Habeas Corpus before Magna Carta

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— Leeds University UCU (@leedsucu) March 20, 2023

Long-term readers here will know the term ‘protochronism’, which I stole from an anthropologist friend of mine to cover the practice that so many historians have of finding something famously developed in a period or area more famous than one’s own, and then pointing out that one’s own actually did it first or better. I don’t like to pass these chances up when they occur, and back in early 2020 I found one while reading an ancient article about royal-aristocratic relations in tenth- to twelfth-century Navarra. I’ve been saving it up till my blog clock rolled round to 2020 since then. The phenomenon in question here would be the ancient right of habeas corpus, enshrined in English law and explained by that always-useful textbook, 1066 and All That, as follows:¹

[This right] “meant it was wrong if people were put in prison except for some reason, and that people who had been mutilated by the King… should always be allowed to keep their bodies.”

A more serious definition can be found on Wikipedia, where else, which at the time of writing explained it as follows:

“Habeas corpus is a recourse in law through which a person can report an unlawful detention or imprisonment to a court and request that the court order the custodian of the person, usually a prison official, to bring the prisoner to court, to determine whether the detention is lawful.”

Either way, you see where the notion attaches to the Latin; fundamentally, you have the right to your own body, so constraint of it by imprisonment needs to have a justification. This is canonically supposed to go back to the great concession of rights to the baronage of England by King John in 1215 that we know as Magna Carta, which does indeed contain a clause to roughly this effect, although the actual term Habeas corpus took a few more years to arise.² Since John was a bit of a one for unjustified imprisonment, among the hundred other civil abuses that Magna Carta tries to prohibit, you can see why it was on people’s minds. I don’t suppose the baronage of England meant to establish a fundamental human right so much as keep themselves out of the clink, but there you go. Humans rarely mean to make their history, I figure. But wait! What is this here clause I see before me?

“Et nullo homine in terra de illo Rege, in priso non sedeat, si directo ibi facere non potest, donec tornet ad suam casam.”

I render that roughly as:

“And let no man in the land of that King stay in prison, if his case cannot be dealt with directly, but rather let him return to his home.”

You have to admit, the core idea is the same.³ The context is an odd one, however. The document was apparently put together in Saragossa in 1134, straight after the death of King Alfonso I the Battler of Aragón. Now, I haven’t read everything about Alfonso I I’d like to have, and myabe this is all well-known to his scholars, but he had run his kingdom pretty hard, as this article explains it, cutting in on many a noble privilege by hiring in foreign soldiery and setting them up in newly-conquered lands so that they threatened the influence of the old Aragonese noble families. Also, and highly inconveniently, he left no male heir and tried to will his kingdoms to the Military Orders.⁴ The collected élites of Aragón, new or old, could all agree that that was a bad idea, so this gathering at Saragossa had a pretty open opportunity to reshape the kingdom as they wanted it, firstly by choosing a successor and then, presumably, by getting him to swear to this document of which the clause above is the fourteenth and final. The document, I should say, claims to be the privileges that the infanzones (basically, gentlemen) and barons of Aragón had had in the time of King Pedro I, Alfonso I’s immediate predecessor. In other words, as depicted here they were claiming to be turning back the clock on Alfonso’s abuses, but there’s no trace that such rights were ever declared in Pedro’s time, so you have to see this more as a sort of Aragonese noble wish-list, to bind a king who had yet to be chosen.⁵

I was slightly surprised to find that this document does actually exist in what appears to be a contemporary copy, but it does, as Archivo Municipal de Zaragoza, R.3, so here it is

To give themselves some chance of this sticking, the assembled gathering got pretty much every surrounding major figure to come and witness, including the Count of Barcelona (then Ramon Berenguer IV), the Count of Urgell, the Count of Pallars (all in Catalonia) and the Count of Foix (in Provence), plus two Aragonese counts but also, and most impressively, Alfonso I’s step-son, Emperor Alfonso VII of León (as he signs himself).⁶ I imagine all were fairly happy to see whoever actually succeeded here thus trammelled by his nobility. But still, what the nobles had done included inventing the right to no imprisonment without charge.

Now, it should be said, I don’t think they got to have this concession. In the end, the succession problem was solved by hauling Alfonso’s brother Ramiro out of the monastery where he was, crowning him and marrying him to someone post haste (that being Agnes, daughter of Duke William IX of Aquitaine and herself already widow of Viscount Aimery of Thouars). They then had a daughter, who was betrothed almost forthwith to that same Count-Marquis Ramon Berenguer IV of Barcelona, who thus became ‘Lord of Aragón’, and its active ruler, while Ramiro returned, still as king, to the monastery (and Agnes went to the nunnery of Fontevraud).⁷ As far as I know, there’s no sign that either Ramiro or Ramon Berenguer accepted these terms as part of their succession. But then, John repudiated Magna Carta within months as well; it was his son Henry III who had to concede it again.⁸ The idea was out there, though, and if all this shows is that it was also out there in Aragón eighty years before John was forced to concede it, I’m happy with that!

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1. Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 and All That: A Memorable History of England, comprising all the parts you can remember, including 103 Good Things, 5 Bad Kings and 2 Genuine Dates (London 1930), p. 65.

2. Ralph V. Turner, Magna Carta through the Ages (Harlow 2003), 69-73, and see pp. 161, 194-196 and 208-218 on the afterlife of the idea in law.

3. José-Maria Lacarra, “« Honores » et « tenencias » en Aragon (XI^e siècle)”, transl. Pierre Bonnassie and Y. Bonnassie in Annales du Midi Vol. 80 (Toulouse 1968), pp. 485–528, DOI: 10.3406/anami.1968.4454, Ap. III.

4. See Elena Lourie, “The Will of Alfonso I, ‘El Batallador,’ King of Aragon and Navarre: A Reassessment” in Speculum Vol. 50 (Cambridge MA 1975), pp. 635–651, DOI: 10.2307/2855471, repr. in Lourie, Crusade and Colonisation: Muslims, Christians and Jews in Medieval Aragon, Variorum Collected Studies 317 (Aldershot 1990), chapter III, and for a more recent take on Alfonso I see Clay Stalls, Possessing the Land: Aragon’s Expansion into Islam’s Ebro Frontier under Alfonso the Battler (1104-1134), The Medieval Mediterranean 7 (Leiden 1995).

5. Lacarra, “« Honores » et « tenencias » en Aragon”, p. 520.

6. I glean these details from the text of the document itself, ibid. pp. 518-519.

7. Thomas N. Bisson, The Medieval Crown of Aragon: a short history (Oxford 2000), pp. 14-19.

8. Turner, Magna Carta, pp. 77-100.

Two Big Noises Sadly Quieted

The winter holiday always makes posting difficult, and, as darkly implied last post, I have to shunt my next planned post because of people whom I can’t ignore making their final departures from among us. One was an academic contact, the other, as sometimes happens on this blog, a musician I cared about (I suppose I still do; tenses are weird around the deceased). I thought for a few minutes about some way I could combine reflections on them, but to be honest, other than that neither of them minded causing a bit of trouble when they thought they were in the right, that both were 82 when they died, and that I imagine if they caught the same bus to the beyond they got on fine, it didn’t seem like a respectful way to salute either of them. So I’ll record them separately and hope that, if you’re here for historical content, you can hang on a moment.

Photo from Nik Turner’s final Facebook post, here borrowed from the The Isle of Thanet News, recording the death of a son of Margate

So, Nicholas Turner, known to one and all as Nik, saxophonist, flautist and hippy to the end, the so-called ‘Spirit of Hawkwind’ and the man after whose features that legendary band was legendarily named, was one of the musicians I’ve probably seen most often on a stage. I saw him with Hawkwind, in a couple of the ten-minute slots he and the main band were talking again in the 1990s, with his punk outfit Inner City Unit, under his own name, with his various post-Hawkwind revivals like Space Ritual, and with several combinations of the above. He was capable of stealing most shows, even when he himself was woefully under-rehearsed; he seemed to have played withb everyone in the rock world; and he was unfailingly cheerful and polite to anyone who’d come out to see him. His retirement plan seemed to be to record a new album every year until he no longer needed to, and I’m not going to say they were all fantastic, but he did write and record some of the most iconic space-rock ever and at least one of the very weirdest albums I ever heard, and if you’ve seen my music collection you’ll know that neither of those are minor honours.

