Since the manuscripts of his writings first passed out of his monastery of St Albans, Matthew Paris has been regarded as a man apart. When a portion of his chronicle fell into the hands of John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln (1480–94), the prelate recognised its historical value at once and covered it with copious notes, but perhaps for that very reason, he was not readily persuaded that it came from the ancient abbey in his own diocese.¹

Fifty years on, and after the St Albans book collection had been broken up, John Leland (1502–52), an antiquarian who had searched many of these ancient libraries, judged Matthew to be among the highest authorities for the annals of England. ‘I very much favour Matthew’ (ut merito auctoritati Matthaei plurimum faveo), he declared, distinguishing him by name instead of institutional affiliation.² Leland was the first reader beyond St Albans to discover the full scope of Matthew’s historical endeavours, reaching from the reign of Henry III (1216–72) into the remote Saxon past and further still to the legendary landscape of King Arthur. Noting a tendency to embroider details he nonetheless recognised him as an authority (autoritati Matthaei plurimum faveo).³

John Bale (1495–1563), the first to trace church history after Henry VIII’s Reformation, responded, upholding Matthew as among those ‘noble’ authors whose legacy was no less than the ‘conservacion of Englandes antiquitees, the bewtie of our nacyon’.⁴ Bale drew readers’ attention not only to the breadth and depth of Matthew’s testimony but also to what he regarded as its unvarnished truth. ‘[For] how to become a full antichrist … in all … ungodlynesse’, he advised, ‘loke [to] Matthew Paris’.⁵ Suspicious of the stories of some of the most commonplace chronicles, such as the printed Chronicles of England and Polychronicon, he asserted, ‘I have Matthew Paris … to confound them.’⁶ Bale was a lifelong rebel and in Matthew he saw a like-minded critic who ‘confutyth this devlyshe dreame’.⁷ When twenty years later Archbishop Matthew Parker (1504–75) published a full text of his chronicle for the first time, he fixed Matthew’s profile in a classical frame: fulfilling Cicero’s dictum that true history is ‘the light of truth’, ‘whatever he heard, he reported’ as an independent witness never weighed down by the wickedness of the age (see Figure 1.1).⁸

Figure 1.1

Portrait of Matthew Paris, engraving by Thomas Cecil, 1640.

The second printing of Matthew’s works (1639–40) presented a portrait of him in gathered habit, hinting at a robed, classical sage about to declaim before an audience (see Figure 1.2).⁹ When the engraving was redone to accompany the first English translation of his history in 1852–54, his figure was placed in a scene of an encampment of knights in coats of chain mail clutching lance, shield and sword in preparation for battle (see Figure 1.3). Now he was more than a wise commentator on current affairs. He was a reporter on the front line.¹⁰

Figure 1.2

Title page of Matthew Parker’s first printing of Matthew Paris’ Chronica maiora under the title Historia maior, London, 1571.

Figure 1.3

Portrait of Matthew Paris, engraving by Hinchcliffe, 1852.

Figure 1.3 Long description

Standing behind him are three knights wearing chain mail armour. On the monk’s right, a knight holds a sword; on his left, two knights hold shields, one also clasps a spear. Behind them is a campaign tent.

The frequent reproduction of Matthew’s chronicle accounts from the mid nineteenth century, far more than any monastic historian other than Bede, in full or in part, in a modernised Latin, in English and French translations has etched this profile in sharp relief. As the force of the confessional conflict of the Reformation has faded, his critical honesty has been celebrated. ‘[He] had the nerve to let himself go’, like ‘a distinguished predecessor of the Fleet Street gossip’.¹¹ Unstintingly opinionated and subjective, his monastic profession has been eclipsed by a populist status, representing ‘healthy English prejudices’ and the ‘foibles of the ordinary man in the street’ – in short, an everyman.¹²

The separation and transformation of Matthew Paris traces the arc of responses to the remains of England’s medieval literature since the turn of the sixteenth century, passing from a prosecution witness in the Reformation trial to the preferred narrator of the nation’s story. The cost of the personal reputation and public stage given to him over time, however, has been the distortion of his body of creative work and its significance in his own day and after. His annals of his kingdom and of Christendom have been allowed to eclipse his record-keeping on other subjects. His investment in narrative history has been emphasised at the expense of his equal interest in the exemplary life histories of established or emerging saints. For three centuries there was almost no acknowledgement of his writing in Norman French. The character of his outlook and commentary on his world has drawn attention without due recognition of his affiliation to his profession as monk. Likewise, the material evidence of his creativity – the number of surviving manuscripts, maps and paintings which certainly passed through his hands – too often has been described in isolation as the traces of a singular genius, not, as it surely was, one instance of the art, craft, archival and literary activity of a substantial, diverse and dynamic institutional community.

In fact, it might be suggested that the foundation for an appreciation of Matthew and the value of his work for an understanding of the political, religious and social life, art and culture of the high Middle Ages is an awareness of his monastic world. Like a growing number of those who lived under vows in his time, Matthew Paris was a career monk. So far as we know he was not entered into this life from infancy. Few were in England by the beginning of the thirteenth century. Rather, he chose his course in adolescence or early adulthood and committed himself to membership of a particular corporate body and to the national and international networks with which it identified. He may have been occupied with the routine demands of his monastic rule for as much as two decades before he devoted very much time to the making of books.

Every generation after his own has assumed that the small group of mid thirteenth-century manuscripts that name him and display his distinctive script and a rich array of illustrations, miniatures, portraits and narratives schemes amount to a more or less coherent body of work as conceived by Matthew himself. The transcriptions from some (but not all) of these books published in thirteen volumes of the Rolls Series from 1866 and 1883 framed this view with formidable scholarly authority and in the following century and further it remained the point of departure for understanding his achievement.¹³ Different interpretations of evidence so familiar and seemingly resolved and entirely new discoveries have arisen only as access to manuscript collections has widened and, most recently, as digitisation has advanced comparative analysis.¹⁴

The claim that Matthew’s writings ‘have come down to us almost intact’¹⁵ may no longer be wholly secure but there can be no doubt that above all else Matthew was the writer of which his own monastic and secular contemporaries were aware, who made histories, archival collections and lives of celebrated saints.

