Writing history did not occur in a vacuum. Chroniclers and others writing about the past interacted directly with their brethren, peers and patrons, and indirectly with a long tradition of earlier writers, reaching all the way back to the Bible. Yet most medieval writers were rather reticent about the tradition on which they built. They might namecheck especially important sources, or illustrious predecessors, but, with few exceptions, they reveal rather little about the literary traditions on which they were supposed to build.
From internal evidence, we can sometimes deduce that they had access to historical compendia that brought together the most important texts, and there are historiographical miscellanea and Sammelhandschriften (compilation manuscripts). This makes all the more useful a curious text written in England in the 1180s: the Abbreviatio Chronicarum by Ralph of Diss (or Diceto). It is as weird and wonderful as it is revealing of what writing and compiling history meant around the year 1200.
Ralph of Diceto
British Library, Cotton Ms Claudius E III contains a remarkably rich text, full of fascinating insights into the practice of history in twelfth-century Europe: Ralph of Diss (or Diceto)’s Abbreviatio Chronicarum (‘Abridgement of chronicles’). Ralph was dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London (effectively, he was in charge of the chapter in the absence of the bishop). We don’t know when he was born (most likely in the 1120s), and he probably died in either 1200 or 1201. He seems to have moved to London in the 1130s. His role as dean, the significance of London within the realm, and the cathedral’s proximity to the royal necropolis of Westminster meant that he continued to be deeply involved in the affairs of the realm. As Michael Staunton put it, Ralph wrote history from the vantage point of an insider.
Ralph also produced a rich corpus of historical works, though that seems to have occurred rather late in his life. Most manuscripts refer to him as ‘dean of London’, a dignity to which he had been elected in 1180. Besides the Abbreviatio, he wrote the Ymagines Historiarum (‘Images of history’), and various smaller works, commonly labelled as his opuscula ( ‘smaller works’). Here, I would like to focus on the Abbreviatio. It traced events across the world as it was then known, stretching chronologically from the Creation to 1147. Together with Ralph Niger’s Chronicle, written c. 1195-7, Ralph’s Abbreviatio and Ymagines constitute the first universal chronicles written – rather than copied – in England. In addition, he introduced aspects of manuscript design that proved highly influential among his later readers. For instance, he placed images of crowns or mitres in the margins to indicate when a king’s succession or prelate’s investiture was mentioned in the main narrative; he employed different coloured ink to indicate where he added new information; and developed a system of signs to indicate when he turned to particular topics (I will return to this). All proved highly influential, and were, for instance, adopted by Matthew Paris.
A neglected history: the Abbreviatio Chronicarum
Relatively little attention has been paid to the Abbreviatio. This oversight may have occurred because much of the text consisted of excerpts. Not until the later stages of his narrative did Ralph introduce new materials. Yet his synopses and excerpts are precisely the kind of evidence that allows us to ask how writing about the past fitted into a wider literary and religious culture, about the sources and models available to writers, and about what constituted reputable history. And in that regard, few texts from the twelfth century are as rich and revealing as Ralph’s Abbreviatio.
Importantly, the manuscripts of the Abbreviatio were prestige artefacts, lavishly produced and carefully crafted. The leaves of the British Library manuscript, for instance, are almost the size of A3 paper, with two columns of clearly written text. They contain few abbreviations, used different coloured ink, and several marginal annotations. The original text was dedicated to the bishop of London. Two other manuscripts were intended for powerful patrons: the bishop of Winchester, and the archbishop of Canterbury, that is, the highest echelons of England’s ecclesiastical hierarchy. A third was copied, probably around 1200, and feasibly at St Albans, where it was consulted by none other than Matthew Paris, after Bede the most important chronicler of medieval England. Moreover, it was copied around the same time as another historiographical compendium that William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon and others – that is, the classics of ‘modern’ historical writing as conceived at the time. As such, it marked the beginning of a historical collection at St Albans, an abbey that prided itself in its literary culture. That the Abbreviatio was copied so soon after its completion, and that it was worth copying in full bespeaks its appeal, and its early status as a major contribution to the study of the past. It was not just a collection of random notes, but was read – and, I would suggest, had been conceived – as a major contribution to the understanding and practice of history.
In short, there is a lot still to be said about Ralph and the Abbreviatio (there will be an article in the offing, once I finish other things). For now, let’s focus on the prefatory matter of the Abbreviatio. There was a lot of it – over thirty pages in the modern printed edition. What, though, was its purpose? In rough sequence (there were some variations between manuscripts), its contents include a letter of dedication to the bishop of London, materials about the English Church, matters relating to Ireland and Britain, a list of notable writers, and a series of prefaces to important works of (mostly) history. From these, three overlapping themes emerge: the utility of history; the place of Britain (not just England) in Europe; and the role and purpose of history.
