1 - Textualising the past

Summary

Maurice Halbwachs, in his study on collective memory and the sociology of knowledge, noted the indissoluble tie between the past and the present in the reconstruction of memory or past events. While ‘the material traces, rites, texts, and traditions left behind by [the] past’ form an essential part of secular, religious and institutional memory, they can only be reconstructed (and interpreted) ‘with the aid … of recent psychological and social data, that is to say, with the present’. In many cases, the ‘psychological and social data’ of the present may be difficult to find in the textual content of medieval histories. One of the most famous of medieval historians, Henry of Huntingdon, was perhaps the most spare when it came to writing about the events of his own time. For the medieval historian, the present was less a subject of discussion, and more of an interpretative tool. Contemporary events not only provided the impetus for the construction of texts; all events, past or present, were seen to be part of a grand scheme of things, which was given meaning through historiography. In his study of the network of historiographical endeavours that surrounded the construction and dissemination of the text of John of Worcester, Martin Brett notes the powerful impetus contemporary events gave to the articulation of monastic identity:

The justification for each house … lay in their past. Their saints, their customs, their rights and their estates were the fruit of long growth in time. Violent political change and a new intellectual self-confidence threatened their tradition and forced it to become articulate in self-defence. A school of monastic historians was the result.

Though Brett makes this observation in the context of Latin historiography in the twelfth century, it is equally applicable to the case of the Peterborough Chronicle, where both contemporary circumstances and abbey tradition played a seminal role in the conception and construction of the text. The circumstances of the writing of the Peterborough Chronicle and the transformation of a generic Chronicle into a vehicle of local identity and ideology form the focus of this chapter.