He compiled a chronicle of the recent past in the kingdom of England, narrating the affairs of monarchy, church and to a degree wider society, and their encounters with peoples across the sea. The surviving manuscripts show this history being edited and revised over a number of years to fulfil different purposes. Matthew aimed to maintain his narrative in a long form that recounted affairs in England and the islands of Britain alongside the wider fortunes of European Christendom. Cross-references in his edited, shorter version indicate that he identified this comprehensive account as a ‘greater chronicle’ (cronica maiora or historia magna). His shorter narrative was intended to spotlight England’s experience, an ‘History of the English’ (Historia Anglorum). He also compiled – and partly copied in his own hand – an ‘abbreviation’ or precis of his chronicle (Abbreviatio chronicorum) presented in manuscript in the form of an annal. Matthew drew on his core narrative also to create a continuation of another history of the recent past, the ‘Flowers of History’ (Flores historiarum) begun at St Albans by his older contemporary Roger of Wendover. The nineteenth-century editors devoted their volumes to teasing apart the web of manuscripts and texts and to deducing Matthew’s own rationale. Prevailing views about the keeping of records in a medieval monastery, the corporate – and public – role of chronicles about the process of compiling and copying manuscript books weighed heavily on their reading of the evidence and sometimes misled them entirely.¹⁶

Matthew’s own commentary on his historical enterprise is very slight. What can be certain is that he wrote on the record of the recent past throughout his career in compiling texts, designing and illustrating books and he did so to see his work read and referenced in a variety of contexts in his own monastery and, surely, elsewhere.¹⁷

Matthew was also the compiler of an epic, five-century account of the abbots of his monastery, referred to in the earlier of the two copies made in his lifetime, the ‘Deeds of the Abbots’ (Gesta abbatum). A sequence of biographies of the twenty-three abbots down to Matthew’s own day, the largely consistent structure of the text would suggest the whole was compiled by Matthew, although it seems likely that he drew on records of earlier times, which may have included some or other form of annal or chronicle. Matthew made histories with vivid narrative, animated with dramatic scenes and exchanges of dialogue. Yet he underscored his own prose with transcripts of documents; as a companion to his ‘Greater Chronicle’ he compiled a register of documents which he called his ‘Book of Additions’ (Liber additamentorum).¹⁸

Another St Albans history remains at the margins of Matthew’s record. A dual biography of the legendary Mercian monarchs, The Lives of the Two Offas (Vitae duorum offarum), which was entered into the manuscript, now BL, MS Nero D I, also containing the Gesta abbatum, is by its very subject a companion piece to Matthew’s annal of abbots. The account it contains of the life of Offa II king of Mercia (757–96 CE), St Albans Abbey’s legendary founder, is closely aligned to the opening passages of Matthew’s Gesta. The text also repeats a proverbial phrase found repeatedly in Matthew’s ‘Greater Chronicle’.¹⁹ It has been accepted by some modern scholars as Matthew’s work²⁰ but its modern editor and translator concludes that he may have recovered and revised what was an older, anonymous work, acting as an ‘enhancing editor’.²¹

Now, Matthew’s contribution to hagiography can be more clearly focused. He wrote Latin lives of contemporary churchmen, both archbishops of Canterbury, Stephen Langton and Edmund of Abingdon, who was proclaimed a saint in 1246. His nineteenth-century editors had kept the evidence of his parallel writings in French at arm’s length but there is now general agreement that he was the author of vernacular versions of the lives of St Alban, Archbishop Edmund, the penultimate Saxon king of England Edward the Confessor and the martyred Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury.²² Perhaps surprisingly, there is no trace of a Latin life of Alban or his co-martyr Amphibalus that might be attributed to Matthew, but he is the probable compiler of the account of the translation of the relics of Amphibalus and the miracles attributed to his new shrine that is found in the Trinity College Dublin manuscript, known as the ‘Book of St Albans’. The same manuscript also retains part of an account of Amphibalus and his martyrdom which may have been from Matthew’s own hand.²³

The illustrations – narrative panels, portraits, sketches and armorial blazons – that frame these manuscripts and are threaded through the margins of their text blocks have appeared to some almost too accomplished and prolific to be the possible output of a single hand. At first modern scholars inclined towards the same idea of a school, which seemed a tempting explanation overall for the form and content of these books all associated with a single monastery.²⁴ The communal memory of his own monastery was that Brother Matthew was indeed, in the words of the fourteenth-century chronicler Thomas Walsingham, writing in the abbey’s Book of Benefactors, a ‘brilliant artist’ (pictor peroptimus).²⁵ Deeper study of the underlying drawing, the attitude of figures, style of clothing and scenery and the deployment of colour has strengthened the case for a single vision in design and execution.²⁶ Recent studies of the remarkable sequence of painted panels accompanying the Life of St Alban in the manuscript Trinity College, Dublin 177 – known as the ‘Book of St Albans’ – have tended to accept them as Matthew’s.²⁷

It is the illustrations to the French lives of Thomas Becket and Edward the Confessor each witnessed in a single manuscript that may rather reflect a ‘school’ of Matthew Paris. Perhaps these paintings were his own commission to professional artists, or they were made by such copied from or inspired by (now lost) originals of his own.²⁸

Suzanne Lewis argued that the wide range of connections between pictorial illustration and narrative should give grounds for a ‘new confidence’ that the author of the chronicle was also a gifted illustrator.²⁹ She identified additional hands only contributing details to a handful of illustrations already substantially drawn in BL, MS Nero D I, Claudius D VI and Cambridge Corpus Christi College MS 26.³⁰ Lewis also tempered the admiration of his art, judging him ‘archaic’, ‘awkward’, ‘hesitant’ and deserving the favourite faint praise for an artist, ‘largely self-taught’.³¹

Nonetheless, Matthew Paris can be confirmed as a creative of rare scale and scope, a writer of history and hagiography in Latin and Norman French, an archivist, artist, cartographer and a pioneering student of heraldry.³²

The timeline for this prolific creativity remains open to debate. There is no evidence to support the traditional idea of a more or less formal succession from one generation of chronicler to another – that is, from the earlier St Albans chronicler Roger of Wendover, who died in 1235, to Matthew and then to unnamed others. Richard Vaughan regarded the last decade of Matthew’s life, when he came closest to crown and courtiers, as the most productive;³³ recently it has been argued that the ‘Greater Chronicle’ was always a work in progress, capturing current affairs in close to real time.³⁴ Suzanne Lewis suggested that he took up painting ‘fairly late in life’ but the obvious symbiosis of text and image in his body of work would surely make this doubtful as does his use of drawing assistants for his final additions to his manuscripts.³⁵ Matthew’s ‘career’, if it can be called that, was of a monk professed for life to the conventual routine and it may be more meaningful to see his creative life as an expression of that journey.

