The Late Medieval Cistercian Monastery of Fountains Abbey, Yorkshire: Monastic Administration, Economy, and Archival Memory by Michael Spence (review)

Secluded but public, Fountains Abbey sits hidden away in a wonderful, worldly sufficient (one would think), valley open to myriad visitors. Yet there was murder and mayhem in this monastery and a great deal of effort was expended in the worldly business of managing the numerous estates.

Although much of its history has long been known there is a gap (p. 22)—'Between these two periods [1132–1300] and 'the very end [to 1539] relatively little has been written' (p. 42): after 1361 there are few records surviving, but they start again in 1456.

Michael Spence is not put off by the plaintive annotation in one manuscript: 'Omnes iste carte perdite sunt'! (p. 122). He approaches this and other gaps through the evidence that has survived; his use of archival sources is exemplary. Yet this book is not just an investigation of charters, it is far more: it can be read in several different ways and be of use to very different readers.

Although Fountains has its own beautiful setting on the River Skell, a couple of miles outside Ripon in North Yorkshire, many of its estates were twenty or so miles to the west, in Craven, now in the Yorkshire Dales National Park. Spence raises interesting questions about management of the estates after 1300 (pp. 38–39) and the way Fountains sometimes acted before receiving approval from its mother house at Cîteaux (p. 104). He shows how the management of these estates ebbed and flowed over the years, depending on circumstances. The Black Death, in particular, and subsequent epidemics, had a huge impact (p. 122). However, he has very little to say about how the Scottish Wars impacted the abbey's finances.

In order to gain an understanding of what was happening Spence introduces a number of tools. His approach is detective-like; indeed, he titles Chapter 7 'A Forensic Approach to Fountains Cartularies', while Chapter 4 has intense detective work unpicking the President Book. Spence's knowledge of Yorkshire makes a huge difference, and he has managed to piece together an impressive reconstruction.

He works on at least two levels. On one he carefully correlates items in the different cartularies, in many ways reflecting the explicit cross-referencing in the cartularies themselves, but also establishing non-explicit links. On another he is very aware of the editing that has gone on in producing the cartularies. The book has a fascinating introduction about the redaction process—and unravelling it—thereby revealing the manipulation or even suppression of some records (pp. 14–15). Anyone writing catalogues for the archives engages in the processes of inclusion, exclusion, creation, and amendment of the entries (p. 59). What is omitted may well be as significant as what is included. In this context, Chapter 5 has a splendid argument as to why Abbot Greenwell (abbot 1442–1471) edited a chronicle and cast himself in a good light. Such events remind us that when history is written down it can often reveal as much about the writer as about the events being recounted. Modestly, Spence says that if the monastery's manuscripts are edited the whole situation can be revisited (p. 142).

While Spence is writing about one period and principally one monastery, the book can be read as a guidebook for researchers on how to pull together information scattered in different archives. His care—and especially patience—in putting multitudinous, apparently disparate, facts together is quite remarkable. Medieval scribes rarely did anything by accident, so when one sees, for example, a superscript number, there is a reason for it, though that may not be immediately apparent. Spence ferrets out the reasons. Because of his thoroughness he is able to fill large gaps as in, for example, Table 3 on p. 64, where he has shown...