This book spans one thousand years of historical writing and thought in England, Wales, Ireland, and Scotland. It begins, at its early limit, with Gildas (fl. 500–550 ce), whose De excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain) took the demise of the Roman empire as its beginning point for a history of the Britons. It charts, at its outer chronological limit, the transition from manuscript to print and from medieval to Reformation historiography.

Like the medieval histories that comprise its subject, this volume seeks to give a shape – or many shapes – to the past. One of the challenges, however, of describing medieval historical writing is the capaciousness of historia as a premodern concept. In the Middle Ages history writing did not belong to any particular genre, language, or class of texts.

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one of the most influential poems of the English Middle Ages, is a poem steeped in law. The poet’s profound engagement with legal concepts, with fourteenth-century legislation and with legal instruments, such as charters and seals, is key to his innovative poetics as well as to his larger project of making English verse a discourse of theology, ethics and reform. Throughout the poem, Langland explores the dynamics of justice and mercy; along the way he touches on such bread-and-butter legal topics as contract, crime, inheritance and bondage. As the poem shows, legal language, whether derived from scripture, from canon, civil, or common law, or from contemporary practice can forge creative, even daring links between politics, religion and social life.

The history of the book and the history of literature are rarely coterminous, and this is especially true for medieval texts. It is unusual, for example, for a holograph copy of a medieval manuscript to survive, or for any copy to be signed or dated, and later copies attest to the transmission of a work rather than to a literary scene at the moment of authorship. The history of the book often sits uncomfortably astride traditional literary periods, as, for example, in the case of Middle English literature, which, from a stylistic perspective, seems to reach its zenith with Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1390s, transitioning only fitfully to early modern with the advent of print in the 1470s (figured as a gain for the early modern) and the dissolution of the monasteries and the dispersion of their books in the 1530s and 1540s (figured as a loss for the medieval).

The little-studied but important figure Richard de Bury (c. 1287–1345) provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between book history and literary history, and the forms with which we write them. Bury's life as a book collector, and his vivid reflections on the value of letters, make him a site at which English book and literary history collide. As we will see, Bury imagines that collision as a violent one, strewn with bodies and books, and, indeed, it is his portrayal of literary history as a history of destruction that maps the history of letters so meaningfully on to the history of material texts. Only one literary work of his survives, the Latin treatise called the Philobiblon (Love of Books, c. 1345); earlier in his career, he compiled a formulary, the Liber epistolaris, containing about 1,500 letters, which survives in just one manuscript copied in Bury's own hand (datable approximately to 1324). And yet, had things turned out differently, traditional English literary history might have begun with Richard de Bury (as he intended), rather than in the next generation, with Geoffrey Chaucer. Had that been the case, the history of material texts and the history of English letters might have shared a common origin and a very different future.

Introduction

The last two passūs of Piers Plowman return the poem to irresolution and experiment. At the end of B.18, with church bells tolling and the Four Daughters caroling, the poem seems to have reached its apogee and discovered its lost plot. The triumphant art of B.18, its dramatization of the Redemption, required a partial surrender to biblical narrative or the long history of belief, beginning with the Edenic Tree of Charity and ending with the risen Christ. More of Christian history remains to be written, however, namely, the founding of the church, the Apocalypse, and the Last Judgement. By treating the first two events but not the third B.19–20 moves the poem away from narrative resolution and throws its dreamer back onto a landscape of spiritual uncertainty and social critique. In the heady last lines of B.20, when Unity-Holy Church has been breached and Contrition lies comatose inside, Conscience abandons the community and vows to keep searching for Piers:

1. “By Crist!” quod Conscience tho, “I wole bicome a pilgrym,

2. And walken as wide as the world lasteth,

3. To seken Piers the Plowman, that Pryde myghte destruye,

4. And that freres hadde a fyndyng, that for nede flateren

5. And countrepledeth me, Conscience. Now Kynde me avenge,

6. And sende me hap and heele, til I have Piers the Plowman!”

7. And siththe he gradde after Grace, til I gan awake.

8. (20.381–87)

1. [“By Christ!” said Conscience then, “I will become a pilgrim,

2. And walk to the ends of the earth

3. To seek Piers the Plowman, who might destroy Pride,

4. And arrange a stipend for friars, who flatter for need

5. And who dispute with me, Conscience. Now may Kind avenge me,

6. And send me luck and health, until I have Piers the Plowman!”

7. And then he cried after Grace, until I woke up.]