By his own testimony he entered the monastery in 1217 – a moment when it was reeling from the internal tensions brought by a new abbot and the external threats of the Barons’ War – and took up his books and pens around 1235.³⁶ His role as a monk alongside as many as one hundred colleagues at St Albans and a similar number spread across the abbey’s empire of dependent priories remained the first and foremost influence on what he created in word and image, and how.³⁷

Matthew matters precisely because he was not an onlooker, still less an outsider. He was experienced in and engaged with the framework of lordship, religious and cultural authority which had been formed between church, crown and political nation; one in which monasteries, and in particular those of great age and wealth, held a privileged position. His manuscripts are our passport inside.

It was the status of St Albans Abbey in this hierarchy which above all shaped Matthew’s creative work. St Albans was one of some twenty-odd monasteries tracing their origins in the remote Saxon past which had been renewed in the wake of the Conquest. The church was rebuilt – it was just a century old when Matthew made his profession there – old holdings were returned and then extended with new patronage.³⁸ But St Albans had not shared in further investments which the incoming Normans had offered its peers. Conspicuously, it had been overlooked by the new royalty. Acts of crown patronage and protection were rare in the century after the dedication of the new church; visits were unknown. When after his marriage (1236) Henry III and his family showed more than a passing interest in the abbey and chose to mark feasts and festivals in the church, it was a new experience for the community.³⁹ It was with good reason that Matthew researched the ties of their Saxon forebears to legendary monarchs such as Offa and Æthelred;⁴⁰ it was past compensation for the monastery’s present neglect.

The crown’s aloofness arose in large part from the troubled history of the abbey’s patron saint. Alban was an ancient saint and his cult was known at the time of the Conquest to reach back to the beginnings of British Christianity.⁴¹ But they were too remote and too thinly documented to form a strong impression on Norman patrons. Perhaps they were also too ‘British’. The saints of other monasteries they restored such as Edmund (at Bury) and Edward (at Westminster), were Saxon monarchs and prelates whose histories held a natural appeal and were well recorded. Also, there was no question as to the site of their saints’ relics whereas Alban’s remains were claimed by churches at home (e.g. Ely) and abroad (e.g. Odense).⁴²

The problems of Alban’s profile were compounded by the incoming Norman abbots. Their inclination was to sidestep an inherited devotional tradition so short on substance. They spared every expense on the shrine and instead invested in pre-Conquest cults of proven popularity, such as those of Cuthbert and Wulfstan, and in those, such as Alexis of Rome, carried across from Norman calendars.⁴³ It was almost 100 years after the Norman takeover that a shrine for St Albans was finally completed and a hagiography was compiled.⁴⁴ The new written accounts of the saint – and a co-martyr ‘discovered’ after the restoration of the shrine – reached an audience outside the abbey only at the turn of the thirteenth century. The earliest surviving manuscript of a sequence of seventy-three miracle stories reported at the shrine was made circa 1200.⁴⁵ Another short sequence was collected in the manuscript containing the illustrated passion of Alban and Amphibalus made by Matthew Paris himself. This opened with the translation of Amphibalus’ relics undertaken by Abbot William in 1220, a ceremony which Matthew must have witnessed just a year or so after making his own solemn profession.⁴⁶ He surely wrote aware that the cult, that is to say, a following for the saint(s) outside of the abbey’s immediate circle, was still not widespread.

There is nothing to suggest the compulsion to claim association with other cults, apparent among the first Norman abbots, had receded at the beginning of the thirteenth century. It seems more than coincidence that the last story in the first sequence of miracles of St Alban should tell of the saint acting in tandem with the martyred archbishop. When Matthew wrote in his Gesta abbatum of the friendship of Abbot Simon with Thomas Becket, it may be he was reporting a memory which the community was keen to make known to prospective patrons.⁴⁷ He also recalled his colleague Master Walter’s witness to the ceremony of the translation of the shrine at Canterbury in 1220, a sight first spoken of in his first year at the abbey.⁴⁸ Matthew’s first abbot, William of Trumpington (1214–35), presented the church with a gold and silver reliquary containing the rib of Wulfstan of Worcester a century, almost to the year, after the second Norman abbot, Abbot Richard d’Aubigny, had secured a relic of the same saint.⁴⁹ Abbot William also restored the chapel of St Cuthbert and secured indulgences to mark its rededication.⁵⁰ From Laurence, erstwhile monk of Jerusalem, he procured relics of the Holy Innocents, Jerome and of the cross itself, inserted into a crucifix.⁵¹ Matthew noted how the abbot was at pains to see the whole cycle of saints’ feasts duly observed, as well as persuading his community to adopt a daily act of devotion for the Virgin Mary. Clearly struck by the cult, he painted her image showing himself in prayer.⁵² Matthew’s formation as a monk at this time may have impressed on him the importance of number and variety in the devotions of a great church and perhaps also of novelty. His interest in the lives of saints old and new whose relics were not yet known at St Albans – Edward the Confessor, Thomas Becket, Edmund of Canterbury, Richard of Chichester – arose not only from his associations in the outside world; it was the vocation to which he was called.

