the greatest of medieval historians. His work, which goes down to 1259, is picturesque, vivid, and marked by considerable breadth of view and independence of judgment. The story is carried on by a series of jejune compilations known as the _Flores historiarum_ (ed. Luard). Better authorities for Edward I. are Rishanger, Trokelowe and Blaneforde, Wykes, Walter of Hemingburgh, Nicholas Trevet, Oxnead and Bartholomew Cotton, and others contained in Stubbs's _Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II._ In the 14th century there is a significant deterioration in the monastic chroniclers, and their place is taken by the works of secular clergy like Adam Murimuth, Geoffrey the Baker, Robert of Avesbury, Henry Knighton and the anonymous author of the _Eulogium historiarum_. Monastic history is represented by Higden's voluminous _Polychronicon_, which succeeds the _Flores historiarum_. A brief revival of the St Albans school towards the end of the century is seen in the _Chronicon Angliae_ and the works of T. Walsingham, which continue into the reign of Henry V. For Richard II. we have also Malverne and the Monk of Evesham; for the early Lancastrians, Capgrave, Elmham, Otterbourne, Adam of Usk; and for Henry VI., Amundesham, Whethamstede, William of Worcester and John Hardyng, as well as a number of anonymous briefer chronicles, edited, though not in the Rolls series, by J. Gairdner, C. L. Kingsford, N. H. Nicolas and J. S. Davies.

These are the principal English historical writers for the middle ages; but as the connexion between England and the continent grew closer, and international relations developed, an increasing amount of light is thrown on English history by foreign writers. Of these authorities one of the earliest is the _Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d'Angleterre_ (ed. Michel); briefer are the _Chronique de l'Anonyme de Bethune_ and the _Histoire de Guillaume le Marechal_. A large number of French and Flemish chronicles illustrate the history of the Hundred Years' War, by far the most important being Froissart (best edition by Luce, though Lettenhove's is bigger). Next come Jehan le Bel, Waurin's _Recueil_, Monstrelet, Chastellain, Juvenal des Ursins, and more limited works such as Creton's _Chronique de la traison et mort de Richard II_.

Chronicles, however, grow less important as sources of history as time goes on. Their value is always dependent upon the absence of the more satisfactory materials known as records, and these records gradually become more copious and complete. They develop with the government, of whose activity and policy they are the real test and evidence. Perhaps the most important thing in history is the evolution of government, the development of consciousness and a will on the part of the state. This will is expressed in records; and, as the state progresses from infancy through the stage of tutelage under the church to its modern "omnicompetence," so its will is expressed in an ever widening and differentiating series of records. The first need of a government is finance; the earliest organized machinery for exerting its will is the exchequer; and the earliest great record in English history is Domesday Book. It is followed by a series of exchequer records, called the Pipe Rolls, which begin in the reign of Henry I., and dating from that of Henry II. is the _Dialogus de scaccario_, which explains in none too lucid language the intricate working of the exchequer system. It was Henry II. who gave the greatest impetus to the development of the machinery for expressing the will of the state. He began with finance and went on to justice, recognizing that _justitia magnum emolumentum_, the administration of justice was a great source of revenue. So national courts of law are added to the national exchequer, and by the end of the 12th century legal records become an even more important source of history than financial documents. The judicial system is described by Glanvill at the end of the 12th, and by Bracton and Fleta in the 13th century (for the exchequer see the _Testa de Nevill_ and the _Red Book of the Exchequer_). During that period the Curia Regis threw off three offshoots--the courts of exchequer, king's bench and common pleas; and records of their judicial proceedings survive in the Plea Rolls and Year Books, some of which have been edited for the Rolls series, the Selden and other societies. Numerous other classes of legal and administrative records gradually develop, the Patent and Close Rolls (first calendared by the Record Commission, and subsequently treated more adequately under the direction of the deputy keeper of the Records), Charters (which were first grants to individuals, then to collective groups, monasteries or boroughs, then to classes, and finally expanded--as in Magna Carta--into grants to the whole nation), Escheats, Feet of Fines, Inquisitiones post mortem, Inquisitiones ad quod damnum, Placita de Quo Warranto, and others for which the reader is referred to S. R. Scargill-Bird's _Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents preserved in the Record Office_ (3rd ed., 1908). Every branch of administration comes to be represented in records almost as soon as it is developed. The evolution of the army which won Crecy and Poitiers is accompanied by the accumulation of a mass of indentures and other military documents, the value of which has been illustrated in Dr Morris's _Welsh Wars of Edward I_. and George Wrottesley's _Crecy and Calais from the Public Records_. The growth of naval organization is reflected in the _Black Book of the Admiralty_; the growth of taxation in the _Liber custumarum_ and _Subsidy Rolls_; the rise of parliament in the _Parliamentary Writs_ (ed. Palgrave), in the _Rotuli parliamentorum_, in the _Official Return of Members of Parliament_, and in the _Statutes of the Realm_; that of Convocation in David Wilkins's _Concilia_. The register of the privy council does not begin until later in the 14th century, and then is broken off between the middle of the 15th and 1539.