I got into much of that weird music via an ancient listserv mailing list which closed, finally, earlier this year. Up till then, more or less all news about Hawkwind and its friends and relations had reached me by that list. Thus, five weeks or so ago when I had Nik’s Space Gypsy on the stereo, I suddenly thought, ‘Christ, if he’d died I wouldn’t know.’ And of course, as almost has to be true when one of those forebodings strikes you, he’d moved on to the next phase of his cosmic journey, as his closest are choosing to put it, eleven days before. I’m not sure how comfortable a life he’d led, but it does seem reasonable to say that he spent it doing pretty much what he wanted and that lots of people were always glad to see him, and I personally would settle for such an epitaph, no problem.

Professor Paul Hyams presiding over a brunch debate at Cornell University in 2005, photo from the Cornell Chronicle, linked through

Then a few days later I got a text message, itself not untraumatic as my phone was slowly ceasing to work and has now had to be replaced with something more like a phone as others recognise them, recording the second departure. It took me a little while to confirm that Professor Paul Hyams had in fact gone, as new phone or not I’m still not doing Facebook and, as with Nik, that seemed to be where the news broke, but eventually his erstwhile employer and in some sense also mine, Pembroke College Oxford, posted an obituary, and I had to believe it. Cornell, his more recent posting, followed up a few days later.

Cover of Paul Hyams’ Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca NY 2003)

I don’t think anyone would say anything against Paul’s scholarship; his work focused primarily on justice and dispute resolution in high medieval England and the things they revealed about that society, and his book Rancor and Reconciliation is probably still the go-to treatment of feud-like dispute settlement by violence and the attempts by government either to stop or to manage it for post-conquest England. He also wrote on the origins of the common law, a field in which from what I see from the outside agreement is basically impossible but where his contributions were well respected. However, that tendency to cause trouble I mentioned meant that opinion was probably more divided on him as personality; even I saw him launch quite aggressive questions into a seminar discussion, as if scholarship was a gladiatorial arena and the contest won by making everyone else feel awkward (some gentle examples at the Cornell article which provided the photo above give an impression). I have to say that I never found him anything other than sympathetic, witty and kind in actual conversation, however. There might be reasons for that, one being that my father also used to play social engagement like that sometimes and it’s remained a habit among some of my family, so that I was just used to deflecting it; but actually, I don’t remember ever having to do that with Paul myself. And I think that the softer and odder reason is that I first actually met him in the company of Another Damned Medievalist, who knew his wife and could thus threaten him with unspecified social sanction when he played up, as a consequence of which he ruefully didn’t bother when he was around her and a more human Hyams came out instead. And because I connected to that network somehow, I always got the human Hyams. I may have been quite lucky in that; but still, as both scholar and raconteur, wit and good company, I shall miss him. There were many good reasons to do so.

So there is the sad news of the end of 2022, perhaps not all of it but I hope so, and soon, very soon I hope, I can try to prevent the blog falling further behind than the three-and-a-bit year mark I’ve been holding this year. But for now, I hope you’ll forgive me saying goodbye to these two gents, both big noises in their fields whose sound we shan’t hear again.

The conference before the storm: Leeds International Medieval Congress, 2019

Looking back on the last pre-Covid International Medieval Congress seems like a different world by now, even though we’ve but recently had the 2022 one, where, ironically or not, I caught my first dose of Covid. I guess that, because of that and because of the big push towards online hybrid participation that the pandemic gave us, it’s clear already that we’re never going back to quite the same experience of a campus full of medievalists meeting and interacting, but will now live with the sense, firstly, that that may be dangerous as well as desirable and that some people just aren’t going to be able to take part, and secondly that a lot of the action is in fact happening off-stage, in the ether.¹ So this was the end of an era, or the last stop before a change of trains, or some other metaphor. And, to be honest, because of that, before picking up my notes on it I would have said I remembered very little of what happened at the 2019 Congress, as opposed to any other year since the IMC moved to the Central campus. I didn’t organise anything myself, is all I would have told you this morning, and on inspection that is completely untrue: Rethinking the Medieval Frontier ran for a full day, with people speaking from two continents about places from the Canaries to Kashmir. So as it transpires, I was there (obviously) and was pretty busy (nearly as obviously) and learnt a good few things (thankfully), and it was actually an impressively international and intersectional gathering that had all kinds of promise for the future threaded through it, and it still seems worth writing a report on it. It’s just that the future took a different turn… Because these reports are always huge, however, and not necessarily of interest to all (certainly not throughout), I’ll do what has become my practice and give you the running order of my conference experience, and then put actual commentary below a cut and let you decide (the few of you reading on the actual site rather than in your e-mail, anyway) how much further you care to go.

Monday 1st July 2019

119. Materialities at Birkbeck, I: between mind and matter in medieval monetary policy

• Rebecca Darley, “Discourses on Absence, or Kalabhra and Vakataka Monetary Policy in Early Medieval Southern India”
• Chris Budleigh, “Surplus and Scarcity: the contested relationship between monetary supply and aristocratic land management in Comnenian Byzantium”
• Sidin Sunny, “The Lighter Dirham: power relationships in medieval Spanish society and tendencies in coin fineness and debasement.”

240. The Use and Construction of Place, Space, and Materiality in Late Antiquity

• Edward James, “Materiality and the Holy in Gregory of Tours”
• Guy Halsall, “Trace, Space, Place: the materiality of identity”
• Catherine-Rose Hailstone, “Place and Space: Gregory, Materiality, and the Fear of God”

334. Seas and Floods in the Islamic West

• Andrew Marsham, “Nile Flood Levels and Egyptian Revolts in the Early Medieval Period”
• Xavier Ballestín, “Ships, Seafarers, Sails and Bows: a source approach to marine networks and coastal settlement in the Western Mediterranean basin on the eve of the rabaḍ uprising in Córdoba, 202 AH/818 AD”
• Maribel Fierro, “Sea in the Life Narratives of Andalusi Scholars and Saints”

Tuesday 2nd July

530. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, I: Iberian Spaces

• Jonathan Jarrett, “Ends of Empire: Two Island Frontiers between Byzantium and Islam”
• Stacey Murrell, “Centering the Marginal: concubines on Castilian frontiers, c. 1050-1350
• Sandra Schieweck, “Iberian Border Regimes: the case of Castile and Navarre in the late Middle Ages”

630. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier, 2018, II: Administration and Control

• Luca Zavagno, “‘The Byzantine Liquid Frontiers’, or How to Administer Insular and Coastal Peripheral Spaces and Stop Worrying About It”
• Davor Salihović, “The Distribution of Bordering in Late Medieval Hungary”

730. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, III: between religions

• Roberta Denaro, “Far from the Corrupting City: building the frontier as a stage for martyrdom and asceticism, 8th-10th centuries”
• Turaç Hakalmaz, “‘Islandness’ of a Coastal Kingdom: the case of Cilician Armenia”
• Aniket Tathagata Chettry, “Exploring the Complexities of a Brahmanical Frontier in Bengal”

830. Rethinking the Medieval Frontier 2018, IV: dealing with power on the frontier

• Jakub Kabala, “Claiming Authority over the Edge of the World: Frontier Strategies in Salzburg, c. 870″
• Zeynep Aydoğan, “Conquest and Territoriality in the Late Medieval Anatolian Frontiers”
• Andreas Obenaus, “To Whom Might/Do They Belong? Claims to Newly-Discovered Atlantic Islands in the Late Medieval Period”

Wednesday 3rd July 2019

1048. Forging Memory: false documents and historical consciousness in the Middle Ages, I

• Graham Barrett, “Charters, Forgeries, and the Diplomatic of Salvation in Medieval Iberia”
• Daria Safranova, “Using and Detecting Forged Charters in Northern Iberia, c. 900-1100″
• Levi Roach, “True Lies: Leo of Vercelli, Arduin of Ivrea, and the Struggle for Piedmont”