In the absence of significant or sustained interest from the crown, the establishment of the post-Conquest abbey at St Albans had rested on the tactical acts of settler lords seeking to secure a territorial profile for themselves.⁵³ Only one of these patrons was found among the high nobility, Robert de Mowbray, earl of Northumbria, and his domain was declared forfeit following his rebellion.⁵⁴ For the most part they represented the second rank of lordship, those rising through royal service whose estates and influence were concentrated regionally.⁵⁵

The lasting consequences for the community of monks were the comparative isolation of the abbey of St Albans from any proprietorial interest and a commitment to a chain of dependent churches planted in their patrons’ principal domains in East Anglia, the Midlands and the northern border.⁵⁶ These, which were made monastic ‘cells’ of the mother house, were built and endowed with notable ambition by their founding families, bequeathing to the abbot and monastic community the practical and political challenges of governing a distant empire. In his Gesta abbatum Matthew showed how these demands consumed the time and energy of his abbots, William and John. He also documented a developing identity, a house (domus) at St Albans with a growing number of satellite domains, priories and residences at London and Yarmouth (Norfolk), the source of the monastery’s fish.⁵⁷ The mapper of routes across Britain and through the European mainland belonged to a monastery unusually burdened with essential journeys cross-country.⁵⁸

At the turn of the thirteenth century, the St Albans leadership were still feeling their way towards a way of living within their network. A preference for abbots associated with families influential in these regions offered stability, although perhaps at the expense of St Albans itself. Increasingly, they wielded the weapons of visitation, legislation and personal and corporate sanctions. Matthew Paris was always aware of these tensions. He became acutely sensitive to the social status and regional origins of those in his line of sight, from fellow monks to officers of the monastery, from churchmen to courtiers. He also showed a special interest in statutory instruments of governance.⁵⁹ The unique constitution of St Albans Abbey and its cells was an uncommonly useful perspective from which to view the first English parliaments. Perhaps it provided the experience and insight which guided him through the reform in 1248 of the undisciplined Benedictine community at Nidarholm.⁶⁰

In spite of a less exalted place on the horizons of Norman lordship, the abbey accrued a substantial endowment of estates and churches reaching across most of the eastern side of England from the Thames to the Tyne. These sources of income supported the steady growth of the St Albans community. Perhaps the peak was reached around the year 1200. Matthew reported that Abbot John of the Cell set a limit on the number of monks at 100 and for the conduct of an abbatial election the same, minimum number of monks should be present.⁶¹ Several monasteries in the abbey’s peer group of pre-Conquest foundations saw such numbers at this time – Bury, Glastonbury, Westminster – but probably none exceeded them.⁶²

Generally, such large communities became increasingly stratified. Since the population in provincial settlements was small, it was inevitable that rising numbers arrived from diverse origins. At Bury St Edmund’s, the abbot’s chaplain, Jocelin of Brakelond, famously observed the division between the educated elite and the ‘illiterate’, meaning those who had made their profession without first passing through emerging universities, or even any school.⁶³

The St Albans Gesta abbatum, which for these years records what Matthew Paris himself had heard recalled, gives the impression of differences not only of education but also regional background and social status. At the turn of the thirteenth century there was a hierarchy of monks distinguished for their advanced studies: Walter of Rheims carried the title ‘Master’, connecting him to a career at Paris or another nascent university. Roger of Poitiers was said to be distinguished for his command of many disciplines, grammar, logic, natural philosophy, civil and canon law; in short, the syllabus of the secular schools. Reymund, prior under Abbot John of the Cell, was known for his collection of books, among them a copy of Peter Comestor’s Scholastic History, a guide to the study of the Bible then fast becoming a staple textbook for students of theology. His successor as prior, Alexander of Langley, Matthew remembered as an expert rhetorician, a characterisation which surely also signalled the study of the liberal arts.⁶⁴

The toponyms of the monks of this generation – that is to say, the place names that follow their first names – do suggest a wide geographical catchment. Some surely came to St Albans after earlier careers in France whether or not it was their place of birth. Internal migration between monasteries was more common than in the later Middle Ages, and Matthew’s Gesta records the arrival of Ralph of Stanham, erstwhile prior of Whitby Abbey.⁶⁵ Men of ‘northern parts’ were familiar at St Albans. Matthew knew this was the origin of Germanus, whom Abbot William sent to take up the priorate of Tynemouth.⁶⁶ When he described Abbot William’s visit to Tynemouth, although not a first-hand witness, he could well imagine the antipathy between northerners and southerners (licet generaliter sese non diligant ad invicem boreales et australes corde sincero).⁶⁷

His awareness of their different point of view was heightened by his passing contact with secular churchmen and royal clerks from the western side of the kingdom – far outside the abbey’s territorial domain – and those whose duties carried them across the borders into Scotland and Wales. In the last years of his life, Matthew may have learned news of Wales from the long stay at St Albans of Bishop Richard of Bangor.⁶⁸

Clerks retained in the household of the abbot extended this cosmopolitan society. Matthew recalled Nicholas, known as the Greek, whom he claimed to have assisted Bishop Grosseteste in his Latin translation of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.⁶⁹

Yet the tension which above all Matthew met on entry into the community was a matter of social class. In his first years the community was still disturbed by the election of Abbot William. It was said that from the outset he, from a knightly family, showed a preference for the company of the social elite and for their lifestyle.⁷⁰ Matthew learned that senior monks had soon lamented their choice, recalling ruefully King John’s response when the new abbot was named: ‘Ha! He’s the one that I want.’⁷¹ Matthew’s Gesta discovered a history of division between high-born abbots and their communities. Abbot Warin (1183–95) had been condemned by the sacrist William Martel for his self-regard and the favour he shamelessly showed to his kinfolk, however distant the connection.⁷² Both Richard d’Aubigny (1100–19) and Geoffrey de Gorron (1119–46) were said to have enriched their own Norman families at the expense of the abbey.⁷³ Matthew took up these suspicions. He saw Abbot William embark on his visitation with a whole caravan of worldly family and friends; he counted the 100 horses lost in a year, resources of the prodigal nobility.⁷⁴ He was more of a monarch in his realm than a monk professed to the same vows as his brethren.

Matthew’s portrait of William’s successor, John de Hertford (1235–63), perhaps implied a shift in the superior’s social status. John was of local birth; Hertford was little more than a dozen miles from St Albans. No precise measure of his family’s standing was given in the Gesta abbatum, perhaps because there was nothing of distinction to say. It may be there was an oblique indication of it when the narrative observed how often Abbot John was bested in his battles with the local lay elite.⁷⁵

Matthew’s judgement of secular society drew on a discourse of social criticism long established inside the monastery. Perhaps it was also sharpened by personal experience. It may be more than coincidental that Matthew came to be recognised in and outside St Albans only after Abbot William’s death.