The utility of history
The Abbreviatio was meant to be read. It was designed for easy accessibility. The letter of dedication, for example, included a series of visual markers that, Ralph explained, would be placed in the margins to indicate particularly important topics: the persecution of the Church, schismatics, general councils, the anointing of kings, the privileges of the Church of Canterbury, the election of archbishops of Canterbury, the dukes of Normandy, counts of Anjou, disputes between regnum and sacerdotium (that is, clashes between what modern historians used to describe as secular and ecclesiastical powers), the kings of England as dukes of Normandy (and as dukes and as counts of Anjou), and the conflict between King Henry II and his eponymous younger son.
Comparable visual pointers abound. f. 10r of the Cotton manuscript, for example, contains a visual representation of the Creation to add both interpretation and contemplation:
Similarly, among the prefaces copied by Ralph was that by Ivo of Chartres to his canon law collections. In a later revision, either Ralph or a scribe copying the Abbreviatio, inserted references to those years in the Ymagines, when these principles would be invoked.
And once the introductory materials had been completed, Ralph returned to the issue of utility. He explained that he would focus on matters especially pertinent to England – and went into reiterate the topics highlighted by visual markers in his letter to the bishop of London: when and through whose services the kings of England received unction and their crown; the grants that the Church of Canterbury had received from successive popes; how Anjou expanded its borders; how, during the reign of Henry II, a dispute arose between Thomas Becket and the king; and the resolution of the conflict between Henry and his eldest son.
This emphasis on utility also permeated the prefaces that Ralph had included among the introductory matter of the Abbreviatio. They include Justin’s epitome of Trogus, a summary of the opening of Caesar’s Gallic War, Solinus, Caesar and Eutropius on Gaul, Jerome on Flavius Josephus, the prologue to Hegesippus (without noting that it was copied from Jerome), Augustine’s prologue to the City of God, Orosius, Jerome’s introduction to his translation of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical history, Bede’s to his History of the English People, Robert of Torigni and Hugh of St Victor, and Ivo of Chartres’ to his canon law collection. There is a lot to disentangle in these texts. For now, it will suffice that they provide a model for how Ralph structured his own preface – moving from a geographical description to matters of the Church – to matters of grave concern for the law of the land and of the Church. They also stressed the hard work of the historian as finder of truth and collator of facts, and the benefits to be drawn from a knowledge of history.
The Abbreviatio was eminently useful history, placed Britain in context, and exalted the merits both of Ralph, and of History.
Britain in Europe
Indeed, Britain’s place in Latin Christendom was a major concern. The Abbreviatio opened with an exchange between Ralph and the archbishop of Lyon about the organisation of the Christian Church. It centred on a list of church provinces and there dioceses, attributed to Burchard of Worms (d. 1025), but from which Britain had been omitted. The correspondence is followed by a short sketch of the early settlement of Ireland – by exiled Egyptians, no less, some of whom had settled in Iberia in what is now Navarre, some in Britain, and a third part in Ireland; and by a list of the marvels of Britain (‘the first and greatest among the islands’), copied from an unknown author. The latter runs to 35 items, including the Peak District, Stonehenge, Loch Lomond, a rock in the shape of an altar, mountains, rivers, hit springs, barnacles, and a church where thieves found their hands glued to whatever they had stolen – they would be released only after confessing their sins. The sequence of matters relating to Britain concludes with a list of the archbishops of Canterbury and of the popes from whom they had received the pallium, a liturgical vestment that denoted their archiepiscopal status. This brought matters back to Ralph’s correspondence with the archbishop of Lyon. Britain was a rich and marvellous land, deeply rooted in a common European past, and evidently part of a community of Christian nations.
The apex of tradition
My far the largest chuck of the extended preface concerned the writing and reading of history. Immediately after the list of archbishops of Canterbury follows a prologue, where Ralph lamented the difficulty of keeping track of the multiplicity of events as kingdoms spread, and decades turned first into centuries and then millennia. He therefore divided history into three – highly original – categories: the most ancient (vetustissima, with connotations of ‘venerable’ and ‘august’, or, as Thomas Mann called in in the Magic Mountain, gilted in the patina of history), the ancient, and the modern. These stages were defined not by events, but by authors or types of sources and topic. Most ancient history was contained in the Old Testament and the Septuagint. Ancient history was recorded in the works of interpreters of Scripture, writers of Catholic histories, and those who reported prodigies and marvels. Ralph listed the examples of Orosius, Eusebius, (Pseudo-)Dionysius, Bede, Marianus Scotus and Tertullian (I will return to some of these). These more recent authorities could not be followed blindly, but had to be weighed up, and set against each other, with the most venerable and trustworthy to be credited over rival readings. The year 1147, Ralph stressed, caused particular challenges, and it was implicitly then that modern history began – that is, when Ralph’s own experiences and observations, his searching for evidence and collating information, became the chief source of information.