Local as well as central government begets records as it grows. From the _Extenta manerii_ of the 12th century we get to the _Manorial Rolls_ of the 13th, when also we have _Hundred Rolls_, records of forest courts, of courts leet and of coroners' courts, and a variety of municipal documents, for which the reader is referred to Dr C. Gross's _Bibliography of British Municipal History_ and to Mrs J. R. Green's more popular _Town Life in the Fifteenth Century_. The municipal records of London, its hustings court and city companies, are too multifarious to describe; some classes of these documents have been exemplified in the works of Dr R. R. Sharpe. Ecclesiastical records are represented by the episcopal registers (for the most part still unpublished), monastic cartularies, and other documents rendered comparatively scarce by the spoliation of the monasteries, and scattered proceedings of ecclesiastical courts. (See also the article RECORD.)

Documents, other than records strictly so called, begin to grow with the habit of correspondence and the necessity of communication. A few letters survive from the time of the Norman kings, but the earliest collection of English royal letters is the _Letters of Henry III_. (Rolls series). Contemporary are the _Letters of Grosseteste_, and a little later come the _Letters of Archbishop Peckham_ and Raine's _Letters from Northern Registers_ (all in the Rolls series). Private correspondence appeared earlier in the voluminous epistles of Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath (ed. Giles). This is a somewhat intermittent source of history until we come to the 15th century, when the well-known _Paston Letters_ (ed. Gairdner) begin a stream which never fails thereafter and soon becomes a torrent. The most important series of official correspondence is the _Papal Letters_, calendared from 1198 to 1404 in 4 vols. (ed. Bliss, Johnson and Twemlow). Subsidiary sources are the _Political Songs_ (ed. Wright), treatises like those of John of Salisbury, Gerald of Wales, and, later, Wycliffe's works, Netter's _Fasciculi Zizaniorum_, Gascoigne's _Loci e libro veritatum_, Pecock's _Repressor_, and the literary writings of Chaucer, Langland, Gower, Richard Rolle and others.

During the 15th century the transition, which marks the change from medieval to modern history, affects also the character of historical sources and historical writing. In the first place, history ceases to be the exclusive province of the church; monastic chronicles shrink to a trickle and then dry up; the last of their kind in England is the _Greyfriars Chronicle_ (Camden Society), which ends in 1554. Their place is taken by the city chronicle compiled by middle-class laymen, just as the Renaissance was not a revival of clerical learning, but the expression of new intellectual demands on the part of the laity. Secondly, the definite disappearance of the medieval ideas of a cosmopolitan world and the emergence of national states begat diplomacy, and with it an ever-swelling mass of diplomatic material. Diplomacy had hitherto been occasional and intermittent, and embassies rare; now we get resident ambassadors carrying on a regular correspondence (see DIPLOMACY). The mercantile interests of Venice made it the pioneer in this direction, though its representatives abroad were at first commercial rather than diplomatic agents. The _Calendar of Venetian State Papers_ goes back to the 14th century, but does not become copious till the reign of Henry VII., when also the Spanish Calendar begins. Resident French ambassadors in England only begin in the 16th century, and later still those from the emperor, the German and Italian states other than Venice. In the third place, the development of the new monarchy involved an enormous extension of the activity of the central government, and therefore a corresponding expansion in the records of its energy.