The visible difference, if not also the clash between the vowed religious and the secular way of life was heightened for the St Albans monks of Matthew’s generation because of cohorts of lay brothers (monachi conversi, as Matthew describes them) and the retained clerks who lived and worked alongside.⁷⁶ Matthew himself accepted and often admired them for their contribution to the church and the monastic community but their presence appears also to have prompted him to record and reflect on the distinctive discipline of his own kind – that is, of observant monks – in diet, dress and daily devotions.

He himself is not easily placed in this large, diverse community. The only biographical information now surviving notes his activity as a writer and artist of the books he wrote and recalls his journey to Norway, but it reveals nothing of his geographical and social origin. His family name offers no further clue. Paris can be found in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries across southern England from east to the far south-west among those who were tenants, merchants and landlords on some scale. Another St Albans monk of the same century shared the name. William Parys is named as the donor of a manuscript of the Sentences of Peter Lombard.⁷⁷ Thomas Fuller ‘presumed [Matthew] born in [Cambridgeshire] as bred in the next county [Cheshire, in Fuller’s running-order] where the name and family of Paris is right ancient’.⁷⁸ Matthew’s awareness of an English proverb, ‘Men seth gamen goth on wombe. Ac ich segge, gamen goth on herte [Play enters the belly but now I say play enters the heart],’ which he repeats in his account of Edmund of Abingdon, might be the hint of an origin below the tier of landowners at which the Anglo–Norman vernacular was the lingua franca.⁷⁹ A passing reference to an obscure holy well of ‘St Cradon’ – perhaps meant to be St Cadoc – in Cornwall in one of the miracle stories he copied into the Dublin manuscript could be a hint of a West Country homeland.⁸⁰ Of course, it cannot be proved.

If he made his profession as a young adult, almost certainly he would have been among a growing number of monks at St Albans who did so. With them he would have stood apart from the leadership of the community, which by his own account was dominated by those whose scholastic titles and skills spoke of careers before they came to the monastery. Their ascendency may explain why for more than forty years Matthew himself never held any office. It is doubtful that he had studied at the same level.

He admired the learning of these masters and listened for details of the academic world out of which they came. He remembered the names of the famous clerks who fled Paris in 1229.⁸¹ Troubled Richard of Croxley, Abbot of Westminster (1246–58), he praised for his school learning in both laws.⁸² The Bishop of Lincoln’s bullying of Oxford, a focus for academic learning, filled him with foreboding.⁸³ He even overcame his distaste for novelty to praise the mendicant friars for their learned preaching.⁸⁴

These observations are made in the detached tone of an outsider. Yet Matthew knew current interests of his own generation of schoolmen well enough to give close attention to the testimony of John Basing, the archdeacon of Leicester under Bishop Robert Grosseteste, a pioneering scholar of the Greek language, who compiled a guide capturing the whole essence (vis) of Greek such that it was called the ‘Greek Donatus’.⁸⁵ On one occasion he reached for one of their favourite authorities, Bernardus Silvestris’ Cosmographia, copying his couplet on the nature of the buffalo when in 1252 Richard, earl of Cornwall (1209–72) was sent some from abroad.⁸⁶

Nonetheless, the few glimpses given of his own sources of reference suggest reading largely outside the syllabus of these advanced schools: court poetry (Henry of Avranches), a copy of which he wrote out;⁸⁷ a handful of favourite classical tags repeated so often in different contexts as to suggest his overall stock was low;⁸⁸ and the scriptural stories and images which were the daily diet of any observant monk.

He showed the fruits of further reading so sparingly in his own writing that it does suggest he was not so much a scholar as a thoughtful browser. Describing the siege of Bedford Castle, he reached for ‘architectoria’, a medieval recasting of the classical ‘architectura’, which he would have met in an encyclopaedia of terms but not in the original manual on the subject by the classical authority, Vitruvius.⁸⁹

Matthew may not have known the same schools from where the masters and many of the books now seen at the abbey had come, but somehow he had become well versed in the vernacular French culture of the social elite.⁹⁰ It also thrived in the reading and original writing of regular women, not least among the Benedictines at nearby Barking Abbey.⁹¹ But other than through the work of Matthew himself there is scarcely any sign of interest in or use of vernacular languages at St Albans. In fact, there are faint traces among Benedictine men of this time elsewhere: at the end of the century, at Reading Abbey, a church and community whose exchanges with crown and court life were as close as St Albans.⁹²

The meeting point between monastics and francophone secular society was the worship of their altars and shrines. Here was Matthew’s own centre of gravity. The ceremonies of the church were always the frame through which he watched the comings and goings at St Albans. What he remembered of King Henry’s visit to the shrine in March 1255 was his performance of devotions day and night and that his gifts of vestments were entered in the book kept for the purpose in the abbey church.⁹³ His point of view was sometimes sharply focused in his Historia Anglorum: when Richard, earl of Cornwall, embarked on Crusade, he came to the abbey and in the chapter house the community bade him farewell with their ‘devout prayers’ (orationibus eorum devotus commendebat). In the longer form of the entry in Chronica maiora the action of the brethren is not described.⁹⁴ The description in the St Albans Flores of relics taken out (or off) from the shrine for the king and the singing of a special chant carry an echo of Matthew as the committed choir monk.⁹⁵

What he observed best of the abbots he knew first-hand was their attitude to these fundamental duties. His obituary for William of Trumpington dwells on his renewal of the fabric of the abbey church and his determination to revitalise devotions.⁹⁶ Matthew pictures him vividly, participating in the ‘work of God’ (Opus Dei), the pattern of worship required under the monastery’s rule.⁹⁷ He led the chant from his stall in the choir, was to be seen there at both the break and the end of the day (Matins to Compline) and presided as celebrant at festal masses.⁹⁸ Matthew documented William’s development of the liturgical calendar and customs, the introduction of a daily mass for the Virgin Mary, and associated lighting of candles and sounding of bells; and his scheme – the first in the monastery’s post-Conquest history – for his own commemoration using the chant sequence for the patronal saint.⁹⁹ His written observations of William’s successor, John de Hertford, were briefer but again he noted his choir acts: the provision of a precious vestment, the assign of income to the office of the sacrist and his plan for his own posthumous commemoration.¹⁰⁰

