3 - Preserving Records and Writing History in Worcester’s Conquest-Era Archives

Summary

The archive of pre-Conquest and Conquest-era records pertaining to Worcester cathedral and its monastic community that is available for us to study is remarkable for several reasons. First among these notable characteristics must be the sheer number and variety of records that have been preserved: texts of hundreds of charters, leases and other assorted memoranda may be included in our conception of Worcester's Conquest-era archive. Second is that the texts of many individual records apparently issued prior to or during the Conquest era have survived in multiple early manuscript witnesses; some of these records were preserved in the format of single-sheet documents, but the majority were entered among the cathedral's series of eleventh-century cartularies. Judging from the surviving memoranda collected and preserved during the eleventh century, it is beyond doubt not only that Worcester cathedral possessed an extensive archive of written records prior to the Norman Conquest, but also that at several times from the late tenth through to the early twelfth century, members of the cathedral's community engaged in what appears to have been particularly energetic efforts to preserve, reproduce and ‘renew’ the documentary records at their disposal which described the history of the cathedral and the landholdings that supported it. Worcester's surviving eleventh-century records preserve observable textual, organisational and physical evidence of how the contents of its archive were transformed during the Conquest era. They also suggest how the community’s attitudes regarding the significance of those records may have changed from viewing them simply as instruments of institutional administration to expressions of communal history and identity. Recognising the various ways in which these transformations occurred reinforces the current view that Worcester's Conquest-era archive was less a static repository of documentary records and more an atelier where the history of the cathedral and its community was not only being preserved, but also dynamically developed.

Before proceeding with my discussion of how Worcester's record-keepers developed and preserved their records over the course of the Conquest era, it is probably necessary to delineate the conceptual scope of my study as explicitly as possible. My interest in Worcester's archive and the general focus of my research is on observing pragmatic aspects of written memorialisation and record-keeping during the early medieval period.