The Winchcombe and Coventry Chronicles. Hitherto Unnoticed Witnesses to the Work of John of Worcester: Vol. 1: Introduction and Commentary; Vol. 2: Texts and Translations (review)

The significance of the annals edited and translated by Paul Antony Hayward is minor from an historical point of view but rather greater from a historiographical one. Thus, although they add little to our knowledge of events in England during the twelfth century, they are potentially more revealing about the practice of writing history then. It is this latter aspect that justifies the expansive presentation of them here—a two-volume set with a combined total of 750 pages, the entirety of the first volume being devoted to introduction (nearly 200 pages) and commentary (some 150 pages).

The principal concern of the commentary is to note sources and analogues for individual entries in the chronicles; and, although these occasionally include charters or privileges (notably sub anno 811, the dedication of Winchcombe church; pp. 251-70), they are principally other chronicles and annals. The scattered evidence thus furnished is drawn together in the substantial introduction that highlights the facts that the Winchcombe and the Coventry Annals share a common stock for their entries to 1122, and that more than 90 percent of this shared material is also to be found in the Chronica chronicarum of John of Worcester. From this it is deduced: first, that the Winchcombe and Coventry Annals and John's depended on the same source; and second (more daringly) that since the lost source shared "affinities of method, purpose and outlook with the known works of John of Worcester" (p. 97), it was probably also his work.

The motive imputed to John for the hypothetical text was "to reach out to a new and different audience from that which was likely to use Chronica chronicarum or Chronicula" (p. 97), a proposition that rests on, and supports, Hayward's analysis of the functions of annals more generally (chapter 1). Rather than representing a more primitive form of history writing than chronicles, they met a different need, here identified as pedagogical—annalistic world chronicles, it is argued, were teaching tools (pp. 37-41). This in turn explains why the manuscripts in which such texts appear may be "booklets or collections of a humble kind . . . their format and their sometimes scruffy aspect is aptly explained by the hypothesis that they are teaching texts" (p. 43).

Notwithstanding the complexity of the material, the arguments are set out with masterful clarity. At each step, the reasoning seems cogent and the conclusion plausible. The fact that the evidence on which they are based is scattered through 500 pages of apparatus and notes—not to mention across other texts and editions altogether—means that it is virtually impossible for a reviewer to deconstruct them. However, in general terms the inevitability of the conclusion diminishes with each of the steps, as summarized above. This summary, it should be noted, reverses the order in which the ideas are presented by the author, who starts with the hypothesis that annals were teaching tools. Now, there is an element of "chicken and egg" in such a premise, for do annals appear in such contexts because they were actually teaching tools, or rather because "schoolmasters" were the most likely members of a community to have the interest, skills, opportunity, and possibly even the formal responsibility to contemplate earlier annals and to record new ones?

In sum, this is an impressive edition with a thorough and thoughtful introduction that not only explicates the significance of the Winchcombe and Coventry Chronicles and their relationship to the literary culture of Worcester, but raises important issues about annal writing in general, with suggestions that now need to be tested in relation to other examples. One [End...