Matthew’s constant attention to the detail of church ceremony, timing, location, text and dynamics (procession and otherwise) leaves the impression that here was his viewpoint on the life of the abbey. It may be telling that he only remembered the speech of Abbot William when he witnessed him at the head of the community in choir, as at the reception of a cohort of novices.¹⁰¹ Even happenings beyond the abbey he recalled according to the calendar of his church. Parliament was summoned, he wrote in 1246, ‘on the day [the fourth Sunday in Lent] that we sing “Rejoice O Jerusalem! (Laetere Jerusalem Isaiah 66:10)”’.¹⁰² Near the end of his life, his report of a sentence of interdict at St Albans still gave the cloister monks’ view of the strange suspension of the daily offices and the compulsion to conduct the chapter meeting in whispers.¹⁰³

His long experience of the observant routine made him a champion of custom and a defender of discipline. He was proud of his part, as he put it, in Norway reforming ‘the Benedictine order in the houses of Black Monks’.¹⁰⁴ Although he commended the academic masters who were now monks with him, he criticised the Cistercians’ creation of a college at the University of Paris. In the schools, he lamented, the rigour of the monastic order was dissipated by the wickedness of the world.¹⁰⁵ He welcomed Abbot William’s change to the community’s footwear from soft sheepskin to tooled leather as ‘more honest’ (honestius) for a monk.¹⁰⁶

A lament for the laxity of monastic discipline in that day – an offence to the legacy of Benedict and Bernard (of Clairvaux, the Cistercian champion) – made near the end of the narration of John de Hertford’s abbacy may be the heartfelt regret of the aged Matthew.¹⁰⁷ At this time of life, the hope for a return to the simple purity of ancient monastic observance seemed to be rising in Matthew. He condemned the multiplicity of orders now present in England (ordines in Anglia … videretur inordinata)¹⁰⁸ and considered that the shame of modern monastics (moderni) would anger both Benedict and Bernard.¹⁰⁹

Here it is worth noting in this context how he claimed Edmund of Abingdon for an observant monk. ‘He maintained his abstemiousness in … all worldly things … assiduous in prayer … took only the briefest sleep.’¹¹⁰ He was drawn to stories which demonstrated a monastic devotion: how when a Master of Arts, Edmund built his own oratory in the parish where he was living; how he was suspicious of his scholastic syllabus, ‘sinfully entrapped by his type of learning … while moving among scholars he seemed to be not merely religious but the perfect model of the religious life’; he was ‘assiduous in reading and meditation … fervent in prayer, even constant in keeping fasts and vigils’, never missed matins and came to all the offices (at Merton) ‘as if he had been under an obligation to do so’. It was said he turned laymen and schoolmen to the cloister.¹¹¹ Such were the secular churchmen Matthew admired – not only Edmund but also Bishops Richard Wyche and Robert Grosseteste – who placed personal religion at the centre of their prelacy.¹¹²

It was a monastic outlook touched by misogyny. In spite of his interest in tracing the early history of St Albans, Matthew ignored entirely the figure of Christina of Markyate (d. c. 1155), recluse and later abbess, although her anniversary was recorded at the abbey and her hagiography was preserved, if not originated there. He scarcely noticed the communities of monastic women set under the jurisdiction of the abbot except to condemn them for their support of the incoming Dominicans.¹¹³ Perhaps his prejudice was as much status as sex. Like many monks it seems he was sceptical of the place of professed women in the territory of the male clergy. Yet when he saw and even spoke to secular women, especially those of noble rank, he put aside monastic sensibility to praise their personal qualities, even their beauty.¹¹⁴ Worthy of his attention was the Christian witness of well-born women Margaret Bisset, ‘of distinguished birth and a life yet more so’ (genere praeclara, moribus clarior) and Cecilia de Sanford, a widowed gentlewoman living under vows, ‘noble in blood, nobler still in morals’ (sanguine nobilis, sed moribus nobilior).¹¹⁵

This outlook of the observant monk was surely reinforced in Matthew – and others of his generation at St Albans – by William of Trumpington’s programme of reconstruction and renewal, a transformation of the church and its cult life second only to the Norman restoration. The space for worship and the way in which it was animated through liturgical words, processions and props (i.e. relics, images) was changed by Abbot William in the opening years of Matthew’s cloister career, when he himself would have been most tightly bound to the daily observant routine.¹¹⁶

It does seem likely it was sharpened also by the same abbot’s commitment to the programme of reform promulgated at the fourth Lateran Council convened in 1215, at which he was present with two of the monastery’s masters of the schools.¹¹⁷ The canons issued at the council called for a general recovery of discipline among the clergy, regular as much as secular, to raise the quality of pastoral care of the laity and to strengthen the church’s defence against heresy and the non-Christian religions of Judaism and Islam.¹¹⁸ Monks were required to adopt the same arrangements for teaching as were already established in the cathedral schools, and the diverse and widespread networks of Benedictines were urged to accept a new system of centralised governance under the authority of the General Chapter.¹¹⁹ What Matthew remembered of Abbot William represents him as a champion of the council’s cause: his regal and rigid rule of his monks, his exemplary conduct in choir routine and his investment in the textbooks of a mainstream clerical curriculum. Perhaps it is telling that the one book for reading which the abbot commissioned for the monks was a copy of Peter Comestor’s Scholastic History, the foundation of the emerging academic syllabus in theology.¹²⁰ He was a likely source of the works of the Paris master Robert de Courçon (d. 1219) and Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), Bishop of Acre, chronicler of the Fifth Crusade and popular preacher of reform, which Matthew boasted proudly were to be found in the abbey book collection.¹²¹ Abbot William instilled an understanding of the canons of 1215 sufficiently for the monks to invoke them when they elected his successor twenty years on.

