edited for the earlier English Historical Society; some of them
have been re-edited without being superseded in the Rolls
series. For the reign of Stephen we have the anonymous
Gesta Stephani in addition to the writers already mentioned,
several of whom continue into Stephen’s reign. For Henry II.
we have William of Newburgh, who reaches the highest point
attained by historical composition in the 12th century; the
so-called Benedict of Peterborough’s Gesta Henrici, which Stubbs
tentatively and without sufficient authority ascribed to Richard
Fitznigel; Robert of Torigni; and seven volumes of “Materials
for the History of Thomas Becket,” which contain some of the
best and worst samples of hagiological history. For Richard
and John the chronicles of Roger of Hoveden, Ralph de Diceto
(Diss), Gervase of Canterbury, Ralph of Coggeshall, and a later
continuation of Hoveden, known under the name of Walter of
Coventry, are the best narrative authorities.
With the accession of Henry III., Roger of Wendover, the first of the St Albans school whose writings are extant, becomes our chief authority. He was re-edited and continued after 1236 by Matthew Paris, the greatest of medieval historians. His work, which goes down to 1259, is picturesque, vivid, and marked by considerable breadth of view and independence of judgment. The story is carried on by a series of jejune compilations known as the Flores historiarum (ed. Luard). Better authorities for Edward I. are Rishanger, Trokelowe and Blaneforde, Wykes, Walter of Hemingburgh, Nicholas Trevet, Oxnead and Bartholomew Cotton, and others contained in Stubbs’s Chronicles of Edward I. and Edward II. In the 14th century there is a significant deterioration in the monastic chroniclers, and their place is taken by the works of secular clergy like Adam Murimuth, Geoffrey the Baker, Robert of Avesbury, Henry Knighton and the anonymous author of the Eulogium historiarum. Monastic history is represented by Higden’s voluminous Polychronicon, which succeeds the Flores historiarum. A brief revival of the St Albans school towards the end of the century is seen in the Chronicon Angliae and the works of T. Walsingham, which continue into the reign of Henry V. For Richard II. we have also Malverne and the Monk of Evesham; for the early Lancastrians, Capgrave, Elmham, Otterbourne, Adam of Usk; and for Henry VI., Amundesham, Whethamstede, William of Worcester and John Hardyng, as well as a number of anonymous briefer chronicles, edited, though not in the Rolls series, by J. Gairdner, C. L. Kingsford, N. H. Nicolas and J. S. Davies.
These are the principal English historical writers for the middle ages; but as the connexion between England and the continent grew closer, and international relations developed, an increasing amount of light is thrown on English history by foreign writers. Of these authorities one of the earliest is the Histoire des ducs de Normandie et des rois d’Angleterre (ed. Michel); briefer are the Chronique de l’Anonyme de Béthune and the Histoire de Guillaume le Maréchal. A large number of French and Flemish chronicles illustrate the history of the Hundred Years’ War, by far the most important being Froissart (best edition by Luce, though Lettenhove’s is bigger). Next come Jehan le Bel, Waurin’s Recueil, Monstrelet, Chastellain, Juvenal des Ursins, and more limited works such as Créton’s Chronique de la traison et mort de Richard II.
Chronicles, however, grow less important as sources of history as time goes on. Their value is always dependent upon the absence of the more satisfactory materials known as records, and these records gradually become more copious and complete. They develop with the government, of whose activity and policy they are the real test and evidence. Perhaps the most important thing in history is the evolution of government, the development of consciousness and a will on the part of the state. This will is expressed in records; and, as the state progresses from infancy through the stage of tutelage under the church to its modern “omnicompetence,” so its will is expressed in an ever widening and differentiating series of records. The first need of a government is finance; the earliest organized machinery for exerting its will is the exchequer; and the earliest great record in English history is Domesday Book. It is followed by a series of exchequer records, called the Pipe Rolls, which begin in the reign of Henry I., and dating from that of Henry II. is the Dialogus de scaccario, which explains in none too lucid language the intricate working of the exchequer system. It was Henry II. who gave the greatest impetus to the development of the machinery for expressing the will of the state. He began with finance and went on to justice, recognizing that justitia magnum emolumentum, the administration of justice was a great source of revenue. So national courts of law are added to the national exchequer, and by the end of the 12th century legal records become an even more important source of history than financial documents. The judicial system is described by Glanvill at the end of the 12th, and by Bracton and Fleta in the 13th century (for the exchequer see the Testa de Nevill and the Red Book of the Exchequer). During that period the Curia Regis threw off three offshoots—the courts of exchequer, king’s bench and common pleas; and records of their judicial proceedings survive in the Plea Rolls and Year Books, some of which have been edited for the Rolls series, the Selden and other societies. Numerous other classes of legal and administrative records gradually develop, the Patent and Close Rolls (first calendared by the Record Commission, and subsequently treated more adequately under the direction of the deputy keeper of the Records), Charters (which were first grants to individuals, then to collective groups, monasteries or boroughs, then to classes, and finally expanded—as in Magna Carta—into grants to the whole nation), Escheats, Feet of Fines, Inquisitiones post mortem, Inquisitiones ad quod damnum, Placita de Quo Warranto, and others for which the reader is referred to S. R. Scargill-Bird’s Guide to the Principal Classes of Documents preserved in the Record Office (3rd ed., 1908). Every branch of administration comes to be represented in records almost as soon as it is developed. The evolution of the army which won Creçy and Poitiers is accompanied by the accumulation of a mass of indentures and other military documents, the value of which has been illustrated in Dr Morris’s Welsh Wars of Edward I. and George Wrottesley’s Creçy and Calais from the Public Records. The growth of naval organization is reflected in the Black Book of the Admiralty; the growth of taxation in the Liber custumarum and Subsidy Rolls; the rise of parliament in the Parliamentary Writs (ed. Palgrave), in the Rotuli parliamentorum, in the Official Return of Members of Parliament, and in the Statutes of the Realm; that of Convocation in David Wilkins’s Concilia. The register of the privy council does not begin until later in the 14th century, and then is broken off between the middle of the 15th and 1539.
Local as well as central government begets records as it grows. From the Extenta manerii of the 12th century we get to the Manorial Rolls of the 13th, when also we have Hundred Rolls, records of forest courts, of courts leet and of coroners’ courts, and a variety of municipal documents, for which the reader is referred to Dr C. Gross’s Bibliography of British Municipal History and to Mrs J. R. Green’s more popular Town Life in the Fifteenth Century. The municipal records of London, its hustings court and city companies, are too multifarious to describe; some classes of these documents have been exemplified in the works of Dr R. R. Sharpe. Ecclesiastical records are represented by the episcopal registers (for the most part still unpublished), monastic cartularies, and other documents rendered comparatively scarce by the spoliation of the monasteries, and scattered proceedings of ecclesiastical courts. (See also the article Record.)
Documents, other than records strictly so called, begin to grow with the habit of correspondence and the necessity of communication. A few letters survive from the time of the Norman kings, but the earliest collection of English royal letters is the Letters of Henry III. (Rolls series). Contemporary are the Letters of Grosseteste, and a little later come the Letters of Archbishop Peckham and Raine’s Letters from Northern Registers (all in the Rolls series). Private correspondence appeared earlier in the voluminous epistles of Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath (ed. Giles). This is a somewhat intermittent source of history until we come to the 15th century, when the well-known Paston
