The St. Albans Chronicle: The Chronica Maiora of Thomas Walsingham (review)

The Benedictine monks of St. Albans Abbey were the most prolific of all English medieval chroniclers. There may have been those of superior scholarship (William of Malmesbury) and those that captured a wider audience (Ranulf Higden), but none that could match either the scale or the remarkable continuity of their historical enterprise, which encompassed a succession of (sometimes synoptic) chronicles compiled between the thirteenth and the fifteenth centuries. The significance of their achievement and the historical, political, and public value of their work were recognized by the first generation of English antiquarians who did much to recover their manuscripts in the wake of the Dissolution and to present their version of history to a new readership. The new English histories of Hall and Holinshed even ensured that the St. Albans stories of Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V became embedded in the Shakespearean history cycle. Their early assimilation into the national narrative, however, led to long centuries of neglect, and it was only after the inception of the Rolls series (1857) that a systematic attempt was made to recover each chronicle from the extant manuscripts. These editions reflected many weaknesses of the Rolls project as a whole, such as the arbitrary selection of manuscripts for transcription and the imposition of titles and textual subdivisions of the editors' own invention. Yet modern scholars have been notably slow to re-examine them in spite of their singular mistreatment. There have been a handful of interpretative studies, but the core texts themselves remain untouched. An Arts and Humanities Research Council project to re-edit Matthew Paris's Chronica maiora remains stalled after more than a decade, and his, and the later medieval narratives, are among the diminishing number of English medieval authorities still routinely cited from the nineteenth-century transcriptions. The groundwork for a revision of the Rolls series editions was laid seventy years ago by V. H. Galbraith, whose pioneering research included the recovery of a fifteenth-century St. Albans recension omitted from the original Rolls sequence. Fittingly, it is a former pupil of Galbraith, John Taylor, together with his Leeds colleague Wendy Childs and Latinist Leslie Watkiss, who now aim to continue the work and to complete a new edition of the chronicle commonly attributed to Thomas Walsingham (c. 1340–c. 1422). Taylor has immersed himself in the histories of fourteenth-century England for the past fifty years, and his knowledge of the development and descent of the principal narratives, from St. Albans and from other houses, remains unrivaled.

Walsingham's Chronica was the largest of the late-medieval chronicles compiled by a single author at St. Albans, and its coverage, some forty-six years or so, is comparable to Paris's own Herculean labors. Walsingham has always suffered by comparison with his thirteenth-century predecessor. His manuscripts lack Matthew's lavish illustrations, and the quality of his writing has been disparaged in the same way as much of the monastic literature of the later Middle Ages; indeed, although almost nothing of Walsingham's own life and character can be recovered from the sources, as Taylor and Childs aver, he is often characterized in almost Chaucerian terms as another self-interested monk whose writing suffered from clerical chauvinism and a signal inability to engage sympathetically with the world beyond the precinct walls. As the editors assert in their one-hundred-page introduction, however, Walsingham was an exceptionally well-informed witness to a remarkable period of almost revolutionary change. There is no contemporary narrative to compare to his coverage, successively, of the Good Parliament (1376), the Peasants' revolt (1381), and the rising of the Appellants (1387), which all appear in this volume. Walsingham was susceptible to gossip and hearsay, as well as to a certain selectivity in his reporting, but, as the editors elaborate here, his historical method was...