Why 1199? Bureaucracy and Enrolment under John and his Contemporaries

Summary

‘In the twenty-third year of the reign of King Henry II, as I was sitting at a turret window overlooking the Thames, I was addressed by someone who said, very earnestly, “Master . . . Why do you not teach others that knowledge of the king’s chancery for which you are famous?” ’

It is one of the greater misfortunes of English medieval history that the words quoted above have had to be invented. Historians of the Plantagenet realm can call upon an extraordinary range of administrative, financial and literary records. From the year 1199 onwards, this wealth of documentary evidence swells into a positive embarrassment of riches. After 1199, the documentary floodgates burst, and we are swiftly overwhelmed by a torrent of rolls, registers, schedules and other such wonders. The royal chancery was the source from which much of this deluge flowed. But although we have a Dialogue of the Exchequer, we pine in vain for a Dialogue of the Chancery. In what follows, I make no claim to have made good this lapse. Much of what I shall have to say has been said with far greater acuity by previous scholars: Madox, R.L. Poole, Tout, Maxwell-Lyte, Galbraith, Richardson and Chaplais, who between them have brought most of the relevant evidence into commission. More recently, Michael Clanchy has widened the scope of enquiry, to comprehend the broader issue of record keeping and written record as aspects of the social, not merely the administrative, history of twelfth and thirteenth century England. Here, I intend to address only three basic questions. What was the extent of record making and record keeping under the early Plantagenet kings, before 1199? Why should it have been in 1199 that the record keeping of the royal chancery took the quantum leap into enrolment? And how does the record keeping of the Plantagenet kings compare with that of other European rulers, and in particular with that of the Plantagenets’ chief rivals, the Capetian kings of France? Most of my evidence will be drawn from the period 1154 to 1216, with only an occasional forwards glance towards the ever greater mountains of parchment heaped up under Henry III and his successors. Nonetheless, in the process, I hope to pose one or two broader questions about English record keeping and its influence upon the writing of English history.