Perhaps William also led the abbey into a closer association with England’s Benedictine congregation. Matthew learned of the collegial friendship he had found at the council in his counterparts from Bury St Edmunds and Durham.¹²² Abbot William took a leading role in the inaugural gatherings of the new General and Provincial Chapters of Benedictines which were convened in England from 1218. The second meeting of the General Chapter, summoned in September 1219, was hosted at St Albans.¹²³ Matthew’s own identification with the network of Black Monks increased over time. When the Cistercians came to Hailes (Gloucestershire) he situated it for himself and his brethren as ‘not far from Winchcombe’, the ancient Benedictine abbey that stood on its border.¹²⁴ Matthew’s witness to these steps in his first years at St Albans may explain the attention he gave in his later narratives not only to papal initiatives for reform, such as the injunctions of Gregory IX and Innocent IV and English missions of their legates, but also to the arrival, rule and preaching campaigns of the friars.¹²⁵ Into his last decade he continued to follow closely the rolling programme which was transforming the ‘Black Order’ (de reformatione ordinis inter nigri ordinis), complementing his chronicle entries with copies of canons collected in his ‘Book of Additions’.¹²⁶

Increasingly Matthew identified with his order as a corporate cause. He kept a watch on oppressions of the monastic, of all customary traditions, but increasingly the focus of his interest was the fortunes of the Benedictines.¹²⁷ The struggles of the monks of the Canterbury and Winchester cathedrals left him lamenting the ‘disgrace and ignominy’ (dedecus et ignominiam) of his kind.¹²⁸ When the abbot of Walden quit his office to become a friar, for Matthew it was a betrayal of the older monastic order.¹²⁹ He responded to the mendicants’ reported mockery of the Benedictines as ‘greedy and proud’ both with criticism of their ambitious building plans and the allegation that they duped the dying out of their money, and he asserted that his own form of regular religious life was ‘authentic and codified by the Church fathers’ (autenticos et a sanctis patribus constitutos).¹³⁰ Although he disliked the friars’ dismissal of Cistercian monks as ‘rusticos’, he also challenged that order for its claim to precedence in the church.¹³¹ The sacred relics of Edmund of Abingdon, he suggested, should not remain at Pontigny since ‘almost all the glorious saints lie in houses of the order of Black Monks, few or none in the houses of Cistercians’.¹³²

It was certainly under the influence of William of Trumpington that the monastery was made a focus for art and craftwork. His changes to the church building and its interior decoration were carried out by members of the monastic community skilled in masonry, timber work, sculpture and painting. Matthew identifies them in his Gesta abbatum as Matthew of Cambridge, who acted as Master of Works,¹³³ Walter of Colchester ‘incomparable painter and sculptor’, who held the office of sacrist, and Richard, identified only as ‘our monk’ who decorated the new guests’ hall built by Abbot John de Hertford.¹³⁴ The cartulary of the sacrist’s office made in the same period records painters (called pictores) present in the town of St Albans.¹³⁵ There can be little doubt that a man such as Walter who took up the monastic life was a member of a wider craft constituency well established in the vicinity of the abbey. Matthew’s own practice as a painter, and perhaps his own skill, was developed in an environment in which professional craft was flourishing for as much as twenty years.

The abbot’s procurement of new books for the monastery may have brought the creative and craft skills of script, rubrication, illustration and binding inside the monastery. There had been phases (if not, perhaps sustained periods) of book production at the abbey for much of the past century. Among Abbot William’s predecessors, Geoffrey de Gorron and Simon (1166–83) were remembered for their personal direction of particular book projects.¹³⁶ The twelfth-century books now surviving give evidence of successive groups of copyists at work in these seventy-five years, among them some showing the skill and style associated with the best of the cross-Channel scribes and book artists active at this time.¹³⁷ The high craft of these books speaks of a professional workshop in which the monks were not, or not principally, participants, but patrons.

On the face of it, the circumstances in which new books were made seem to have been little changed when Matthew began his monastic life at St Albans. In his Gesta abbatum, he reported that Abbot William had presented to the convent a copy of Peter Comestor’s Scholastic History, the writing of which had been organised by the prior, Reymund, who had ensured it was finished to perfection. He also provided a fine psalter fit for a king and an ordinal to the dependent priories at Redbourn and another of no lesser quality to Wymondham. The impression here is of particular manuscripts produced ad hoc and the implication is that professional artisans wrote them and the role of the monks themselves was to supervise their work.¹³⁸

There are few traces of these costly commissions among the surviving dozen or so books of St Albans’ provenance – certain or assumed – which date from the six decades of Matthew’s lifespan. The greater number of these are shown to have been gifts made to the monastery by individual monks or their patrons. Abbot William donated a turn-of-the-century anthology of the theological writings of Hugh of St Victor. What may have been the personal, working copy of the Lombard’s Sentences belonging to Matthew’s namesake, William Parys, passed into the conventual collection. The suffragan bishop, John of Ardfert, whose presence among the monks Matthew recorded in his chronicle and in the Gesta abbatum, donated a manuscript of William de Montibus.¹³⁹ Perhaps these hint at a shift of emphasis in the book culture of the community, from the primary influence of the abbots’ own enterprise to the independent initiative of their community, both its professed members and, as in the case of Bishop John, the network of churchmen and clerks connected with them.

There is some corroboration for this in the condition of this same sample of books which carry the annotations of readers in scripts characteristic of the first half of the thirteenth century: monks who picked them up in the book collection for studies of their own. Among them was Matthew himself.¹⁴⁰

It is also suggested by the few fragments of manuscript compilations other than those with which he was involved. The largest of these has been represented as miscellany compiled and part copied by an individual monk, identified as John of Wallingford, infirmarer at St Albans during the abbacy of John de Hertford, whose portrait was painted by Matthew himself on the last leaf of a quire containing a liturgical calendar.¹⁴¹ In fact it is a gathering together of texts written by several hands over a run of years; among them is the work of Matthew Paris himself. It is likely that each of them came to be made in a particular context for a particular purpose. Another is a sequence of letters from the abbacy of John de Hertford copied in a contemporary hand.¹⁴² Now they appear among unrelated texts, but since their interest is narrowly institutional it seems almost certain that they were first intended for another location.

What may be concluded with some certainty is that William of Trumpington’s abbacy saw further traffic in books generated both by acts of patronage and by personal, creative initiative. Matthew’s capacity to copy a book, to devise and execute a particular design, even to illustrate it, and his impulse to practise these skills for himself was not unusual in the monastery in the first quarter of the thirteenth century.¹⁴³ Indeed, from the abbot who received his profession right across the community of monks, it may have been represented to him as the model of a monastic life.

