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The Rise and Decline of the Medieval Community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 January 2015
Extract
The accumulation of specialized work and the publication of more texts calls for the constant modification of current conceptions of the history of medieval England. Of the means of achieving this readjustment the most satisfactory is probably the lecture, which affords scope for the individual interpretation of development over a wide field and yet does not lose its flexibility or arrogate to itself an authoritative character to which, owing to its very nature, no general survey can rightly lay claim. It is not suggested that the twentieth-century medievalist should ignore the printing-press altogether, but there is much to be said for concentrating on the printing of such works-in the main, editions of texts-as may possibly be of some value to future generations of scholars. To the demand for ‘brighter’ history it is we11 to turn a deaf ear, but the exigencies of time to some extent justify the publication of re-interpretations by those competent to undertake them, whether such text-books assume the form of the co-operative work with almost every chapter from a different pen, the many-volumed history with an expert in charge of each century or so, or a general survey of one or other of the compartments into which history is commonly divided. Of these the last might be deemed the least satisfactory, for the treatment of ‘constitutional’, ‘economic’ or ‘ecclesiastical’ history as a self-contained entity may seem a vicious and outworn practice, leading inevitably to distortion.
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- Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1939
References
1 Some of the defects of Mr Jolliffe’s chapters on the Anglo-Saxon period are pointed out by Miss F. E. Harmer in her extremely learned and highly important work on Anglo-Saxon Charters and the Historian (Manchester University Press, pp. 31, Is 6d, reprinted from the ‘Bulletin of the John Rylands Library’, October 1938).Google Scholar Miss Harmer gives reasons for arriving at the conclusion that ‘so far as Anglo-Saxon texts are concerned, it is not easy to feel full confidence in his use and interpretation of them’. Some of her criticisms of Mr Jolliffe’s use of charters and writs may be cited to support the foregoing remarks regarding the relative urgency of critical editions of texts and works of a general character.
2 The passage in the translation ‘In the South, in Brittany and Normandy, the nomination of bishops fell to the Capetians but in the ecclesiastical provinces of Reims, Sens, Tours, and in the centre of France four archbishoprics and twenty bishoprics were at the disposal of the king’ does not make sense. Clearly ‘échappait aux Capetiens’ of the original should be translated ‘was lost to the Capetians’. From time to time the translation leaves something to be desired and it should have been revised by a historian. The retention of French forms of familiar names—Plantegenet, Richard de Lucè, Raoul de Wanneville (recte Warneville), Pierre de Blois and Gervais of Canterbury, for instance—is irritating.
3 Orwin, C.S. Econ. Hist. Rev., 8, p. 134.Google Scholar