1140. Byzantine Materialities, II: Ephemera and Iconoclasm

• Rachel Banes, “You Can’t Write That Here! Mapping Religious and Secular Graffiti in Asia Minor, c. 300-700 CE”
• Daniel K. Reynolds, “Images, Icons and Apologetic: Christian Iconoclasm in Early Islamic Palestine”
• Leslie Brubaker, “Dancing in the Streets: the ephemera of Byzantine processions”

1252. Transport, Traders, and Trade Routes in Early Medieval Europe

• Ewa Magdalena Charowska, “Dugout Builders: the trademark of the Sclaveni in the 6th and 7th Centuries”
• Daniel Melleno, “From Strangers to Neighbors: Franks and Vikings in the late 9th century”
• Thomas Freudenhammer, “Rafica: early medieval caravan trade between the West Frankish kingdom and al-Andalus”
• Victor Farías Zurita, “Response”

1340. Byzantine Materialities, IV: workshops, trade and manuscripts

• Shaun Tougher, “Macedonian Materialities: the Menologion of Basil II”
• Chris Wickham, “Materialities of Middle Byzantine Exchange in the Aegean”
• Flavia Vanni, “Men at work: stucco workshops on Mount Athos”

Thursday 4th July 2019

1509. Gold, Coins and Power in the Early Middle Ages

• Marco Cristini, “The War of the Coins: Numismatic Evidence for the Gothic War”
• Nicholas Rogers, “Angels and the King’s Evil: projections of royal authority”
• Vera Kemper, “‘All that glitters is not gold’: heroes and material wealth”

1652. The Monetary System and Currency in Eurasia in the Pre-Modern Era, II: money and its circulation in British Isles and Scandinavia

• Yuta Uchikawa, “Commerce and Coin Circulation around the Irish Sea in the 9th and 10th Centuries”
• Hiroko Yanagawa, “The Irish-Sea Imitations and their Circulation during the Middle Ages”
• Kenji Nishioka, “The Use of Money in Scotland during the 12th and 13th Centuries”
• Takahiro Narikawa, “Church and the Money Circulation in High Medieval Norway”

1738. Materialities and Religion in Medieval Armenia and Byzantium

• Katherine New, “The Representations of Material Objects in Medieval Culture: statue or doll in Byzantine mythography”
• Carmen Morais Puche, “Medieval Byzantine Coinage in Patrimonio Nacional: image, materiality and religions”

Seminars CCLXIX & CCLXX: From opposite ends of the Mediterranean

I’ve just had a look through my seminar notes from March 2019 and decided that two still bear the telling. As ever, it is good of those who still read here to bear with my efforts to reduce the backlog in the face of the fact that things continue to occur meanwhile… But back then when my backlog is, at the beginning of the month I was present on the 4th when Professor John Moreland addressed Leeds’s Institute for Medieval Studies Medieval Group with the title, “Sheffield Castle: archives, excavations, and augmented reality, 1927-2018”, and then I was around again on the 27th when Dr Helen Birkett addressed the IMS Medieval History Seminar with the title, “News, Current Events, History: The Preservation of News Texts from 1187/8”. I’ve got no way to tie these together except that they were in the same month in the same university and I saw them both, but why should we need more, eh?

Seminar poster by Thomas Smith

So to begin with Professor Moreland’s paper, I have to admit that I did not previously know that Sheffield had had a castle. But there was one, and a recent bequest had enabled the University’s then-untroubled archaeology department to start a partnership up with the contract organisation Wessex Archaeology (who for reasons unexplained have an office in Sheffield) and the university’s department of Computer Science, to go over the work that had been done on it and try to synthesize the results of old and new digs. The castle has been dug quite a lot, apparently, being located, under what was between the 1960s and very recently the city market, by an amateur archaeologist in the 1920s and then dug for a decade, with some more work on its perimeter in the 1950s and new work just beginning at the date of this paper. The paper was as much about why what had been done had been done as what it actually was, but the basic story was that some kind of castle was probably put here in the 12th century by one William de Loyelote, built up rather with a gatehouse after license was given to crenellate in 1258, and then possibly burnt in a sack of the city of 1266 by a man really genuinely called John De Eville. There was some rebuilding thereafter and it was still a going concern in the 16th century, and indeed in the English Civil War though perhaps not going enough as it fell to siege in 1644 and 1646 and was slighted in 1649-1650.

Archaeological digging at the site of Sheffield Castle in the 1920s, 1930s or 1950s – sadly, Sheffield’s website doesn’t say which

The question that now arises is what bits of this actually survive. The 1920s-30s digs found lots, and some of that was photographed in situ, very luckily for such old archaeology, but that archaeologist, Leslie Armstrong, tended to date what he found from known history, such as the 1266 burning, so that various wooden structures showing destruction by fire he considered to be pre-1266 and everything above them to have been the 13th-17th-century building, which Professor Moreland though would likely prove wrong given the relative depths of stratification. In that case, this fire must have happened earlier and the 1266 sack of the city may not have hurt the castle at all. Another point of difference was over the material that Armstrong considered to have been ‘Saxon’, an alleged cruck-built building in the central courtyard and some of the material culture. Professor Moreland, however, thought that there was no pre-Conquest material at all, and that Armstrong was just after pushing his native city’s origins back to when it could be ‘Germanic’ rather than ‘French’, this mattering rather more in the atmosphere of the 1930s, though not always that way round… The oldest remains Professor Moreland had been able to date were late 11th-century, at which point there seems to have been a Norman motte with maybe a wooden gatehouse. But by this stage he had five minutes left to talk, so we didn’t get all the details of that I might have wanted, and the promised ‘augmented reality’ ironically never materialised, then or now. However, you can find out more! Wessex Archaeology have a good web-page on the digs, including their 602-page site report which, I admit, I didn’t read for this post (or at all), and a video by Professor Moreland explaining what the augmented reality stuff would have been like.¹ Also, not very long after this paper, there emerged a book, so it is certainly possible for you to learn more.²

Dr Birkett’s paper was a very different sort of thing, not just because it completed within the time allowed but also because it was a proper old-fashioned text-mining medievalist study, which as I only now find out, had already been published at the point when she gave it to us.³ The object of the search was to find out how people in the West found out about the recapture of Jerusalem by the forces of Islam, under the famous Saladin, in 1187. We know that it created enough of a furore that eventually King Richard I of England, King Philip II Augustus of France and Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa all went out to try and get it back – but how did the news actually get to their royal ears?

Poster again by Thomas Smith

Obviously, the answer was probably letters, but what I hadn’t expected was firstly that we would have any such letters surviving, and secondly where they turn up. These were surprises because actually, there are 13, but none are actual autographs by people of 1187; instead, such texts were later copied into chronicles and histories, or just copied; we have some loose copies which got used as bindings, and one rather mystifying copy of a letter from Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem (the Latin patriarch, despite his name) that now survives in the Arxiu Parroquial of Cardona, of which town we heard only a couple of posts ago so you know it’s in Catalonia. In fact two such letters made it to Catalonia, but it doesn’t seem to have raised the same response as other places… But from the image I was pretty sure it was a local copy – I know the scripts! – so there was a kind of response even so.

But that is a whole book’s worth of study and for someone else. Better questions to ask might be, as did Alan Murray, of course present, whether multiple copies of such letters were being sent, or whether one was sent and then copied for dissemination, and Dr Birkett thought the latter. There is a particular one by a Templar called Terricas (apparently) which exists in more copies than any other, and Dr Birkett thought that the actual man’s journey westwards to seek help could be tracked. I don’t, myself, see why that precludes him fetching up in, say, Genoa, and then writing his letter and having copies sent hither and thither; but of course, I haven’t seen it, and either solution does explain why what we have is not the original letters, and reminds us that in this era (and to be honest, our one too) a letter only arrives because someone or a chain of someones physically brings it; that process also attracted questions, but answers are hard to provide. Dr Birkett herself was more interested in why these texts were still being copied up long after they were ‘news’, because outside the chronicle texts the preservation rarely seems to have been part of a plan; their homes were often blank folios in manuscripts made for other purposes. It is possible that, since Jerusalem was never recaptured (unless we count Emperor Frederick II’s attempt, which because the Church judged him to be a bad guy we seem never to do), this was ‘news’ that never got old. But the samples are very small, and I was myself wary of any generalisation of plotting trends of 2-4 manuscripts. But the questions are still interesting to ask, and maybe there are more answers to be found.