This division is unusual, not least because it put Ralph centre stage. Notwithstanding protestations of humility – readers were invited to correct errors and improve upon his record – he was the measure of modernity, the sole authority on whose witness could be drawn. Other writers, when seeking to divide the world into stages, normally linked them to salvation or political history: before and after the birth of Christ, for instance; before and after the Norman Conquest of 1066; or before and after the conversion of a particular community of monks or canons. Occasionally they also linked periods to eschatological categories, like the six ages, which would result in the Apocalypse, the rise of Antichrist, and the Second Coming of Christ. Not so Ralph of Diceto. For him, the means by which to measure the course of time was practice of history, the long line of illustrious predecessors on whose work he drew, whose insights he emulated and whose errors he corrected.
Immediately following the prologue, Ralph enumerated these authorities. The list runs to nearly four pages, and was among the most popular elements of the Abbreviationes. Together with the marvels of Britain, it was, for instance, excerpted into the compilation British Library Ms 4007, ff. 35r – 35v. Ralph’s honour call was a veritable who is who of classical, patristic and earlier medieval writers: Valerius Maximus, Flavius Josephus, Aulus Gellius, Tertullian, Eusebius, St Augustine, Orosius and many others. To some extent this was a very conventional selection, the standard array of authoritative texts invoked by chroniclers with access to a decent library, the common fare of many an extant medieval library catalogue or booklist. Equally familiar were some of the medieval writers included: Gregory of Tours and his sixth-century history of the Franks, Jordanes on the Goths, or Paul the Deacon on the Lombards. So far so canonical. But then matters get a bit more interesting. From the tenth century, he included Regino of Prüm of Lotharingia, whose history proved one of the most popular in high medieval Europe, but also Widukind of Corvey (or, as Ralph called him, Windichindus) and his history of the Saxons, and Odo of Cluny. From the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Marianus Scotus makes an appearance, an Irish monk active at Mainz, whose world chronicle, taking up events to 1082, became an essential reference work; but so did Yvo of Chartres, not because of any historiographical output, but because of his collection of canon law; Sigebert of Gembloux from Lotharingia; Robert of Torigni from Normandy, and Hugh of Halberstadt, a monk at St Victor in Paris. Perhaps characteristically, the last author listed is “Ralph, dean of the church of London, who undertook a book called ‘Ymagines historiarum’ from the year of the incarnation 1147, and continued it to 1190.”
Ralph was the heir to and the proud continuator of a venerable tradition. That self-image was not limited to the Abbreviatio – in opening the Ymagines, he explicitly stated that he had borrowed the title from Cassiodorus, who appears in the Abbreviatio not for his chronicle, but his Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (543–555). Only the most famous exemplars, it seems, would do. Tellingly, the Cotton manuscript follows the list of writers with an excerpt from Bede, but in a manner that almost ranks Ralph above medieval England’s most famous historian. Their names were written in the same ink, but while Ralph’s name had been inscribed in the margins – just as in the case of the other authorities included – Bede’s was placed inside the main text, just below the dean’s:
Now, writers of history often placed themselves in an established tradition. Sometimes, they acted as simple continuators. The Historia Pontificalis of Ralph’s contemporary John of Salisbury, for example, and the Chronicle of Robert of Torigni explicitly fashioned themselves as continuations of the world chronicle of Sigebert of Gembloux. William of Malmesbury (d. 1143) lamented the immense difficulty of writing English history between Bede and Eadmer. In each case, invoking precedent established an author as part of a tradition to be continued or revived. Continuity suggested trustworthiness and authority. It highlighted the achievements of the writer in question, but also acknowledged him as but the most recent in a long line of writers. But Ralph took this even further: he was not simply another link in the chain of tradition, but rather its current culmination.
That impression is reinforced by the absence of British writers other than Gildas and Bede. There was no Henry of Huntingdon, no William of Malmesbury, no John of Worcester – all widely read by Ralph’s contemporaries, as Jaakko Thakokallio has recently shown. What’s more, Ralph was in fact familiar with their oeuvre and that of other twelfth-century English historians. In the Ymagines, he portrayed the death of King Henry II as fulfilling the prophecies of Merlin – but Geoffrey of Monmouth is given no mention in this list of authorities. Similarly, Ralph borrowed several anecdotes about an emperor (probably Henry III) and an account of the origin of the family of Eustace of Boulogne from William of Malmesbury. And his account of eleventh-century English regnal politics was drawn largely from John of Worcester’s early twelfth-century chronicle. This erasure is all the more striking, given that Ralph was unusually careful in crediting authors whose work he copied. He clearly indicated the authorship of the prologues he excerpted, and did the same for lengthy passages incorporated into the main part of the Abbreviatio. Even quotes inserted in the margins were attributed to an author. Similarly, he regretted that he was unable to identify the author of his account of the settlement of Ireland. Still, where, when it came to more recent writers from England, William of Malmesbury and John of Salisbury portrayed themselves as indebted to and as walking in the footsteps of their forebears, Ralph omitted them completely. He was the apex of tradition, the first English chronicler since Bede worthy to rank among the likes of Augustine, Flavius Josephus, Isidore of Seville and Sigebert of Gembloux.