The political records of this energy are the State Papers, a class of document which soon dwarfs all others, and renders chroniclers, historians and the like almost negligible quantities as sources of history; but in another way their value is enhanced, for these hundreds of thousands of documents provide a test of the accuracy of modern historians which is imperfect in the case of medieval chroniclers and almost non-existent in that of ancient writers. These state papers are either "foreign" or "domestic," that is to say, the correspondence of the English government with its agents abroad, or at home. There is also the correspondence of foreign ambassadors resident in England with their governments. This last class of documents exists in England mainly in the form of transcripts from the originals in foreign archives, which have been made for the purpose of the Venetian and Spanish Calendars of state papers. The Venetian Calendar had by 1909 been carried well into the 17th century; the Spanish (which includes transcripts from the Habsburg archives at Vienna, Brussels and Simancas) covered only the reigns of Henry VII. and VIII. and Queen Elizabeth. No attempt had yet been made to calendar the French correspondence in a similar way, though the French Foreign Office published some fragmentary collections, such as the _Correspondance de MM. de Castillon et de Marillac_ and that of Odet de Selve. There are other collections too numerous to enumerate, such as Lettenhove's edition of Philip II.'s correspondence relating to the Netherlands, Diegerick and Mueller's, Teulet's and Alberi's collections, the French _Documents inedits_ and the Spanish _Documentos ineditos_, all containing state papers relating to England's foreign policy in the 16th century. The Scottish and Irish state papers are calendared in separate series and without much system. Thus for Scottish affairs there are four series, the Border Papers, the Hamilton Papers, Thorp's Calendar, and, more recent and complete, Bain's Calendar. For Ireland, besides the regular Irish state papers, there are the Carew Papers, almost as important. Anarchy, indeed, pervades the whole method of publication. For the reign of Henry VII. we have, besides the Venetian and Spanish Calendars, only three volumes--Gairdner's _Letters and Papers of Richard III. and Henry VII._ and Campbell's _Materials_ (2 vols., Rolls series). Then with the reign of Henry VIII. begins the magnificent and monumental _Letters and Papers of Henry VIII._, the one modern series for which the Record Office deserves unstinted praise. This is not limited to state papers, domestic and foreign, nor to documents in the Record Office; it calendars private letters, grants, &c., extant in the British Museum and elsewhere. It extends to 21 volumes, each volume consisting of two or more parts, and some parts (as in vol. iv.) containing over a thousand pages; it comprises at least fifty thousand documents. Its value, however, varies; the earlier volumes are not so full as the later, the documents are not so well calendared, and some classes are excluded from earlier, which appear in the later, volumes.

After 1547 a different plan is adopted, though not consistently followed. Only state papers are calendared, and as a rule only those in the Record Office; and the domestic are separated from the foreign. The great fault is the neglect of the vast quantities of state papers in the British Museum. The Domestic Calendar (the first volume of which is very inadequate) extended in 1909 in a series of more than seventy volumes nearly to the end of the 17th century; the mass of MSS. calendared therein may be gathered from the fact that for the reign of Elizabeth the Domestic state papers fill over three hundred MS. volumes. The Foreign Calendar had only got to 1582, but it occupied sixteen printed volumes against one of the Domestic Calendar. For the masses of MSS. uncalendared in the British Museum there is no guide except the imperfect indexes to the Cotton, Harleian, Lansdowne, Additional and other collections. Hardly less important than the calendars are the reports of the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the appendices thereto, which extend to over a hundred volumes; twelve are occupied by Lord Salisbury's 16th-century MSS. at Hatfield House. The dispersion of these state papers is due to the fact that they were in those days treated not as the property of the state, but as the private property of individual secretaries.

State papers represent only one side of the activity of the central government. The register of the privy council, extending with some lacunae from 1539 to 1604, has been printed in thirty-two volumes. The _Rotuli parliamentorum_ end with Henry VII., but in 1509 begin the journals of the House of Lords, and in 1547 the journals of the House of Commons. These are supplemented by private diaries of members of parliament, several of which were used in D'Ewes's _Journals_. Legal history can now be followed in a continuous series of law reports, beginning with Keilway, Staunford and Dyer, and going on with Coke and many others; documentary records of various courts are exemplified in the _Select Cases_ from the star chamber, the court of requests and admiralty courts, published by the Selden Society; and there are voluminous records of the courts of augmentations, first-fruits, wards and liveries in the Record Office. For Ireland, besides the state papers, there are the Calendars of Patents and of Fiants, and for Scotland the Exchequer Rolls and Registers of the Privy Council and of the Great Seal, both extending to many volumes.