That will have to do you for this week. Next post will be some more current news and then I have an old musing that never before got written up about the role of the blog in/as scholarship, so please stay tuned for those, and if that’s not enough I hope to have more critique of a certain historian of early medieval military matters ready to go after that, surely therefore something for all tastes. Stay well and safe till then!

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1. It is Sheffield Castle, Sheffield, South Yorkshire: Final Archaeological Evaluation Report, by Ashley Tuck, 201540.05 (Sheffield 2020), online here.

2. John Moreland, Dawn Hadley and Ashley Tuck, Sheffield Castle: Archaeology, Archives, Regeneration, 1927–2018 (York 2020), online here.

3. Helen Birkett, “News in the Middle Ages: News, Communications, and the Launch of the Third Crusade in 1187–1188” in Viator Vol. 49 (Turnhout 2018), pp. 23–61, DOI: 10.1484/J.VIATOR.5.119573.

Dead Vikings in Carlisle

This gallery contains 16 photos.

Sorry for the absence: despite working to contract at the moment, it turns out life fills up blogging time with work for other people sometimes. In order to get something out for the Bank Holiday weekend, however, here is a … Continue reading →

Seminar CCL: heritage employment for historians

Obviously, if I thought all was well in academic employment in the UK I wouldn’t be on strike right now for the fourth time since I got this job, and it is clear that despite what the vice-chancellors would have the world believe, the number of others who feel that way is growing, not shrinking, each time action is resorted to.

The famous @leedsucu running picket! 💪 pic.twitter.com/YT2T8pCx1L

— Emily (@heliotropia) December 2, 2021

All the same, if there is an area of work in a worse state than UK academia for precarious and underpaid employment, it is surely the heritage and museums sector, a sector whose pay is already so poor that people can often only do it as the second job in a household, meaning that the majority of staff in it are female but somehow the majority of management is still male.¹ I came from that sector to academia, twice, because of the precareity and low wage; I actually enjoyed the museum work more and might have stayed if there had been any prospect of permanence or progress.² But I was fortunate enough to work in museums with some private funding, and even then, the job I held at the Fitzwilliam Museum for five years, on a rolling annual contract whose renewal was never certain, does not now exist. I left just in time to see the UK government utterly gut the sector, with national funding briefly being distributed through only four ‘hub’ museums in England, all in the Golden Triangle, before settling on steady money to 14 ‘national’ museums, 13 of which are based wholly or partly in London. Every other museum in England is either privately funded or paid for by the local councils which the same government also progressively defunded under austerity, leaving them surviving on volunteer labour, what grants they can scrounge, or a dripfeed of emergency funding that doesn’t allow the establishment of a stable staff base to carry on any work that gets started. (The situation in Scotland and Wales is a bit different, and I’m not really up to speed with it, so while I realise that this is to continue that Anglo-centric London-focused attitude, I’m not going to talk about the Home Nations in this post. Sorry. Comments that would educate me are very much welcomed, though!)

So, for all these reasons, whenever someone in academic history hits upon the idea that we could increase our graduates’ employment prospects by directing them at the heritage sector, my reaction is more or less this:

And thus you may imagine that when I learned that, on 14 May 2018, the Medieval Group in the Institute for Medieval Studies here at the University of Leeds were hosting a three-speaker workshop entitled “A Day in the Life of… Heritage Professionals”, I was initially a bit sceptical that we should really be doing this. But it was actually very good, and got a good discussion going, and maybe represents a perspective that is more realistic than the one I’ve just given above, so I thought that I should in fairness present it. Our three speakers were:

• Kathryn Baxter (Leeds Museums and Galleries), “A Day in the Life of… Heritage Professionals”
• Chris Tuckley (York Archaeological Trust), “The Jorvik Group”
• Eleanor Wilkinson-Keys (then Wakefield Council, but see below!), “A Day in the Life…”

I had already met Dr Baxter, because she is the Curator of Archaeology at the city museums, which among other things – many other things – puts her in charge of their coin collection, with which some day I hope to do some work. Her actual speciality is Neolithic stuff, but Leeds Discovery Centre houses 25,000 objects from the far end of then to the current end of now, and 15,000 coins (which does seem to be the magic number for underused coin collections I know about). Some of those objects are in drawers, some in cabinets, some in freezers and some are too big to be in anything except the building, and Dr Baxter is the only archaeologist on staff, so specialisation isn’t really an option. This was one of the questions that came up, about how to cope with such breadth, and Dr Baxter and Dr Tuckley gave different sides of the same answer: you can’t really do your thing any more, but you can acquire a lot of new things!

Interior space at Jorvik Viking Centre, photo by the Jorvik Group of which Dr Tuckley is part and published in ‘Review: Jorvik Viking Centre’, Current Archaeology no. 327 (London 2017), linked through

Dr Tuckley, then as now Head of Interpretaton and Engagement at his Trust, was more optimistic perhaps because of having slightly more spare staff resource; he works primarily at the famous Jorvik Viking Centre, and for what he’s doing, which is the most patron-facing aspect of the work, just has more staff than Dr Baxter does for her rôle, I guess. Still, the tale he told of getting to where he was, and getting Jorvik to where it was, twice over, was no less frantic and exhausting to hear. The trust of which he is part also had bases on several different constituencies, with heritage units at Steffield, Nottingham and Glasgow, all staffed by ex-commercial archaeologists. Of course, Sheffield’s is now gone and I don’t know how true any of this now is, but at that stage it sounded like a healthily-diversified portfolio. Of course, you would hope a public-sector body didn’t need a business survival strategy, but that’s not where we are these days.

Restored walls at Pontefract Castle, photo at their site, linked through

Eleanor, meanwhile, was the most directly-connected of the speakers to the IMS, having lately been a doctoral student there, but was now coordinating the volunteer staff at Pontefract Castle, one of our locality’s lesser-known medieval sites but one where an awful lot has been done in recent years by volunteers, including several from the IMS. The scheme had been built from the ground up and at the time of the workshop was 4 roles being filled by 70 people, so coordinating it was itself a full-time job, though I don’t remember if Eleanor was actually being paid full-time. Of course, actually doing stuff with a site tends to draw people in to see, so they were still recruiting volunteers but also finding more stuff which they would ideally be doing. Quite how far this job could have been expanded, I don’t know, but since Eleanor is now a Curatorial Assistant at the Royal Armouries in Leeds I suppose that one might argue that it served at least one purpose, and Pontefract Castle still has its volunteers, so this, like Jorvik, was probably a success story in the making.

So where does this leave my gloomy prognosis about graduate employment in the heritage sector? Eleanor has clearly managed it, Kat was there doing it, and Chris Tuckley, as it turned out, was not only an IMS graduate himself but had two more of them on his staff. Nor is he alone in this: someone who was then one of my research postgraduate advisees has also gone to work in the sector and looks likely to stay there for now. One lesson from this might then be that, if you want a job in the heritage sector, come and do a doctorate at the Institute for Medieval Studies! But it was also, I think, a good and somewhat bracing clarification about what that heritage job would look like, and how what it was not was a chance to continue your research. One question that was asked was what each of the speakers would do with one day of fully-funded unconstrained time, and all the answers were ironic, but only one even featured research. At the moment, academia can still sometimes give you that unconstrained time, though one has to ignore a lot of electronic clamour to keep it that way. But as of 2018, at least, I had reasons to think better of the state of the heritage sector than I had been used to do, so this was worth it for that dose of realism and balance as well as for the interest of the various work the speakers had going on.

