Fountains Abbey is an important presence in medieval studies: one of the earliest Cistercian houses in Britain, its turbulent history is as familiar as its extensive and magnificent ruins. Yet Fountains, like many other Cistercian institutions, remains partially hidden from historiographical view. While much attention has been paid to themes illuminating the history of Fountains, such as the context of Yorkshire monastic institutions and northern politics, and its architectural history, with the notable exceptions of the work of Joan Wardrop (Fountains Abbey and Its Benefactors: 1132–1300 [1987]) and Derek Baker (‘The Genesis of English Cistercian Chronicles: the Foundation History of Fountains Abbey I,’ Analecta Cisterciensia 25 [1969]: 14–41; ‘The Genesis of English Cistercian Chronicles: the Foundation History of Fountains Abbey II,’ Analecta Cisterciensia 31 [1975]: 179–212]), its large archive has persisted as an untapped source. With The Late Medieval Cistercian Monastery of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire: Monastic Administration, Economy, and Archival Memory, Michael Spence seeks to address that lacuna.
Spence engages with an astonishingly complex body of seventeen registers compiled at Fountains in the high and late medieval periods. Indeed, the abbey has the most abundant “business archive,” to use Spence's terminology (15), of any British Cistercian house. This archive was repeatedly altered, augmented, expanded and—as Spence stresses—redacted from the twelfth century to the time of the Dissolution. Consequently, the archive can provide a detailed picture of the abbey's history across time. More specifically, it reveals the layering of the abbey's history through the mediation of abbots and monks, for the monastic community was keen not only to preserve titles to possessions but also to provide a narrative of its relationship with the community of donors, to navigate the changing fortunes of the English economy and the Cistercian model of organization, and to provide an acceptable history of its internal politics. Excavating the information hidden within the multiple strata of the abbey's registers requires considerable effort in understanding the relationships between the manuscripts. This is one of Spence's main ambitions, which he pursues through a forensic approach to the abbey's cartularies.
The book is organized to provide the reader with useful grounding in the history and historiography of Fountains before engaging with its records. The area of greatest interest is quickly flagged as the long fifteenth century, which is the provenance of the bulk of the abbey's records and a period that witnessed the profound economic and social change that followed by the Black Death in the previous century. Within Fountains, this was a period marked by disputed abbatial elections, struggles to attain mitered abbatial authority, abbatial poisonings, and other incidents that brought the house into serious disrepute, occasioning the appearance of Abbot John Greenwell before Parliament in 1464. This period is revealed as one of crisis on multiple fronts for Fountains. Greenwell was instrumental in both the evolution of the abbey's archive (in part through the interesting President Book, which Spence examines in detail) and, in tandem, the production of a foundation narrative. Accordingly, Spence is able to assemble detailed and convincing arguments about the abbatial response to sustained pressures. The abbey's registers were integral to its fundamental reorganization of its estate management, each record having its own useful, active life before it was superseded or complemented by a new codex, as Spence demonstrates in detail. These texts reveal how successive abbots created ways of understanding and navigating their new relationship with the external world and its newly manorialized form.
While Spence has provided a meticulous study of the interrelated nature of the abbey's business records, at times the density of the material leaves the reader with a tight focus on abstract cartulary material at the expense of a bigger picture. And such is the focus on the fifteenth century that the genesis of the cartulary stage of the abbey's archival practices is somewhat lost. What, for example, was the impetus for the compilation of the first Fountains cartulary in the late thirteenth century? Spence suggests it was simply an inventory of the deeds contained in the abbey archive, but it would be desirable to set this within a wider comparative context of stimuli for cartulary production. Indeed, at times, Spence might have pulled back from minute analysis simply to allow the reader to draw breath.
These quibbles notwithstanding, Spence succeeds in achieving the daunting goal of drawing together the hugely complex material from Fountains. The rounded picture he produces of such documents in their whole archival context is a key part of more recent studies of cartularies—for example, one can point to Johanna Tucker's Reading and Shaping Medieval Cartularies (2020)—and speaks to a firm awareness of the need to engage with cartularies in the kind of sophisticated way single-sheet charters have long been afforded. While few British abbeys boast a late medieval archive as comprehensive as that originating at Fountains, Spence's methodology, framework, and conclusions point the way for the continued nuancing of current approaches to monastic cartularies.