Some padding out seems to have occurred, though it is not always clear whether that was to promote Ralph’s learning or whether it simply reflected the manuscripts at his disposal. For example, the sections cited from Caesar were in fact copied straight from Aimon of Fleury’s late tenth/early eleventh-century world chronicle. Ralph may not, in fact, ever have set eye on a text of Caesar’s Gallic War. When Ralph listed Widukind of Corvey among great writers, he is described as having composed a history of the Saxons from the Incarnation to – depending on the manuscript – 968, 973 and 978. The Deeds of the Saxons actually opened with an account of their origin, and the fact that references to them by Lucan and Flavius Josephus attested to their antiquity. There is no extant manuscript of Widukind’s associated with England. Most likely, Ralph had encountered Widukind’s name in Sigebert of Gembloux, who borrowed from Widukind extensively (the index of the MGH edition of Sigebert contains no entry for Widukind, and the search function for the digital version is still disabled, hence this has to remain speculative). Towards the very end of the Abbreviatio, Ralph implicitly acknowledges his dept to Robert of Torigni: the year 1147 was when Robert had ended his chronicle. Ralph seems to have been unaware that Robert continued writing till the 1180s. With some further research, this list could probably be extended. Invoking a tradition did not necessarily mean that one was actually familiar with it.
How to read and write history around the year 1200
There is more that can be said about Ralph and the Abbreviatio. Its reception history, for example, remains quite fascinating: complete copies exist alongside highlights incorporated into compendia of useful and curious information, but without crediting their author – in a way, deserved comeuppance for Ralph’s self-portrayal.
More importantly, the Abbreviatio reveals quite a lot about contemporary horizons of expectation. Writing history placed an author, his peers and patrons in an established tradition of religious and literary excellence. That tradition shaped how an account of the past was supposed to be represented – indeed, Ralph’s prefatory materials closely follow the pattern he created with his excerpts from ancient writers. While they preceded – and hence foreshadowed – the latter in the ordering of the manuscript, this only served to reinforce the extent to which Ralph upheld an ancient and veritable tradition of writing about the past.
An undertaking on the scale of the Abbreviatio was also a prestige project. It required familiarity with a vast corpus of ancient authorities. Even if those were known only by name, one would at least still need to know who Eutropius and Solinus were, or someone as exotic to a twelfth-century English audience as Widukind of Corvey. Producing such texts required a considerable outlay in terms of time and resources. Poorer houses and cathedrals rarely produced history on as lavish and vast a scale as Ralph of Diss (it runs to over 260 pages in print). Funding such endeavours projected religious and literary excellence, wealth, influence and might. The Abbreviatio was history worth of only the richest and most powerful in England.
Finally, while Ralph never protested the novelty of his undertaking, one would be surprised had he not been aware of it. His was universal history in a truly European mould. It restored England’s place as part of a community of Christian realms, and could conceivably have been read as an extended rebuttal of Burchard of Worms and his failure to see the blatantly obvious. But this project created its own tensions. Since William of Malmesbury, English historical culture had been universal and European in its outlook. Roughly a third of William’s Deeds of the Kings of the English dealt with matters outside Britain. The reason that there had been no insular tradition of universal history was because many of its features had become part and parcel of writing regnal history. In a curious way, therefore, Ralph’s attempt to place England at the heart of Christendom was possible only by erasing his English forebears and sources.
Some further reading:
Laura Cleaver, Illuminated history books in the Anglo-Norman world, 1066-1272 (Oxford, 2018), 86-95 (the most recent study of Ralph’s illustrations)
Michael Staunton, The historians of Angevin England (Oxford, 2017), 67-81 (the most recent and fullest analysis of Ralph’s historiographical oeuvre)
Björn Weiler, ‘How unusual was Matthew Paris? The writing of universal history in Angevin England’, in: Universal chronicles in the High Middle Ages, ed. Michele Campopiano and Henry Bainton (Woodbridge, 2017), 199-222 (useful for the English tradition out of which Ralph emerged, and for his reception by England’s greatest chronicler)
There has been no English translation of the Abbreviatio, but the Latin edition is available at The historical works of Ralph de Diceto, dean of London, ed. W. Stubbs (London, 1876). The Abbreviatio is in volume one.
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