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1. The best figures I can find for this are four to eight years old, in Equality and diversity within the arts and cultural sector in England: evidence and literature review, by Andy Parkinson and by Jamie Buttrick, Final Report (Newcastle-upon-Tyne 2017), online here, so it’s possible things have now changed, but with the pandemic as a factor, we might gloomily guess which way: see Megan Frederickson, “COVID-19’s gendered impact on academic productivity”, preprint in GitHub, 2020, online here, being the broadest-ranging study I’ve seen so far; all the published ones are hard-science-specific.

2. I didn’t necessarily realise this until my last day at the Fitzwilliam, actually, when, searching for something to say at my leaving do, I found myself saying that I’d never regretted having to come into work there. As far as I could remember, it was true. I’m not ragging on academia specifically when I say that I’ve not got that from any other job before or since.

Books and coins in Blackburn

Having been sadly recalled to the present, it now seems safe to retreat again to the past, and specifically 9th and 10th November 2017, when I was in Blackburn by way of a favour for someone who often features on this blog, Dr Rebecca Darley of Birkbeck, University of London. A further chain of favours and persons hangs thereby, and the story of how I or any of us came to be there is a little complex, but it can be told fairly briefly and involves a conference and some coins, so is definitely the kind of story this blog tells. So: it begins with an industrial ropemaker in the town of Blackburn by the name of Robert E. Hart.¹ Hart was quite the collector, especially in the field of manuscripts and early printed books but also of Roman and Hellenistic coins, and when he died in 1946 he left most of his collection to the people of Blackburn as, as he had put it, “something for my native town”. And there, in what is now Blackburn Museum, those collections largely remain.

R. E. Hart, in a much-reproduced portrait here borrowed from and linked through to Wall Street International’s page about the permanent exhibition at Blackburn

It took a while for them to come to notice, however. In the proceedings of this conference, Dr Cynthia Johnston explains how their cataloguing in 1962 led a thin trail of scholars, one by one, north-west to see the various things which interested them, and in 1976 some of the manuscripts were exhibited, but it was really only when Cynthia herself got involved in 2012 that a momentum built up.² By the time I made it to Blackburn to see any of this stuff there had been two exhibitions and two conferences, all in London where Cynthia is based, but this was the first event that had really been possible in Blackburn itself.³ This was the running order (and where the papers occur in the proceedings, I’ve given a reference).

• Nigel Morgan, “The Blackburn Psalter: a 13th-century manuscript by the artists of the Bible of William of Devon”⁴
• Scot McKendrick, “Contextualising the Art and Innvoations of Blackburn’s Treasure of Early Netherlandish Illumination (Hart 20884)”⁵
• Catherine Yvard, “Picturae antiquae: a dismembered Book of Hours reconsidered (Hart 20984)”
• Eric White, “Toward a History of Early Printing used as Binding Waste”⁶
• Rebecca Darley with Jackson Hase, “Collections to Think With”⁷
• Emma Herbert-Davies, “The Winchester Cabinet: unlocking an eighteenth-century coin collection”
• Cleo Cantone, “Bird’s Eye View: travel and pilgrimage to the holy cities of Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina”⁸
• Ed Potten, “A Monastic Pharmacopeia: Robert Edward Hart’s copy of the 1485 Gart der Gesundheit“⁹
• Cynthia Johnston, “‘Given Me by Mr. Maggs’: the relevations of R. E. Hart’s ‘Connoisseur’s Library'”
• David McKitterick, “Collecting – For Whom?”¹⁰

Obviously, this is not really my field for the most part and there are only limited comments about the actual papers I can make here; if I don’t mention them all, it’s not because the ones I don’t mention were any less interesting, it’s just because my notes don’t now let me give a fair account. My notes make it look as if I was especially struck by Eric White’s painstaking detective work in tracking down fragments of books now scattered about various European libraries after being dismembered to serve as bindings for later books, which he described as basically a habit of 1550-1650. The best example he gave was a 1459 Psalter printed in Mainz, which went through 56 editions and which we have in bits of 70 copies; all but 10 of those bits are binding waste…¹¹ Emma, of whose work we’ve read here before, introduced the Winchester Cabinet in the Brotherton Library at Leeds to this audience as a kind of parallel to Hart’s collection. Rebecca’s paper was (as you’d expect me to say) excellent, and focused on the learned networks into which Hart’s coin collecting, as revealed by the notes in his ledgers and papers that are still in the museum, propelled him and the numismatic world in which he thus took part. Lastly David McKitterick rang numerous bells of recollection for me by linking Hart’s activity to a wider world of industrial collecting, already gestured at by several other speakers but here explored, even if through the medium of books, by reference to many other collectors, some of whose coins I’d worked on in my time at the Fitzwilliam long ago; it seems as if it was pretty normal to acquire both manuscripts and coins in this world. In the proceedings of the conference, Rebecca explores this world still further with some really interesting reflections on the civic identities and local pride which explain why these collections actually exist where they do to be used, and Cynthia also does a more holistic take on the world of book-collecting in which Hart so thoroughly took part.¹² And the exhibition which went with all of this made very clear what a richness there was to display, and included a small display of some of Hart’s coins with some of his books and study tools, as if he’d just stepped away from the desk for a minute to check something and would be back when he’d found it.

Manuscripts from the Hart Collection in the Blackburn gallery

But, you may reasonably be asking, where are you in all this, Jonathan? You wouldn’t be blogging it unless there were something about you, now, would you? And I might, actually, but this time that’s a fair cop. You see, as part of the activity around the exhibition, the Museum had been able to get money together for a refurbishment of its major gallery and the construction of a new study space above it (as well as, for a short while at least, the salaries of the staff necessary to make any of this stuff available…). And so, the evening before the conference, there was an open evening for the new study room, with handling sessions available with some of the collection objects. Rebecca had been asked to do one of these sessions with some of the coins—because the Blackburn collection of coins is rather bigger than just Hart’s stuff, and includes some really unusual stuff such as a decent-sized and basically unknown collection of Sasanian Persian drachms—but she was teaching that evening, so asked me if I could do it. And so a few weeks before I’d come up, had a rather whistlestop introduction to the coin cabinets and nominated my four pieces, and then on the evening in question I was set up with a table, a tray and some handouts, and basically made myself available to anyone who wanted to check out some old coins.

Obverse of a silver sixpence of King Charles I struck in Newark Castle, 1646, Blackburn Museum

Reverse of the same coin, which is Spink 3146 in the relevant catalogue

This kind of work is always fun and it’s possibly the second thing I really miss from the museums world (the first, I admit, being the unfettered access to the treasure troves of stuff). Coins are such an excellent teaching tool, because (for now at least) everyone’s used to using them and thinks they know how coins work, but they often don’t read them in any depth, so by confronting people with coins that aren’t quite familiar, but can be read, you can teach them not just about the era of the coin in question, but also of a new way to look at the material culture of their own lived world as well. The four pieces I picked were a London bronze of Emperor Constantine I from after his supposed conversion showing the Unconquered Sun, a teaching point of which I never tire, a Canterbury ‘PAX’ penny of William the Conqueror (also one of my stand-bys), a Lancaster halfpenny token of Daniel Eccleston (there being no actual Blackburn tokens I could immediately find, alas), and the above. The above is probably the most interesting piece of the bunch, not really being a coin as such, and having a very specific context: as my handout has it,

“During the English Civil War which ended with the capture, trial and execution of King Charles I by the forces of Parliament in 1649, a number of royal outposts were besieged by Parliamentary forces, very few of which could be relieved. Money was among the supplies that did not reach the defenders, forcing their leaders to cut up silver plate and ornaments to make coins with which the restless troops could be paid. Newark was besieged three times during the war, but never fell; this coin survived from the final siege between November 1645 and May 1646.”

