Conclusion

Summary

Writing and reading history provided a constant and ever-evolving activity for successive generations of St Cuthbert's community during the period c.700– 1130. Drawing on a remarkable number of surviving original manuscripts, later medieval copies of works dated to this period and surviving traces of now-lost sources, this book has offered insight into the importance and uses of historical knowledge within a single medieval community. I have examined a total of eighteen historical texts written in the community of St Cuthbert between c.700 and 1130, as laid out in the Appendix. Of these eighteen new works, eight survive in original or near-contemporary manuscripts, nine are known from later medieval copies, while the lost Chronica monasterii Dunelmensis was reconstructed by Craster from information contained in later writings. It is almost certain that this selection of historiographical materials presents an incomplete picture of the entire range of works that were once available, and much of the source material and the circumstances through which authors accessed it remains unknown. Despite these losses, the evidence that does survive remains exceptional, in both the number and types of works known. Within the English context, the community of St Cuthbert (and Anglo-Norman Durham in particular) can be placed among a small group of elite centres for pre-1150 historical production, alongside Christ Church Canterbury and Worcester. This small group may also include Malmesbury Abbey, during the early twelfth-century career of the author, William.

In this book, I have offered ways to understand the methods and sources that allowed the community of St Cuthbert to reconstruct their understandings of its past. This has also included discussion of the reasons why such conceptualisations of the past mattered to St Cuthbert's community in the particular circumstances in which histories were written. Following on from this, I have sought to explain some of the uses towards which this knowledge of the past was put. This book began life as a study of history-writing in Anglo-Norman Durham, but it quickly became apparent that Symeon and his contemporaries would not have been able to write as much as they did if it had not been for the preservation of several important earlier works.