7 - England’s Defending Kings in Twelfth-Century Historical Writing

Summary

The fourteenth of October 1066 conjures instant, powerful associations. But how much of what we know or believe about the men involved in this conquest, and in the Danish conquest earlier in the eleventh century, has been shaped by what historians wrote years later in the twelfth century? My present object is to illuminate the consistent historical agendas of two twelfth-century writers: William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester. In comparing their narratives of two eleventh-century defending kings, Æthelred II and Harold II, I aim to show that William and John share a view of royal responsibility not found in their sources and untouched by any political agenda that placed English and Norman allegiances in opposition. Although the two accounts diverge widely in how they interpret royal character, they are similar in their greater concern with the effectiveness of England’s defending kings than with these kings’ origins.

William, a Benedictine monk, completed his Gesta Regum Anglorum in 1125 and revised it after 1135. The Gesta Regum possesses none of the balance or objectivity that William claims for it. Recent work has identified the value of understanding William’s occasions of invention, digression, and rhetoric as essential to his meaning. But William’s apparent humility and changes to the narrative are more than isolated features: they constitute the substance of the narrative and guide the story throughout. John, a monk at Worcester, finished compiling his Chronicon ex Chronicis, a series of annals, between 1140 and 1143. Our current picture of John is one of a compiler who follows the basic account of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but historians have been unable to offer a reason for the way in which John restructures this material. John was probably of English origins; William, like Henry of Huntingdon and Orderic Vitalis, came from a mixed Anglo-Norman family. Heritage may indeed influence each writer’s particular style, tone, and historical project: William’s Gesta Regum is uniformly caustic towards the failures of eleventh-century kings with English origins, whereas John’s Chronicon is uniformly favorable. William and John’s interpretation of character differs, but their interpretation of responsibility is consistent despite each writer’s different view of the past.