It drew a lot of interest because of its shape, of course, and kept it when I told the story that goes with it, but I probably still shouldn’t have used it! It was only afterwards, you see, that I did a cursory search and found that, of course, because such pieces are fantastically rare given how few were issued and how briefly, its probable market value was a full order of magnitude greater than any of the other three. But we were careful and everything was still on the tray when we closed, and perhaps, indeed, we might have relied on that same pride on the part of the visitors in their native place and the collections belonging to those who belong there. As Rebecca’s paper explores, these things get complex. Anyway, it was all great to be part of and got me into a collection I’d never have known about otherwise, and with which I’m still trying to come up with a way to work in future. Who knows but what this may some day come off, and if so, of course, you’ll hear about it here.

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1. I draw these background details from Cynthia Johnston, “Introduction. A British book collector: rare books and manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery” in Johnston (ed.), A British Book Collector: rare books and manuscripts in the R. E. Hart Collection, Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery (London 2021), pp. 1-5.

2. See Johnston, “Introduction”, p. 2; for that exhibition, see J. J. G. Alexander and P. Crossley, Medieval and Early Renaissance Treasures in the North West (Manchester 1976), and note how the title sort of implies that it needs specifying that these things are not in London.

3. Publications resulting from the earlier ones were C. Johnston & S. J. Biggs (edd.), Blackburn’s Worthy Citizen: the philanthropic legacy of R. E. Hart (London 2013), C. Johnston & J. Hartnell, Cotton to Gold: extraordinary collections of the industrial North West (London 2015), T. Burrows & C. Johnston (edd.), Collecting the Past: collectors and their collections from the 18th to the 20th centuries (Abingdon 2019) and C. Johnston, Holding the Vision: collecting the art of the book in the industrial North West (Blackburn 2020).

4. The printed version being Morgan, “The Blackburn Psalter and the William of Devon group” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 23-59.

5. Printed version McKendrick, “Contextualising the art and innovations of the Master of Edward IV in the Blackburn Hours (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery, Hart MS 20884)”, ibid. pp. 93-143.

6. In the proceedings, White’s paper is “Fragments of early Mainz printing in the R. E. Hart Collection”, ibid. pp. 145-164.

7. Published as Jackson Hase and Rebecca Darley, “Collections to Think with: Collecting, Scholarship and Belonging in the R. E. Hart Collection (Blackburn Museum and Art Gallery)” in Journal of the History of Collections Vol. 32 (Oxford 2020), pp. 369–378, DOI: 10.1093/jhc/fhz022.

8. Printed version Cantone, “Journey in the mind’s eye: the virtue and value of virtual pilgrimage” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 191-212.

9. See Potten’s own report of the conference here.

10. Printed as McKitterick, “The Loyalties of a Collector” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 7-21.

11. White, “Fragments of early Mainz printing”, pp. 159-164.

12. Darley, “The value of the past: heritage between local, global and national” in Johnston, British Book Collector, pp. 213-228; Johnston, “Book collecting in context: Hart and his contemporaries”, ibid. pp. 191-212.

Thoughts on two exhibitions

By one of those occasional happy chances which look like coincidence but are actually probably consistent foci of interest, I’ve had this post intended for ages to follow the previous one, even before I fully realised the previous one was about a cemetery excavation and so would involve me using or not using photos of skeletons. And one commentator has even obligingly passed comment on the fact that I mentioned making that choice. Well, this post is about that very issue. This arises out of my having been to an exhibition which also raised that very issue, but that trip followed very hard on another exhibition opening which we’ve already mentioned, so I’m going just to mention it again first of all and then get onto the big issue for the day. That will involve one, slightly blurry, photo of skeletons, which I have put below a cut, so please don’t press for ‘more’ if such things distress you (already).

The Winchester Coin Cabinet, in the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds

So, we are at this point in very early October 2017 in terms of my backlog, and it was then that the project I had raised money for called Unlocking the Winchester Cabinet came to fruition and we opened both its physical exhibition and the virtual one that goes with it.¹ I’ve talked about both of these before, and how they are very much mostly not my work but that of Leeds student, then undergraduate, now doctoral, Emma Herbert-Davies, so I won’t repeat that story here. However, for value added, I can at least explain how it came to be that the physical exhibition is deep in the Brotherton Library in the entry corridor outside Special Collections, where only people with library access can see it. You see, back in the 1990s when the rather extensive University of Leeds coin collection was in its first phase of care and curation under Christopher Challis, there was a wall display case outside the Library barriers, and it had been used for regular, but quite small, coin displays. Now, the case is still in position, and we had initially hoped to use it for this, but it turned out that it isn’t alarmed, and while that may have been OK in the 1990s it wasn’t going to pass security and insurance muster now. So we replanned for the current location, which has given us about twice as much display space, admittedly, but not where the actual public can see it. On the other hand, it’s also meant that no-one has yet seen a need to change it, so if you can get into the Brotherton Library, you can go see our exhibition still!

The exhibition in place: photo by Emma Herbert-Davies and used by permission

But the exhibition which is this post’s real topic I went to see a few days after our one opened, and was nothing to do with the University. It was in Leeds City Museum, and it was called Skeletons: Our Buried Bones.² It was a single gallery, and the centrepiece displays were twelve skeletons, which had been gathered from collections in London, Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford, in the latter two cases university collections but not, perhaps thankfully, in Leeds’s case. (The London ones came from the Wellcome Collection.) The point of the exhibition was mainly to showcase the different things and personal histories which archaeologists and forensic scientists could learn about the people whose bodies these had been, using just their bones. On that score, I will freely admit, it was extremely well-done, pitched at a low enough level to be comprehensible and a high enough one to sound scientific, and with some fascinating stories to reconstruct, such as…

• … the Iron Age man and woman with a life of labour and disease behind them who were buried together in a small mound near Wetherby!
• … the Black Death victim from one of the mass burials in Spitalfields, London, who turned out to have an arrowhead embedded in his spine in what must have been a seriously painful old war wound!
• … the fifteenth-century woman buried at All Saints York who may have been an anchoress there but also turned out to be suffering from not just severe osteoporosis but syphilis! [Edit: some excellent discussion about this in comments; we begin to think that the anchoress is not guilty here, in so far as guilt is even appropriate to apportion…]
• … the casualty from the Battle of Towton whose assailant didn’t know or care when to stop: the body had been, “struck by a poleaxe, leaving square injuries in his skull, stabbed in the right shoulder, and decapitated.”³

And of course all these stars of the show were actually physically there, laid out clinically in glass cases with careful explanations of how their histories had been deduced, suitable pointers to things like the arrowhead, and handy display panels around the walls about the sites where these people had been found and the wider archaeological context of which they came to form part. It was really very well-curated. And the one photo below the cut is as close as I’m going to showing you any of it.

Some words for Richard Sharpe

I seem to have spent quite a lot of last year not hearing about people dying. I guess the specifics of personal mortality were getting lost in the global version, and I also wasn’t looking at news very much, but still, there are those I would have expected to hear about somehow that I didn’t, and such a one was Richard Sharpe, Professor of Diplomatic at Oxford, who died suddenly of a heart attack all the way back in March 2020. I found out last week.

The late Professor Richard Sharpe, in life; the image is all over the web but I borrow it from the Cultures of Knowledge obituary linked through since, perhaps ironically, they mention no copyright.

I didn’t know Richard very well, but I did know him. We first met, as with about half my academic contacts really, when he was presenting at the Institute of Historical Research, in 2002, on intellectual contacts in very early medieval Northern Italy, when I was much too junior to say anything much to such an eminence. It would have been fine, I subsequently learned, not least because he was back there again in 2006 to present a paper about a putative daughter of King Harold II of England (he of Hastings fame), who of course survived her father into the reign of the man who defeated him.¹ That got a bit of a conversation going, as I recall, and then a few years after that I was in the same institution as him, in so far as Oxford is one institution, and considering whether or not to get him to lecture on the Celtic parts of the early medieval British syllabus. (I didn’t get him to, though I don’t now remember why.) Before I was gone from Oxford, we’d been thrown together by someone going on leave and thus making us supposedly the two most qualified people to run the Norman Conquest Special Subject that year. That’s where I really first had dealings with him. He was tremendously helpful and energetic and made me feel very much as if I were the person who knew what was going on, which compared to him could hardly have been further from the truth; but we got on fine and it ran OK. I think I ran into him twice after that, once at a paper in Cambridge and once again at the IHR, and thus (as it has transpired) ended our acquaintance. Still, his death has shocked me somewhat, not least because he was an active man in robust health bar one deaf ear, and everyone else seems to have been just as shocked when it happened, I imagine not least himself.