Matthew also inherited from his seniors an interest in documenting the history of their house. He himself acknowledged that the beginning of his Gesta abbatum was an annal of the names and acts of the early abbots of St Albans which came to him from one Bartholomew and had belonged to Adam, cellarer during the abbacy of Robert de Gorham (1151–66).¹⁴⁴ This annal may itself have been a compilation of records of the reigns of particular abbots. It incorporates what appears to be a self-contained account of the constitution of the office of the abbey kitchener in the time of Abbot Geoffrey de Gorron.¹⁴⁵ In the half century before Matthew made his profession, an unnamed monk of St Albans had recorded another aspect of Geoffrey’s abbacy, the career of the recluse Christina, whom he appointed as superior of a community of professed women at Hertford.¹⁴⁶ From the turn of the thirteenth century, Roger of Wendover, who held the priorate of the dependent community at Belvoir, compiled an annal aimed at developing and extending the contemporary history of the London canon, Ralph de Diceto, to recount current affairs from the perspective of St Albans.¹⁴⁷ Around this time it may have been John of Wallingford who began a brief annal of early British and English history to the reign of Cnut (1016–35), which is now found near the front of his miscellany.¹⁴⁸

Although no abbey cartulary survives from this same period, there is evidence of active archival compilation. Matthew himself recalled how Abbot William had compiled a record of the losses the abbey suffered during the First Barons’ War, writing it in his own hand (in manu propria).¹⁴⁹ A sequence of charters concerning the office of the sacrist and the altar of the co-patron saint, Amphibalus, is conserved in a composite manuscript made a century later.¹⁵⁰ It may be another indication of the independent copying of texts and keeping of books. Matthew may have entered a monastery with a collective awareness of history but a tradition of individual expression.¹⁵¹ His colleague John of Wallingford shadowed Matthew in his watch on current affairs but he made an annal of his own.¹⁵² Perhaps what set Matthew apart was his capacity to mobilise peers with common interests – among them John of Wallingford – to assist him in his own enterprise.¹⁵³

The dynamics of monastic life that Matthew Paris met at St Albans in the wake of the Barons’ War were matched among many of the abbey’s peers. The renewal of the monastic church and its principal cults was a common enterprise. The ambition and energy of the sacrists at Bury St Edmunds, who maintained a record book for their office, a Gesta sacristarum from circa 1200 to 1263, echoes that of Matthew’s celebrated Walter of Colchester.¹⁵⁴ At Westminster, daily Marian devotions were now introduced alongside elaborate posthumous commemorations for past abbots, possibly the very model for Trumpington and Hertford’s propositions at St Albans.¹⁵⁵ The abbots of Bury and Westminster stood beside William of Trumpington at the Lateran council of 1215; in its aftermath Bury confronted the challenges its canons raised as they struggled to settle the matter of their abbot’s election. Bury and other independent abbeys of Benedictines such as Evesham and Tewkesbury made the same investment in keeping of annals and related record collections.¹⁵⁶ The striking similarity in the material surviving from Bury is the independence of the compilers, who narrated accounts of their own times and collected and transcribed charters from their different positions within the community, the abbot’s household, the office of the kitchener or the sacristy. Like Roger of Wendover, the Tewkesbury annalist recorded current affairs from the perspective of his own precinct.

Matthew himself appeared not only aware of this shared experience but also eager to articulate it as an identity. He reported on the causes, the gains and losses of his colleagues’ communities. He commended his colleagues when he perceived the rights and privileges of monastic status to have been upheld, but he was certain to condemn them if he thought they had failed those rights and privileges. It may be that he gave voice to a corporate point of view that was more developed at St Albans than elsewhere. As Matthew recalled in the Gesta abbatum, Abbot John de Hertford had proposed (1253) the formation of an affinity with the Benedictines of Bury St Edmunds, Canterbury, St Augustine’s, Evesham and Westminster which is not documented elsewhere and which appears to have come to nothing.¹⁵⁷

In fact, it may be that in some ideas and outlooks St Albans in the first half of the thirteenth century did still stand apart. The dominance of masters of the schools does not appear to have been typical of the hierarchy of Benedictines in the years after 1215. The traces of learning of this kind at its nearest neighbours, Bury and Westminster, are very slight; from elsewhere, there is nothing at all.¹⁵⁸ This influence, and the customary discipline Abbot William apparently advanced in the wake of the Lateran Council, which still resonated with Matthew twenty years on as he copied and recopied the canons of successive papal legates, may also help to explain the absence of any more diverse culture at the abbey. Less than twenty miles from St Albans, on the same route north, the Augustinians at Dunstable appear to have absorbed news of people and things of all kinds by word of mouth.¹⁵⁹ By contrast, the prompt and purpose of Matthew Paris’ creativity was almost always his own monastic profession.

The lived experience of England’s largest, wealthiest and most influential monasteries in the thirteenth centuries is not at all well documented. It was a period as pivotal in their development and in their imprint on religious culture and economic, social and political life as the coming of the Normans. Relations with royal, seigniorial and papal authority were perhaps more volatile and impactful than at any time until the reformation of Henry VIII. The renewal of their churches and cult practice resulted in patterns of worship which remained in place, scarcely altered, for another two centuries. The programme of papal reform began to draw them towards the learning, teaching, pastoral care and governance of the secular clergy. The majority of monastic annals and chronicles which have been preserved scarcely notice these transformations; many are little more than customised versions of more homogenous narratives. The body of records, cartularies, registers, and Gesta abbatum – which do remain in larger numbers – display the limitations of their genre: they describe the business of an institution but not its prevailing attitudes or outlook. Hardly any other original writing from monasteries of this period survives. Matthew Paris’ manuscripts present a uniquely valuable point of entry into an otherwise very shadowy world. Of course, the scale and scope of this body of work opens a wide perspective on the years. His lack of an office gives a view from ground level. Above all, his voice, voluble and idiosyncratic, gives expression to the experience of a monastery both a part and a parcel of momentous times. As an unnamed colleague recalled in an obituary neatly inscribed in the margin of the last of his texts, Matthew Paris was an eloquent man (vir quidam eloquens) who wrote down a great deal (in scriptis plenarie redegit) in an age of great events (gesta magnatam, tam saecularium quam ecclesiasticorum, necnon casus et eventus, varios et mirabiles).¹⁶⁰ The rare monk’s-eye view is what compels him still to be studied.