Family, Commerce, and Religion in London and Cologne: Anglo-German Emigrants, c. 1000-c. 1300 (review)

Family, Commerce and Religion in London and Cologne: Anglo-German Emigrants c. 1000-c. 1300. By Joseph P. Huffman (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998) 273 pp. $59.95.

It is a common prejudice among Anglophone and French medieval historians, writes Huffman in the introduction to this monograph, that the city of Cologne is "so far East" (ix)--that the old Roman colony, and medieval Germany more generally, somehow lie beyond the pale of what counts today as medieval Western Europe. ¹ This book is Huffman's attempt to correct this imbalance, to bring Cologne and Germany a bit further West, so to speak, by investigating "the evidence of interactions between English and German emigrants from London and Cologne" (5).

To this end, the book unfolds in three unequally developed parts. The most important work in the introductory first part ("Anglo-German Commercial Foundations") comes in the third chapter, in which Huffman uses selected entries from late-thirteenth-century Cologne's municipal documents (Schreinsbücher) to trace the degree to which English currency played a role in the daily economic life of the city. Beguines and clerics wanted to be paid in sterling; family members swapped property in return for rents in sterling; and the Cologne municipal government took out a loan based on English pennies. Huffman takes the strength and popularity of the English and Cologne currencies, in short, as the embodiment of the "significant interregional nexus" that took shape between the two cities from the later twelfth century (57). The most important of the Schreinsbücher entries are helpfully transcribed in an appendix to the chapter.

The book's second part ("Anglo-Cologne Family, Property and Inheritance Ties") is the most developed and detailed of the three. Two chapters show, through often painstaking prosopographical work, how those of English origin settled in Cologne during and after the twelfth century and how these "English" families were able to achieve a "thoroughgoing integration" in Cologne through marriage, kinship, and trade (99). Two more chapters survey the English sources for evidence of Cologners active in England. Huffman discovers not only exceptional figures acting at the highest social and political levels (particularly as diplomats promoting the English-Welf cause), but also common merchants and laborers de Colonia who also were granted citizenship or other privileges, worked and traded, and bought and sold property. Some became criminals. But all became "integrated" in some way into local English society.

Part three is the book's best gesture to interdisciplinary history, remarkable in its attempt to find in a wide range of sources the scattered evidence of links between England and Cologne. Huffman mines saints' lives, for example, to recover how St. Ursula, a "British saint," was revered in Cologne by English and German pilgrims alike, and how a Cologne woman was healed of madness before the tomb of St. Thomas Beckett. In the letters and writings of monks and clerics, Huffman traces the exceptional careers of Englishmen who distinguished themselves as teachers and political advisors in Cologne.

The core of this commendable effort is clearly focused and meticulously researched, its arguments sound. From the Cologne documents in particular, Huffman weaves a rich tapestry of social and economic interaction between Cologne and England. The range of sources he is willing to enlist in the third part of the book is both praiseworthy and suggestive for future research. But interdisciplinary breadth always comes at the expense of a more comprehensive depth. The farther the argument moves from the Cologne documents, the more scattershot seems the method and threadbare the argument. Confraternities, expatriate monks, pious legends and pilgrims, clerics, canon law, crusaders and culture--each perhaps worth a chapter in its own right--are imprisoned in the final forty pages of the book.

The meticulous prosopography and the wide reading of sources are also needlessly hampered at times by...