Thankfully, rather a lot of people who knew him better have been busy since he died recording stories about Richard that give a better impression of him than I have managed there. I might just quote some:

“As an undergraduate he acquired a firm grounding in the medieval Celtic languages and literatures to add to his Classics. But his first love was to history. Professor Simon Keynes remembers teaching him: ‘The depth of engagement with the primary source material for any given subject was phenomenal . . . I distinctly remember the appearance of his essays: the top five or ten lines comprising main text, and the rest of the page the numbered footnotes, perfectly judged to fit the page—but of course all hand-written rather than typed let alone word processed.’”

Thomas Charles-Edwards, ‘Tribute to Professor Richard Sharpe (1954-2020)’

“His first job, in 1981, was as assistant editor of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin in Oxford; he made himself a formidable Latinist by reading nothing but Latin for a year.”

Nigel Ramsay, ‘Richard Sharpe obituary’

“Used to the testing limitations of evidence from the ‘Dark Ages’, Richard was not reluctant to express his view that the study of English political history after the publication of Magna Carta was ‘mere journalism’.”

Hugh Doherty and James Willoughby, ‘Richard Sharpe’

“Politically, he was liberal, and was a member of Oxford Town Council between 1987 and 1995, where he was a strong supporter of the rights of Headington freeholders to erect giant fibreglass sharks on their roofs. He felt such a thing could only add to the gaiety of the Oxford skyline, and enjoyed the self-answering objection of another councillor: ‘But if we give this shark permission, then everyone will want one!’”²

Ibid.

“The volume and versatility of his research were nothing short of mystifying. Richard confessed that he himself found it difficult at times to keep track of the state of his many projects and side projects, which could range, in a single year (2016), from an article on the earliest Norman sheriffs, through early nineteenth-century printing of Irish poetry, to the composer Tommaso Giordani (‘accidents happen, as I sometimes pick something up along the way’, he wrote on his webpage in relation to that one).”

Roy Flechner, ‘Richard Sharpe, 17 February 1954 – 22 March 2020’

“He was already working on Hebridean history: his first book, Raasay: A Study in Island History was published in 1977, the year he graduated, followed by a second the following year, Raasay: A Study in Island History. Documents and Sources, People and Places (Raasay lies between Skye and the mainland). At the same time he was working on editions of the two earliest Lives of Brigit, a saint of peculiar interest—as a female counterpart to St Patrick, as the premier patron-saint of Leinster, and as someone widely culted in Britain as well as Ireland. He never published his editions but was generous in allowing others to use them.”

Ramsay, ‘Richard Sharpe obituary’, as above

That last strikes chords with me all the way back from those years in Oxford. I remember hearing, on two different occasions, someone (Hugh Doherty once, I think; can’t remember who the other was) say that they’d been to talk to Richard up in his office about some new problem they’d just stumbled on in a project, a saint’s life or manuscript they’d never heard of before or similar and were going to have to track down, and Richard going, “Oh yes! I wrote a piece about that years ago”, striding over to a cupboard and after a short search pulling out a neat stapled and paper-covered typescript on the exact topic, existence unknown to anyone but him. I should say, it’s not that Richard was shy about publishing; as Roy Flechner’s obituary that I’ve linked above says, his total of works even at the point of death was at least 212 separate items. But apparently he still wrote more than he could manage to publish… If there is a tiny crumb of compensation for him being dead it’s that we will now presumably have found out what else was in the cupboard; but it’s not how either he, I’m guessing, or I would have wanted that learning to be made available. I don’t know how many other people the world can make like this, or what the academy looks like if ever we run out.

Next post will be a final short one about (early) medieval remains in Rome as of some time ago; and after that I promise some actual academic content for once; but having finally got this news I didn’t want to let a kind colleague go unrecorded when he was so very important in understanding records.

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1. That paper eventually published as Richard Sharpe, “King Harold’s Daughter” in Haskins Society Journal Vol. 19 (Woodbridge 2008), pp. 1–27. No-one seems to have attempted a full bibliography of Richard’s work, for reasons which may be suggested by what follows, and I’m not up to the challenge; there was a lot…

2. I’m bravely assuming that most of these anecdotes can stand by themselves, but the Tale of the Headington Shark—in which I’d had no idea Richard had had any part—might need a link for the unfamiliar…

Historians to remember

It is a distressing habit that seems to be developing on this blog where it is deaths that bring me out of a hiatus. Of course, there would be no such habit if there were no hiatuses, but the times are not good for that. Maybe that will get more explanation next post, whenever I can do that, but in the meantime, I shouldn’t go the whole holiday and post nothing, even if what must be posted is kind of awful. It is also delayed: this has been on my deck since February, when news of one significant death reached me and the person who’d told me then let me know about the five other major medievalists the reaper had claimed the previous month, and there were such among them that I knew I would have to write something next post instead of whatever I had planned. And finally, here we are.

My rules for giving someone an obituary on this blog are not very worked out. In general it is because, whether I knew them or not, their work has touched mine somehow or been the foundation of something I’ve done. In this, I persist in the blog’s basically self-serving purpose that it’s all about me somehow, I suppose, but to be fair, if I reported on deaths even of people I didn’t have much connection with, firstly it’d become a pretty grim blog and secondly I’d hardly be able to say much of use about them. Thus it is that I will not be saying more here about the late Jean-Marie Martin, leading expert on the society of the Italian area of Apulia on its journey from Byzantine through Lombard, Arab and Norman rules, or Jean Richard, eminent historian of the Crusades, than those notices, except to observe that apparently Richard, whose work I’ve put on many a reading list without myself giving it the attention it surely deserved, was only two weeks short of his hundredth birthday, and to provide links under their names to places where you can read more.¹

Giles Constable, photographed by Randall Hagadorn for Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study

Then come two about whom I have more to say, but still did not know. Firstly, Giles Constable, 91 at his death, and by that stage he had been Professor of Medieval History at Harvard and Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Study, serving between times as Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Library and Research Collection in Washington DC, despite having been born in London. His was so productive a career it would hard to sum it up, and sufficiently long that I currently work with a doctoral grand-pupil of his. Wikipedia currently singles out his work on the key Benedictine reform abbey of Cluny, which I wrote about here long ago, on its abbot Peter the Venerable, a major figure in European theology and religious and intellectual life, and on twelfth-century thought in general, and certainly when making reading lists on Cluny or the twelfth-century Renaissance, I have always made sure as recent a dose of Constable as I could find was in there. That’s mostly because of reading bits of his work as an undergraduate myself, and finding that it carefully and clearly opened window after window on my understanding of the world he described.² But what I still mainly cite him for is a short and brilliant article that did a similar thing for my understanding of the motivation of medieval monastic forgers, and sometimes for his work on monasteries’ claims to Church tithes, both of which are in that category of things which people still cite from decades ago because no-one has written a better thing on the subject.³ He seems to still have been working up to about 2016, at which point he’d have been 85 or so; may we all hope for so much…

Ronnie Ellenblum, from his Academia.edu page, which of course, does not record his death

Not active for as long, because only 68 when struck by a fatal heart attack, was Professor Ronnie Ellenblum. A more controversial figure, whom again I never met, every one of Ellenblum’s books seemed to upset a consensus, on how involved Frankish settlers were in the landscapes of the Holy Land where the Crusades brought some of them, on how much those Crusaders were willing to learn from their Muslim opponents in terms of fortifications and strategy (rather than the other way round), and more recently and noticeably, on the power of climate change to tip societies’ survivability over the edge.⁴ All of this, as you can probably tell, was born out of a deep acquaintance and close contact with the land in his native Israel. He also taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, which by itself put him beyond some people’s pales. I did not know about that issue when, as was recorded here, I read a short piece of his that was effectively the entire impetus of my Rethinking the Medieval Frontier project, but that was, in a more direct way than usual, his fault; from my wrangling with that book chapter came all the conversations that brought the agenda for that project into being.⁵ If I had ever met him, I’d have thanked him for that, as well as being embarrassed about how little the project yet had to show for itself; now I will never be able to.

Cyril Mango at the American School at Athens

Then we reach the ones I did in fact know, at least a bit. The death whose news sparked off the exchange I reported above was that of the one I knew less well, Professor Cyril Mango. I met him twice, I think, at the Medieval History Seminar at All Soul’s College Oxford both times, and when I say met, I mean sat at a table while he talked, or while his wife Marlia Mundell Mango talked for him because, even then, he was very ill. Farflung Byzantinist colleagues would ask me if Cyril Mango was still alive when they were in contact with me for completely other reasons, so widely known was this, but the news was important because he truly was a ‘giant in the field‘, who had been responsible perhaps more than any other single scholar—and there really weren’t many in this competition when he began—for bringing the history and culture of the Byzantine Empire into a wider Anglophone awareness. This was not because he was a populariser, though I don’t think he had any shame about writing for a public, but because despite being extremely learned in his subject matter he remained able to communicate it to outsiders whilst still being recognised by insiders. The result was that, if someone in the UK owned one book not by John Julius Norwich about Byzantium, Mango was probably either the author or a contributor, but also that if one went on to study Byzantium, he was in all the experts’ references too.⁶ The field has been oddly quiet about his departure from it, perhaps because it had been expected for so long, and I’m sure there are people from his 92-year-long life who could give him a better write-up than I can—indeed, several already have—but for now I hope this does him at least some justice.

[The only pictures of Professor Michael Clanchy I can find which show him as I remember him are attached to things written by his daughter about his death, which was apparently preceded very narrowly by his wife’s, and they’re painful reading and I would feel bad stealing the pictures. The obituaries linked below have pictures of him in happier times.]

And then lastly, and for me saddest because I knew him best, there was Michael Clanchy. Since he worked mostly in the same kind of fields as Giles Constable, and especially on the intellectual ferment around the creation of the first university in Paris and one of that ferment’s principal products, the philosopher, theologian and leading candidate for history’s worst boyfriend Peter Abelard, you might wonder why I knew Michael Clanchy at all, and then be surprised at how many papers of his, including one (before the blog) which was both his inaugural and retirement lecture, I’d been to. But, investigating, you would quickly then discover that that lecture was given at the Institute of Historical Research in London, one of my academic homes, and although he really only tuned in the eleventh century in terms of his own work, he was a regular at the Earlier Middle Ages Seminar, because he found everything interesting as far as I can see. Consequently, because kindness returns kindness, people used to go to his stuff as well, but this was also because he made it all so interesting. His biography of Abelard may still be the only work that manages to make the man interesting personally as well as significant intellectually, as well as at least halfway comprehensible to the non-expert, not least because as its title suggests it is about far more than just Abelard.⁷ But as far as I know, excellent though that book is, especially if accompanied by his revision of the Penguin translation of Abelard’s and Héloïse’s letters, it only had the one edition, unlike the one that most people had heard of Michael Clanchy for, From Memory to Written Record, which argued for a fundamental shift in the way people used and stored information over the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and in which by the third edition, under pressure from those who knew England before the Conquest better than after (and better than he did), he was beginning to extend that thinking backwards into a new way of thinking about how writing was being used then that I’m not sure anyone has really picked up.⁸ And there’s an article of Michael’s from 1970, even, that still gets cited, another of those things that are just too good to replace.⁹ But it is his kindness for which he might deserve to be remembered best. I don’t know how many conversations I had with him in the IHR tea-room in which he not just professed but maintained an interest in what I did, even once or twice asking very junior me for advice on early medieval archives, none of which, since he could never teach me and our periods barely even met at the edges, he needed to do. I will of course remember him for his work, but I will also remember those conversations and be thankful for him. I can picture him trying bashfully to shrug off the praise, and of course, again, I shan’t ever get to deliver it, but also again, I hope this is something.

I need to rethink what I am doing with this blog, again, since the backlog and the available time obviously don’t work together. I will try and do some of that rethinking for the next post, but even if that doesn’t sound thrilling, at least it more or less must be more cheerful than this one. Thanks for still reading and I hope to write more soon.

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1. For Martin, the work for which he was famous beyond Apulia was probably his first book, which made that area well-known to a wider audience, J.-M. Martin, La Pouille du VI^e au XII^e siècle, Collection de l’École française de Rome 179 (Rome 1993), but I confess, it is one of those I know I ought to have read, and actually what I know him for most is his contribution to Pierre Bonnassie’s Festschrift, “Quelques réflexions sur l’évolution des droits banaux en Italie méridionale (XI^e-XIII^e siècle)” in Hélène Débax (ed.), Les sociétés méridionales à l’âge féodal (l’Espagne, Italie et sud de France X^e-XIII^e s.). Hommage à Pierre Bonnassie, Méridiennes 8 (Toulouse 1999), pp. 339–344. Richard is easily most famous for The Crusades, c. 1071–c. 1291, transl. Jean Birrell (Cambridge 1999), one of the only textbook histories of the Crusades that gets beyond the Fourth one.

2. Embarrassingly, I now can’t work out what work it was that I was then reading; I apparently didn’t make notes on it, and several of the obvious things came out too late. It could, just about, have been, G. Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought: The Interpretation of Mary and Martha; The Ideal of the Imitation of Christ; The Orders of Society (Cambridge 1995), then very new, and may more likely have been idem, “Renewal and Reform in Religious Life: Concepts and Realities” in Robert L. Benson (ed.), Renaissance and Renewal in the Twelfth Century(Cambridge MA 1982), pp. 37–67, but one could also mention Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge 1996) or idem, The Abbey of Cluny: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Eleventh-Hundredth Anniversary of its Foundation, Abhandlungen Vita Regularis: Ordnungen und Deutungen religiosen Lebens im Mittelalter, 43 (Münster 2010), as only two. For me especially, there’s also the quite out-of-area Constable, “Frontiers in the Middle Ages” in O. Merisalo (ed.), Frontiers in the Middle Ages, Textes et études du Moyen Âge 35 (Turnhout 2006), pp. 3–28.

3. Constable, “Forgery and Plagiarism in the Middle Ages” in Archiv für Diplomatik Vol. 39 (München 1983), pp. 1–41; idem, Monastic Tithes from their Origins to the Twelfth Century, Cambridge Studies in Medieval Life and Thought 2nd Series 10 (Cambridge 1964).

4. Respectively, Ellenblum, Frankish Rural Settlement in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (Cambridge 2003); idem, Crusader Castles and Modern Histories (Cambridge 2007) and idem, The Collapse of the Eastern Mediterranean: Climate Change and the Decline of the East, 950–1072 (Cambridge 2012).

5. Ronnie Ellenblum, “Were there Borders and Borderlines in the Middle Ages? The Example of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem” in David Abulafia and Nora Berend (edd.), Medieval Frontiers: concepts and practices (Aldershot 2002), pp. 105–118.

6. While it doesn’t cover his whole œuvre by any means, I guess one has to mention Mango, Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (New York City, NY, 1980), idem, Le développement urbain de Constantinople, IV^e-VII^e siècles, Travaux et Mémoires du Centre de recherche d’histoire et civilisation de Byzance, Collège de France, Monographies, 2, 2nd edn (Paris 2004) and idem (ed.), The Oxford History of Byzantium (Oxford 2002). Even that omits a number of critical source translations and a vital textual anthology of sources for Byzantine art, idem (ed.), The Art of Byzantine Empire (New York City NY 1972), and I could go on.

7. M. T. Clanchy, Abelard: a medieval life (Oxford 1999).

8. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record: England, 1066-1307, 3rd edn (Chichester 2013); one should probably also mention his England and its Rulers, 1066–1307, 3rd edn (Oxford 2006).

9. Clanchy, “Remembering the Past and the Good Old Law” in History Vol. 55 (London 1970), pp. 165–176.